Yearly Archives: 2021
How We Became Post-Modernist (And Why It’s A Problem)
Perhaps the ultimate postmodern irony is to be both – to sell out to the system while sending it up. It becomes impossible to...
Forest Whitaker’s Production Company Has Never Lost Investors A Dime. It Still Has Trouble...
Significant Productions, founded by Whitaker and run by Nina Yang Bongiovi, has made admired films like Fruitvale Station and Sorry to Bother You (that...
How A Nice Jewish Boy From Oakland Became A Busy Bollywood Actor
Richard Klein seemed well set as a math and science teacher and amateur performer in the Bay Area. Then, at 45, he up and...
How Julia Child Changed Americans’ Minds, And, Later, Her Own
Those under 55 may not appreciate just how differently people in the US thought about home cooking before Child's TV shows caught on. For...
Hong Kong’s M+ Museum Opens In A Climate No One Expected When It Was...
When plans for Asia's biggest contemporary art museum were announced back in 2007, Xi Jinping wasn't yet president of China, few people anticipated political...
How Peter Gelb Is Handling The Most Difficult Job In Opera, Now Even More...
A longread on how the Metropolitan Opera's general manager is handling the company's reopening and its long-term problems, what people inside and outside of...
A Universal Basic Income For Arts Workers? One Country Is Trying It
Ireland will launch a basic income guarantee program for artists and arts workers in 2022. The three-year initial plan will have a budget of...
Art Critic Reviews Work Without Noticing That It Depicts Rupert Murdoch
Robert Nelson of Melbourne's The Age wrote several hundred words about Jeremy Deller's Father and Son — life-sized grey wax candles, lit and gradually...
As Broadway Reopens, Who Is Broadway For?
Representation absolutely matters. But ever since Broadway announced that so many Black plays would reopen its season, there has been a feeling of dread...
London’s Barbican Center Commits To “Radical Transformation” After Investigation
The external review, which interviewed 35 people, identified “a lack of diversity in the organisation, an absence of confidence in HR systems and in...
Cities Are Spreading Like Organisms
In a widely cited paper from 2007, on a number of common measures of innovation and wealth creation, cities deliver benefits that exceed what we would...
Ludovic Morlot Appointed To Lead Barcelona Orchestra
Morlot, born in Lyon in 1974, will replace Kazushi Ono. The contract with the OBC is for four years, with a minimum of eleven...
Niall Ferguson: Why I’m Starting A New University
Those of us who were fortunate to be undergraduates in the 1980s remember the exhilarating combination of intellectual freedom and ambition to which all...
Musicians: Suffocating In The Gig Economy
Many musicians have watched, cringing, as the term “gig economy” has become a defining term of the national economic Zeitgeist. Not just because the...
How Can Today’s Piano Students Learn To Improvise? The Same Way They Did In...
John Mortensen has made a thorough study of how music students in Baroque-era Naples were taught to improvise harmony and counterpoint, then a basic...
John Cleese Cancels Cambridge Union Appearance Over Speaker Blacklist
"I was looking forward to talking to students at the Cambridge Union this Friday, but I hear that someone there has been blacklisted for...
Chinese Composers Are Making Western Classical Music Their Own
In fact, there have been composers in China writing for European instruments for over a century. Since the end of the Cultural Revolution, though,...
Portland’s Iconic Super Bookstore Faces Uncertainty
The latest plot twist has foreshadowed a potentially unhappy ending. Like the rest of Portland’s urban core — and like downtowns across the United...
The Building Industry Helped Create The Climate Crisis. The National Building Museum Wants To...
"The construction industry is responsible for nearly 40 percent of global carbon emissions, and it must be part of the solution, says museum president...
Study: Listening To Familiar Music Boosts Brain Function
"We have new brain-based evidence that autobiographically salient music -; that is, music that holds special meaning for a person, like the song they...
Here’s The First State To Requires All High Schoolers To Take A Media Literacy...
The Illinois legislature approved the rule this summer — almost entirely along party lines. Republicans seem to assume out-of-hand that the class will be...
Theatre Workers Aren’t Just Leaving Jobs, They’re Leaving Theatre
Theater salaries, even for full-time jobs, are so low so often that the weekly nationwide theater newsletter Nothing for the Group recently debuted a section called That’s...
What Will Change The Way Hollywood Portrays Muslims? Maybe Just This Directory
When a co-founder of the Pillars Fund advocacy organization discussed this issue within the industry, he heard repeatedly that decision-makers didn't know where to...
This Theatre Is Avoiding Founder’s Syndrome By Shutting Down When Its Founder Retires
First Folio Theatre, a small Equity company in the Chicago suburbs, will close when David Rice retires in 2024. He and his wife founded...
Think There Aren’t Any Serous Female Magicians Or Jugglers? Let’s Make That Idea Disappear
Los Angeles magician Krystyn Lambert and puppeteer Pam Severn have launched a new variety show called "No Man's Land" featuring circus artists, jugglers, ventriloquists,...