ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

Stories

Filmmaker Lina Wertmüller Dead At 93

A protégée of Federico Fellini, she won critical acclaim internationally for such films as The Seduction of Mimi, Love and Anarchy, and Swept Away; in 1977, for Seven Beauties, she became the first woman nominated for a Best Director Oscar. - Variety

Brooklyn Museum Gets A New President/COO

Trueblood, who starts early next year, previously served as chief of staff at the American Civil Liberties Union and as director of White House operations for the Obama Administration from 2013 to 2015. - The New York Times

Welcome To Selfie Wrld – Unique Pix That Aren’t

Selfie Wrld is a chain with 30 franchises from Anchorage to Tampa. Because the props encourage certain poses, your selfies might be identical to someone’s in Indianapolis or Boston or Denver. - Washington Post

How Translating Language Opens A Writer’s Mind

In translating, you pose yourself a question—or it is posed to you by the text; you have no satisfactory answer, though you put something down on paper, and then years later the answer may turn up. Certainly you never forget the question. - LitHub

San Jose Opera Picks A New General Director

Shawna Lucey has some 15 years of opera and theater experience, having worked at such companies as Santa Fe Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Gran Teatre del Liceu, Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Bolshoi Theater, and Lyric Opera of Kansas City. - San Francisco Classical Voice

Why Is A New Moscow Museum Recreating An American Soap Opera?

Every day through March 22, 2022, a team of 80 actors and technicians is carrying out the vision of the Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson by re-creating, filming and editing episodes of that American soap opera in front of a live audience at the museum. - The New York Times

The 13-Year-Old Who’s Become Famous For His Car Pictures

The Woodinville eighth-grader has made a name for himself in the art of “forced perspective” photography, a technique that creates an optical illusion by altering the perception between objects. Anthony takes photos of die-cast cars and makes them appear life-sized in retro settings. - Everett Herald

Literary Translators Are Finally Demanding The Recognition They Deserve — On The Book Cover

"For decades, translators in the U.S. have been ... working in the back rooms of literature even as they play a central role in enriching Anglophone letters. ... None of the past five years' winners of the International Booker Prize credits the translator on the front cover." - Vulture

A Museum On The Border Between North And South Korea (What Could Go Wrong?)

Unimaru, as it's called, opened in September in a former customs clearinghouse in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Visitors must get a permit from the South Korean government, and the curator wears a bulletproof vest. - CNN

Why The Music They Play While You’re On Hold Is So Infuriating

So where did hold music, the most vanilla of genres, go wrong? When experts have spent decades crafting tinkling tones to placate us, why does our blood still boil? The answer is not so simple. - Wired

Can Newly-Won Artistic Freedom In Sudan Survive Post-Coup?

After longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir was overthrown in 2019, the country saw "the flowering of an artistic community that had long been harassed, censored and forced into the shadows." Now, says one artist, "we finally thought we were free and then this happened." - The Guardian

The Collapse Of NeoLiberalism

The challenge for the neoliberals was—how do you design institutions that safeguard the rights of property over borders, in an era when everyone is talking about national sovereignty, self-determination, and democracy in ways that might invalidate or cross out universal property rights? - Strelka

Greg Tate, Cultural Critic And Pioneering Writer On Hop-Hop, Dead At 64

He made his mark as a staff writer for The Village Voice, covering everything from rap to Black hardcore, African-American identity to Michael Jackson. (He got death threats for a piece about Jackson titled "I'm White!") His essay collection Flyboy in the Buttermilk is considered a landmark. - NPR

Have We Forgotten The Art Of Listening?

Being able to engage in the practice of mindful, aesthetic and critical listening is as important to democracy as literacy. Yet, in comparison to the time and money put into early childhood reading development or STEM, these three modalities of democratic listening receive scant attention. 3 Quarks Daily

Sondheim’s “Assassins” And American Gun Culture

"In Assassins, the gun serves not as a tool of self-defense … but as an instrument of self-expression and self-realization. The assassins, who saw themselves as the 'good guys with guns,' are, in a perverse way, the epitome of American individualism." - The Conversation

Our Free Newsletter

Join our 30,000 subscribers

Latest

Don't Miss

function my_excerpt_length($length){ return 200; } add_filter('excerpt_length', 'my_excerpt_length');