“On or about November 21st the Ballet Boyz official Twitter account posted an image of the company’s dancers. Taken in what appears to be a dressing room, all but two of the dancers are completely naked.” (Their privates were not visible.) “A caption attached to the message read ‘Wouldn’t you just like to be a fly on the wall …?'” (Let the pearl-clutching begin.)
Tag: 12.02.12
Palm Beach Symphony Replaces Its Musicians, Who Call For Boycott
“The union accuses Ramon Tebar, who is music director of the symphony and [also of] Florida Grand Opera, of replacing the majority of the symphony’s orchestra with the opera’s musicians, without telling the musicians he was dissatisfied with their performance or giving them a chance to improve.”
Who Should Be The Next Chairman Of The NEA?
“Our next NEA chair needs to make the fine arts trendy, return talk about poetry, literature and classical music to the national conversation. He needs Twitter followers.”
How Language Shapes How We Think
“Language lets us learn the answers to practical questions, but it also opens us up to novel insights and perspectives. Simply put, language straddles the chasm between science and art.”
Neuro-Aesthetics? Feh! What Neuroscience Can And Can’t Teach Us
“[The] growing chorus of neuro-critics are half right: our early-twenty-first-century world truly is filled with brain porn, with sloppy reductionist thinking and an unseemly lust for neuroscientific explanations. … [What] we need now is ‘the meticulous dissection of some elementary brain functions, not ambitious but vague notions like brain-based aesthetics, when we still don’t understand how the brain recognizes something as basic as a straight line’.”
The Dance Philanthropist
“The new biggest name in dance is Glorya Kaufman, who shook up the arts world last month when she gave the University of Southern California a gift that despite its undisclosed amount, has been called one of the largest donations in dance history.”
Led Zeppelin Parties At Kennedy Center Honors
“Stars from New York, Hollywood and the music world joined President Obama at the White House on Sunday night to salute the honorees, whose ranks also included actor Dustin Hoffman, Chicago bluesman Buddy Guy and ballerina Natalia Makarova.”
Will Anybody Actually Go To The Louvre’s New Northern Outpost?
So far, first reactions in the French press have been mixed. Le Figaro called the museum “discreet”. The Journal du Dimanche said that, without its contents, it would look like “two, immense, cold hangars”.
Why Are Next Generation Artists So Conservative?
“There is really no reason why you should find your voice in your early twenties. It’s a 20th-century assumption that creativity comes before the craft rather than the other way round. Nobody in previous centuries would have signed up to that.”
Why Second-Hand Bookshops Make Less And Less Sense
“Booksellers tell me that 90 per cent of their overheads arise from their shops, and 90 per cent of their sales from the internet. Except for the true antiquarian dealers, whose customers are aficionados of the first state and the misprint on page 287, second-hand bookshops make less and less economic sense.”