Erica Eisen tells the story of the Dunhuang Diamond Sūtra, a Chinese block-printed scroll dated 868 CE that was bricked up in a cave for eight centuries and ended up at the British Library (which the Chinese government is not happy about).
Tag: 10.12.18
With String Quartets In A Brewery, NC Classical Radio Station Courts New Listeners
“Organized by WDAV in Davidson, and held at a brewery in Charlotte, the quarterly Small Batch Concert Series has attracted standing-room-only crowds of more than 200 people for its four concerts to date” — a turnout “much bigger” than previous station events, says the general manager, who adds that at every concert he encounters people who didn’t know that metro Charlotte even had a full-time classical radio station.
The Saucer Has Landed! Taiwan Opens Its New National Arts Center
Part landscape, part architecture, the 1.51-million-square-foot National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts blurs the boundaries between indoors and out, solid and void. Floating at one end of a 116-acre park that had been a military base before the project began 12 years ago, the $280-million complex brings together four performance spaces under one enormous roof and a fifth one on top of it.
Sotheby’s Banksy Stunt Illustrates The Art Of Stunt (Or Stunt Of Art)
“Art, which once reflected values aloof from simple (or complicated) greed, has been insidiously absorbed into the economy of commercial products,” Gary Indiana wrote in 1986, “its cash worth determined by dicey variables unlike the ones fixed for ordinary commodities.” The difference now is that the variables that determine art’s monetary value are no longer seen as dicey. Instead, they’re understood as art itself.
Reviving Latin As A Spoken Language Is A Politically Fraught Project
“Latin’s revival, among young teachers on the one hand and nostalgic nationalists on the other, appears to flourish on two opposing ends. But while they may seem to be separate, the two are inexorably and uneasily linked through the history of white men’s appropriation of Latin as a marker of superiority.”
In The Age Of The Museum Of Ice Cream And The Creation Museum, What Does ‘Museum’ Even Mean?
Philip Kennicott: “It isn’t easy coming up with a definition capacious enough to include the richness and diversity of the museum world without being so wide open that it might as well encompass theme parks and drinking holes that just happen to include the word ‘Museum’ in their name.”
We Need to Talk About Non-Consensual Audience Participation
“Artists who cleverly use participatory moments can make bold statements about the boundaries between performer and spectator, onstage and off. … But all the experiences I’ve loved have had something in common: They’ve given audiences a choice. A few weeks back, I had a starkly different experience.” Lauren Wingenroth describes what went wrong with that experience (Boris Charmatz’s 10000 Gestures, if you want to know), and suggests one simple step performers could take to avoid crossing the line from challenging to obnoxious or worse.
‘It’s Something Of A Counter-Museum’ — American Poetry Museum Operates Without Exhibition Space
Board chair Jon West-Bey, who developed the institution based on his graduate thesis: “We wanted to put programs before space. We didn’t want to be the type of place where we said, ‘If we build it, they’ll come.’ It was more, ‘We’ll come to you.'”
Greece Is Finally Crawling Out Of Its Economic Disaster — What’s Next For Its Art World?
“Since Greece officially ended its decade-long economic bailout this summer, its government has been tentatively moving forward with plans to ease austerity measures on its citizens. … We asked figures from Greece’s art world to reflect on the economic crisis and its effect on the arts, and to look towards the future.”
Could New EU Rules On Sharing Content Save The Arts’ Middle Classes?
“The reality is a lot of the profits go to a few super tech houses in Silicon Valley and the result is you lose entire segments of the cultural creation population,” says John Degen, executive director of The Writers’ Union of Canada and chair of the International Authors Forum. “You end up either with superstar authors, or a vast underclass wanting to be superstars and no middle class. It’s been completely hollowed out.”