“As one-off fees, you might say, ‘that’s not so bad’. But consider that your average art history PhD will have dozens, if not perhaps hundreds, of images, then soon even an unpublished PhD can become prohibitively expensive. You want to discuss mid-18th Century portraiture, and show perhaps 50 images? That’ll be £750. You want to turn that PhD into a book? £3050 please, before you’ve even thought of printing costs. Want to put on a Hogarth exhibition, with a decent catalogue? £8600. Ouch. And Tate are on the cheaper end of the scale.”
Tag: 09.26.17
Arts Are $4.1 Billion Engine For Philadelphia’s Economy
A Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance report “shows a nearly 25 percent percent increase in economic impact over 2011, measured in direct spending by audiences and art organizations and estimated indirect spending. It also shows a 32 percent increase in city tax revenue, attributable to the arts sector.”
What Carey Perloff Achieved In Her 25 Years Leading American Conservatory Theater (A Miracle, Basically)
“Her ability to make a go of ACT in the wake of dual disasters – the artistically uncompromising [founder Bill] Ball’s financial mismanagement and 1989’s Loma Prieta earthquake, which partially collapsed and temporarily shuttered the palatial Geary Theater – looks downright miraculous even to her. … The story of those early years, particularly a riotous first season that included a picket by the Catholic Church and exercised critics and season subscribers alike, is now theatre lore.” Perloff talks to Richard Avila about how she did it and what she learned over the years, especially about being a woman running a major institution.
Meet New York City Ballet’s Youngest Choreographer in History
“School of American Ballet graduate and Ballet Semperoper Dresden apprentice Gianna Reisen” – age 18 – “makes her first-ever work for New York City Ballet this season. Reisen began studying at SAB in 2010 and first participated in SAB’s Student Choreography Workshop as a choreographer in 2015. She also choreographed for the New York Choreographic Institute, an affiliate of NYCB, during the fall 2016 working session.”
Keeping Count: What Plays (And By Whom) Are Being Produced
“These last stats can be spun positively: In the new-play world, male playwrights are down to just nearly half of all production credits, with women slowly but surely catching up. The glass-half-empty take, though, is that at this rate we won’t see gender parity (or women cracking the 50-percent ceiling, at least) in the new-play sector until roughly 2021.”
Legendary Samurai ‘Macbeth’ Production Returns After More Than Three Decades
“When it visited the Edinburgh Festival in 1985, this Macbeth” – staged by the revered Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa with his company, Saitama Arts Theater – “was declared an ‘overnight legend’, with critics praising its bold gestures and painterly beauty.” Saitama has now prepared a touring revival, which is coming to Britain next month, and, writes Andrew Dickson, it “still makes much homegrown Shakespeare look pallid.”
At The International Championship Of A Cappella
Jon Caramanca checks out the finals at Carnegie Hall: “There were groups striving to make a cappella their lives, groups that formed as passion projects and groups that seemed intent on dismantling the a cappella establishment from within by taking advantage of the competition’s open format to import styles of singing you won’t see at most college pre-frosh weekends. At times, and especially during the awards portion of the evening, that made for a confusing mandate, with global folk songs pitted against choral lite-gospel, and smarmy pop-rock alongside the familiar complex multipart vocal harmonizing (with vocal percussion!) that is a cappella’s public face.”
A Visit To Yayoi Kusama’s New Museum In Tokyo
“Even the restrooms are covered in polka dots.” Motoko Rich meets the artist and tours the five-story museum, which opens October 1. (Timed tickets are already sold out through November.)
Composer Arvo Pärt Wins Theology Prize From Vatican
The 81-year-old Estonian, who is the world’s most-performed living classical composer (and who is not himself Roman Catholic), is one of three recipients of this year’s Ratzinger Prize, named for Pope Benedict XVI (né Joseph Ratzinger) and given to “people who answered to the challenge of fostering a deep dialogue among science, theology and philosophy.”
Improving Schools Is Not The Key To Upward Mobility For Poor Children, Finds New Research
UC Berkeley economist Jesse Rothstein “found that differences in local labor markets – for example, how similar industries can vary across different communities – and marriage patterns, such as higher concentrations of single-parent households, seemed to make much more of a difference than school quality. For Rothstein, there’s no reason to assume that improving schools will be necessary or sufficient for improving someone’s economic prospects. ‘We can’t educate people out of this problem,’ he says.”