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Disney-As-Religion

More than ever before, people are identifying less and less with a religious tradition. This leads some people to look for meaning and identity in the things they love most. My goal here isn’t to argue against those who consider Disney their religion. - The Conversation

A Symphony Of Ships’ Horns In A Newfoundland Harbour

Every other summer since 2004, composer Delf Maria Hohmann has been visiting the vessels docked in the harbor at St. John's to learn about their horns' sounds — which he then mixes-and-matches into a composition called a "Harbour Symphony." - Yahoo! (Canadian Press)

If Theatres Phase Out Unpaid Internships, There Will Be A Tradeoff

"In conversation with (several) artistic directors, one trend seems abundantly clear: more equitable access to better opportunities for fewer people. ... Is that a bad thing?  Not necessarily." - American Theatre

The Heatwave In China Has Melted The Roof Right Off Of A Museum

The Forbidden City Cultural Relics Museum, which opened in 2020 in a restored Yangtze River-front warehouse complex in Chongqing, had a large number of roof tiles slide off, leading to the collapse of one of the museum's several buildings. - Artnet

Unpublished Poems By Ted Hughes About His Lover’s Suicide Have Been Discovered

No, these aren't about Sylvia Plath (who was Hughes's first wife): they're about Assia Wevill, who took up with Hughes (her landlord at the time) the year before Plath gassed herself — as Wevill did, along with her daughter by Hughes, six years later. - The Guardian

Award-Winning Documentary About Yazidi Women Enslaved By ISIS Is In Big Trouble

Among the issues surrounding the film, titled Sebaya: a key scene doesn't show the rescue it purports to show, whether the women onscreen legitimately consented to appear, and an issue the film avoids entirely: rescued women being separated from the children sired by their ISIS enslavers. - The New York Times

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Founder of Dance Troupe Urban Bush Women, Wins $250,000 Gish Prize

"Revolutionary at the time – and still cutting edge — Zollar's choreography synthesizes movement from modern dance and traditional folk African dance styles with the kind of text and shouted language the company describes as 'the urgent dialogue of the 21st century.'" - NPR

Rescue Deal Falls Apart And San Francisco Art Institute Closes For Good

Twice the financially beleaguered school had secured a merger deal with the University of San Francisco, and both times USF backed out due to concerns about falling enrollment and continued viability. Still uncertain is the fate of SFAI's Diego Rivera mural. - SFist

Claes Oldenburg, 93

Mr. Oldenburg entered the New York art scene in earnest in the late 1950s, embracing the audience-participation “Happenings” then in vogue and expanding the boundaries of art with shows that incorporated things like street signs, wire-and-plaster clothing and even pieces of pie. - The New York Times

We Miscalculated. The World Is Not A Game

As the scope of algorithm-based applications in social reality has expanded over the past decades, we have by the same measure been conditioned to approach ever more fields of human life as if they were strategy games. - Liberties Journal

The Meaning Of Art: To Point Out Evil

I am using the word “evil” to encompass the whole range of negative human experience, from being wronged, to doing wrong, to sheer bad luck. This list of evils is also a list of the essential ingredients of narrative fiction. - The Point

How NFTs Are Upending The Art World

This so-called revolution strikes at something many hold sacred: the relationship between artist and art, the meaning in an act of creation. What’s happening now is larger than the traditional tension between art and commerce, and it’s occurring at internet speed. - Alta

The Complicated Remaking Of Oscar Hammerstein

Of all the great makers of the American song, none has undergone so drastic a change in educated—O.K., call it “élite”—opinion in the past twenty years as Hammerstein. - The New Yorker

Nicholas Payne: The State Of European Opera After COVID

"I think opera went through a sticky time, with all that Darmstadt stuff where people were deliberately writing music that people couldn’t understand, as a badge of honour, really, and I don’t think composers are trying to do that now. It doesn't mean they're always successful, but I do think a healthy contemporary element is pretty essential to any...

Maryland Institute Of Art Lays Off Employees After They Unionize

The news comes roughly two months after employees working across various departments voted 86–17 on to join SEIU Local 500 on May 24. - ARTnews

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