“One week after Mo Yan became the first Chinese author to win the Nobel prize, proud local officials rushed out a £70 million plan to transform his sleepy village into a ‘Mo Yan Culture Experience Zone’.” An official told Mo’s father, “Your son is no longer your son, and the house is no longer your house. It does not really matter if you agree or not.”
Tag: 10.18.12
Anthony Gormley, The Engineer Of Experience
In a Q&A, the sculptor talks about what his installations – for instance, putting groups of visitors in a pressurized room to do what they want with 100 tons of clay, or placing them on a large reflective platform suspended 25 feet above ground – reveal about the ways humans interact.
Man Asian Literary Prize Loses Man’s Sponsorship
“Man has sponsored the $30,000 award – won in the past by Chinese author Su Tong, Filipino writer Miguel Syjuco and South Korean Kyung-sook Shin – since it was set up in 2007. But in a struggling [stock] market,” the hedge fund “has decided to ‘concentrate our arts sponsorship on the world-leading Man Booker prize, where our support is about to go into its 12th year’.”
Making Your Way Into Chunky Move
One of the first things new artistic director Anouk van Dijk did when she took over the Melbourne modern dance company from founder Gideon Obarzanek was to hold open auditions. Three of the troupe’s eight new members talk about their new jobs (and Alya Manzart explains how he cut his head open).
Getty Buys Important Knoedler Archive Documenting A 160-Year History In Art Dealing
“The gallery abruptly closed last year after more than 160 years in business. Now the Getty Research Institute is acquiring for an undisclosed sum the sales books documenting the Hermitage deals, among other resources that make up Knoedler’s vast private archives. The trove of sales books, artists’ letters, telegrams, photographs and rare books will fill up three large shipping containers.”
Considering John Cheever At 100
“John Cheever, now unfairly known as the gloomy, sodden satyr of suburbia, was at least rarely gloomy. Fact is he was more fun per minute than is legal…”
Can Philosophy Really Help Us Make Sense Of The World?
“Philosophers are mostly splitters, dividing their ways of thinking into narrow specialties such as theism or deism or humanism or panpsychism or axiarchism. I find it more convenient to lump them into two big groups, one obsessed with matter and the other obsessed with mind.”
The Three Sides Of Modern Chinese Literature (They All Won Prizes This Month)
Mo Yan, the new Nobel literature laureate, works in a contemporary idiom and is seen as more-or-less mainstream, mainland establishment. On the other hand, dissident and exile Liao Yiwu, in his speech accepting the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, said of the People’s Republic, “This empire must break apart.” Meanwhile, Taiwanese poet Yang Mu, winner of the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature, models himself after the medieval Chinese poet-scholars.
The Plays That Made Ben Brantley Scream
“I do not scream at the theater. … I laugh, I cry, I might even gasp. Scream? Almost never. It is, however, that ‘almost’ that I am thinking of just now, as Halloween creeps up on us. For there have been a few, isolated occasions when I have been scared out of my cucumber-cool skin by what was happening on a stage.”
By Fattening Up A Bit, Ballerinas Are Saving Their Art And Themselves
Deirdre Kelly: “Medical experts have, since the 1970s when Balanchine-inspired eating disorders first started decimating the ballerina population, quite forcefully determined that ballet’s tyranny of thin is detrimental to dancers’ health. … Ballerinas today are again embracing the breasts and hips which first made them objects of desire way back in the day.”