The pertinence of A Soldier’s Tale today is self-evident. It is a COVID diversion: compact, flexible, rejecting Romantic symphonic upholstery in favor of a dry, caustic sonority conducive to bitter entertainments, light-hearted yet not evasive. - Joseph Horowitz
A guest post by actor/writer/arts administrator Selena Anguiano, who shares some concerns about the use of benchmarks in the process of pursuing equity in nonprofit arts organizations. - Doug Borwick
As I hear my student playing the piano through Zoom, just for a moment, I think I am hearing Paderewski in 1912. The sound is imperfect. At moments it drops out. There are distortions of speed and rhythm. Yet, my ear, my mind is hearing music: completing and linking together the aural information that is there. - Bruce Brubaker
As it happens, I don’t care at all for Childe Hassam’s better-known etchings — I find them fussy — but lithography brought out a freer, more adventurous streak in his work, and there is one print of his that I have long sought, Avenue of the Allies. Also made in 1918, it is a lithographic monochrome pendant to the...
Taking a page from the problematic playbooks of the Berkshire, Everson and Baltimore museums, the Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina, has become the latest poster child for deplorable deaccessions. - Lee Rosenbaum
The Secretary General of the European Union Youth Orchestra shares about the connection between the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the mission of arts organizations. - Aaron Dworkin
I have said before here that the time for talk is long past and that figuring out a way to prod real action on DEI issues is essential. This Conversation, hosted by the Community Engagement Network, is an attempt to lay groundwork for actual movement. - Doug Borwick
A generation of important Chinese composers, paradoxical beneficiaries of enforced rural relocation, wound up studying in the West. For many, Bela Bartok became a lodestar for his way of retaining the spontaneity and savage beauty of folk elements. And so they discovered a middle ground between Chinese and Western instrumental performance. - Joseph Horowitz
The co-founder, Artistic/Executive Director and violist of Castle of our Skins, a collective of artists of all kinds dedicated to advancing Black artistry through music, shares the philosophy behind her leadership work furthering the contributions of Black artists. - Aaron Dworkin
Compared with the average annual growth rate of arts and cultural industries as a whole (+3 percent), web streaming and web publishing surged by 12 percent, in terms of the value added by those industries to the U.S. economy. The book and software publishing industry grew by over 7 percent. In both cases, we might expect to see sustained...
Here are some lessons from old-school conference speakers who acknowledged the need for progress, but defended what former Metropolitan Museum director Philippe de Montebello once called “the primacy of art” in the museum’s mission. - Lee Rosenbaum
Lucky in Manhattan to have a Japanese market nearby, and because I’m enticed by anything in a post-Pop package, I fell for Nobel’s Super Cola, three ounces for $3, a dozen or so globes of hot surprise. I told myself that I sprung for my candyphile boyfriend, but they were really for me. When artists such as Lichtenstein or...
To get the drift of Aufzeichnungen über Aussenseiter, I’ve been typing pieces of text into Google Translate. It’s a helluva time-consuming job, but it’s more than worth the effort. It’s just obvious how classy and swinging the whole thing is! Herewith, an excerpt: "Buk Sings His Ass Off." - Jan Herman
Although last week’s Syracuse Symposium was nominally about Deaccessioning After 2020, it was mostly focused on the new museum imperative — advancing DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Access) by any means possible, even at the cost of dismantling, monetizing and redefining the “permanent” collection to further those sociopolitical goals. - Lee Rosenbaum
