Tag: 09.14.17

Words, Words, Words. We All Use Them. So We’re All Experts In Poetry

In his new book, “Why Poetry,”Matthew Zapruder makes the bold assertion that understanding poetry requires “forgetting many incorrect things we have learned in school” and accepting “what is right before us on the page.” Any reader can do that, he says, because “we are all experts in words; we have been for a long time. And any word we don’t know we can look up.”

How We Can Get The Arts To Connect With Conservative Audiences

“The first challenge is to convince prospective audiences that there should be no fear of embarrassment associated with coming to a performance. Decades of research have shown that the best demographic predictor of attendance to all performing arts disciplines is level of educational attainment. … For many people, attending a performance is equated with shelling out big bucks to feel stupid in a sea of strangers, to be thrown out of one’s cultural comfort zone. How do we fix that?” Duncan Webb has a few ideas.

Crystal Bridges Founder Launches Clearinghouse For Museums To Share Art

“Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art founder Alice Walton has established a nonprofit foundation to focus on sharing American art across the country through collaborations with museums and institutions. Art Bridges, which was announced Wednesday, will develop and fund exhibitions to expand access to American art. Walton’s new venture is separate from the Crystal Bridges museum in Bentonville but is aligned with the museum’s mission.”

Silicon Valley Companies Say They’re Building A Better World. But They Can’t Even Build A Better Silicon Valley

This failure to create places for people—our logical “target user,” in the region’s parlance—is, in part, to blame for the soul-crushing, NIMBY-inducing, place-agnostic sprawl we’ve idly cobbled together here. Planning-wise, the city that’s supposed to be inventing the future remains trapped in the 1950s, as Allison Arieff wrote recently in The New York Times. The Valley of Heart’s Delight’s once fine agricultural complexion is now forever marked with the suburban scars of endless tract homes, bland office parks, and a dogmatic adherence to California’s transportation motto—”Park Free or Die.”

Explaining the Cultural Elite (It’s All About The Consumption)

By means of what is, at bottom, a self-gratifying act, spending money—rather than by means of compassion, piety, courage, or self-sacrifice—a lucky elite has set itself above ordinary people by virtue of its aesthetic tastes and preferences, which it has elevated to a self-defined enlightenment. The result, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett writes, is “a deep cultural divide that has never existed with such distinction as it does today.”

As Classical Music Increasingly Becomes “Post-Genre,” Some New Language Is Required

“Post-genre thinking seeks to move away from objective judgment of music towards a subjective reality, where the emphasis is no longer on whether a certain piece fits/does not fit a pre-conceptualized genre “bin.” Instead, the emphasis is on the individual intent of the composer. The individual is quite important to post-genre thinking.”

Paris Biennale Struggles With Low Attendance, Critical Press

“Attendance to the fair, especially by Parisians just back from the summer holidays, was notably lower that previous years and far from that of Frieze Masters in London or Tefaf Maastricht. In the middle of the week, late in the day, the aisles were almost empty. The organisers did not provide attendance figures or information on sales, but the press reviews have been grim.”