“The Colombian artist’s 57cm-high sculpture, Maternity (2003), of a mother sitting on a plinth and cradling her baby, … was stolen from Galerie Bartoux in an upmarket district of Paris earlier this month in broad daylight. Gallery staff became aware of the theft only when they prepared to close the gallery.”
Tag: 11.20.17
$1.5 Million Bounties For Beheading Bollywood Star And Director Offered By Indian Politician
A state-level boss of India’s ruling party, the Hindu nationalist BJP, is offering 10 million rupees each for the heads of the lead actress and director of Padmavati, a new movie about a legendary 14th-century Rajput queen. A leader of the present-day Rajput clans has threatened to cut off the star’s nose, and violent demonstrations have led to the delay of the film’s release. All this over rumors of a scene the director says isn’t even in the movie.
Top Posts From AJBlogs 11.20.17
Forgetting Hitchcock
Unlike most of my colleagues, I liked, and was even a little moved by the world première of Nico Muhly’s Marnie by the English National Opera (it goes to the NY Metropolitan next year). … read more
AJBlog: Plain English Published 2017-11-20
All there is
I’ve worked on enough shows by now to be familiar with the all-consuming experience of rehearsing, yet its disorienting nature still comes as a surprise each time it happens. … read more
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2017-11-20
A Stat You Probably Didn’t Need: Netflix Says Many People Stream Video In Public Restrooms
According to new data from the video giant Netflix, about 12 per cent of Americans who watch television shows or movies outside of the home admit to having done so in a public restroom. And 37 per cent say they’ve watched at work.
How Babies Map Words And Build Vocabulary
“A new study suggests that the few words infants know are structured in their minds the same way as an adult’s vocabulary, in a complex web of related concepts. The evidence: When words have similar meanings, babies can get confused. That confusion hints that babies know more about language, at a younger age, than scientists have found before.”
Will “Smart” Cities Include The Arts?
Local arts agencies, be they county, city or state need to make a connection with the owners / planners of the smart cities projects, and make the case for their inclusion in the decision making process. We need to provide strong evidence of our value, and, more than that, make a case with media and the public that no city without an arts component in both the planning and execution is truly “smart” in any sense of the word.
Citizen Science Sounds Noble. Democratic. But There Are Problems
“The irony is that some of the individuals who do take part appear to be motivated by a burning distrust of the government or else a rebel anarchism set against large corporations – sentiments that are common among cadres of biohackers. Yet it’s those very governments and corporations that are injecting the money and ginning up the momentum behind the movement. Something doesn’t stack up.”
Germany Plans To Create Mega-Cultural Exhibitions To Promote German Culture Globally
For Andreas Görgen, a global approach to cultural policy has two aims: to promote German culture abroad and to give foreign museums access to the collections and scholarship of German institutions. “We should be willing to free things from the context of our collections and to let other curators look at them and deal with them in their own context, which might give a completely different interpretation,” he says. He is also interested in the potential of digitisation, and how virtual reality can allow objects to be shown without travelling.
Why Are Museums Gouging The Public With Fees To Reproduce Images?
“These days, a large part of the budget for arts programmes is taken up by reproduction fees. Museums merrily charge hundreds of pounds each second a painting is seen. But such charges are little more than a hustle. Museums talk threateningly about “copyright”, but in law, they’re on weak ground. If a painting was made by an artist who died more than 75 years ago (70 years in the US), it is out of copyright, end of story. Faithfully photographing it generates no new copyright implications, and there is nothing in law to stop one reproducing (say) a Rembrandt, in any context, and without paying. But because most of us think we need to pay to secure a spurious image ‘licence’, museums get away with it.”
How Junot Díaz Got TV, Spider-Man, His Father, And America All Mixed Up Together
“I was five when my neighbor in Santo Domingo bought the first set on our street, the first I’d ever laid eyes on. … Maybe I would have been O.K. if I’d seen anything else: the news, a variety show, a political debate. But my earliest exposure to television was a Spider-Man cartoon … My father’s absence made perfect sense. He couldn’t come back right away because he was busy fighting crime in N.Y.C. . . . as Spider-Man. The diasporic imagination really is its own superpower.”