Andrea Scott: “For months, looking at art became staring at screens, and a new three-letter acronym entered the lexicon: O.V.R., for “online viewing room.” If that sounds like an enticement to see artists envision new forms with digital means, downgrade your expectations to “slideshow.” Still, the art world has been luckier than other cultural sectors of New York City.” – The New Yorker
Tag: 12.30.20
What Mark Swed Learned About Listening This Year
“It soon dawned on me that I was no longer in the realm of how to listen but that of why we must listen. The central tenet in John Cage’s philosophy of art — and, for that matter, of life — is the essential need to pay attention. Listening really does matter. That message, moreover, was all around us.” – Los Angeles Times
2020 – A Year Of Ideas
In a year that felt like it changed everything, people also began contemplating how we might rebuild differently, with new ideas about how to fix the climate crisis, how we work, and how we live. – Fast Company
Using High Tech To Preserve Imagery Of India’s Ancient Cave Paintings
In the 1990s, art historian Benoy Behl developed his own low-light photography techniques to capture the famous Buddhist murals in the Ajanta caves. Since then, he’s been using digital technology to correct for the deterioration that time and the breath of visitors have caused in the paintings, so that we can see their imagery in something like its original state. – South China Morning Post (Hong Kong)
Hollywood Owes A Lot To Theatre. Should It Find Ways To Give Back?
If Hollywood is going to continue reaping the creative benefits of the theater — the actors’ training, the ambitious storytelling, the characters fleshed out over countless rewrites — it bears an obligation, artistic and moral, to assist the theater in its time of need. – Los Angeles Times
New York’s Grand New Train Station Is No Grand Central
Grand Central is inviting, harmonious, soothing even in moments of frenzy. Moynihan self-consciously tries to reconcile old-timey graciousness and contemporary cool, muted stone and garish screens. – Curbed
‘Frankenstein’: An Oral History of a Monstrous Broadway Flop, Exactly 40 Years Ago
“When the curtain went up at the Palace Theater on Jan. 4, 1981, the expectations — and the stakes — were high. Frankenstein, an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel, had cost a reported $2 million, at the time a record for a Broadway play. The screen legend John Carradine and a young Dianne Wiest were in the cast, and the unprecedented stage effects came courtesy of Bran Ferren, the wunderkind behind the mind-bending hallucinations in the film Altered States, released two weeks earlier.’ But the reviews were so awful that the producers closed the show the next morning, putting Frankenstein in an exclusive club: Broadway one-night wonders. – The New York Times
Important LA Jazz Club Closes For Good
Statistics can’t begin to describe the importance of The Blue Whale to the jazz ecology, in Los Angeles and beyond. On social media, testimonials have flowed freely from musicians and fans, along with expressions of sorrow. – WBGO
Tomorrow Is Public Domain Day – Here Is Some Of The Art Of 1925 That’s Now Available
These works include books such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, and Franz Kafka’s The Trial (in the original German), silent films featuring Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, and music ranging from the jazz standard Sweet Georgia Brown to songs by Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, W.C. Handy, and Fats Waller. – Center for the Study of the Public Domain
Where Writing Historical Novels Can Get You Thrown Into Prison For Life
Yes, there are a number of countries where this is the case. But one that has an ongoing history of jailing its most famous writers, even as it claims to be an elective democracy is Turkey, where Ahmet Altan is now living in a 13-foot-long cell in Europe’s largest prison complex. Fellow novelist Kaya Genç (himself free, at least for now) looks at Altan’s case and at his magnum opus, the Ottoman Quartet, whose last volume, if it’s written at all, will come from behind bars. – The New Republic