"Across the city, amateur and professional dancers are donning sneakers, masks and lots of layers to carry on with a familiar ritual that, for many, is essential to maintaining physical and mental health. … For the most part, have endured without interruption, a consistency that speaks to dancers' desire to be physically present together, not cooped up in...
"We inhabit a dystopian reality, which may account for the dearth of dystopian fiction. Yet the novels of Zamyatin, Huxley and Orwell continue to cast a powerful spell. All of them end in defeat for the protagonists, but in each case a possibility of revolt remains." - New Statesman
Says classical music editor Zachary Woolfe (who came up with the idea in the shower), "It has doubled our audience for classical music. It's gratifying that whatever we do, people are willing to explore and be into it." - The New York Times
There is no shortage of theories about what makes an object aesthetically pleasing. Ideas about proportion, harmony, symmetry, order, complexity and balance have all been studied by psychologists in great depth. The theories go as far back as 1876—in the early days of experimental psychology—when German psychologist Gustav Fechner provided evidence that people prefer rectangles with sides in proportion...
"The pandemic closed the city on March 13, the eve of the opening of Miami New Drama's first musical. To keep the 5-year-old company going, Hausmann … commissioned seven notable playwrights — five Latino or Latina, two Black — to write short works that would fit under the 'Seven Deadly Sins' rubric. … Guides led audience groups of...
Dan-el Padilla Peralta's "vision of classics’ complicity in systemic injustice is uncompromising, even by the standards of some of his allies. He has condemned the field as “equal parts vampire and cannibal” — a dangerous force that has been used to murder, enslave and subjugate. “He’s on record as saying that he’s not sure the discipline deserves a future,”...
"Finding your thrills in erotic literature, rather than in video scenes, might take a little longer, but it means caring more about the characters involved, which brings more meaning to the sexual scenes," says totally unbiased erotica author Max Sebastian. "I'm not sure than any other literary genre or visual media honestly appreciates male sexuality the way that erotica...
"On its face this list is a little concerning — in a few years, robots might render humans' book-recommending jobs obsolete. I, a human with a book-recommending job, am indeed a little concerned. But if humans aren't stepping up to do the necessary work of recommending 67 books to give a woman, I'm not going to tell a...
Streaming services thoroughly dominate the roster: Hulu took 9 nominations, Amazon Studios 10, and Netflix a whopping 42. Among notable details: Tom Hanks and Spike Lee were snubbed, and of the five nominated directors, three are women. (For a complete list of nominations, click here.) - Variety
"The National Institute of Anthropology and History, a division of the Mexico government dedicated to the preservation of cultural artifacts, has filed a legal claim over 33 pre-Columbian objects set to be auctioned at Christie's on February 9 in Paris. ... The pieces scheduled to be sold include sculptures, vessels, masks, plates, and figures from Aztec, Mayan, Toltec, Totonac,...
Yes, 2020 was a no-good-very-bad year for the arts (and most everything else), but a new study from TRG Arts and Purple Seven has at least a few glad tidings. In the U.S. and Canada, half of the arts organizations surveyed took in more total gift income than in 2019, and three-quarters attracted more individual donors than the previous...
" a virtuoso vocalist whose ease of motion between opera, jazz and South African popular music made her a symbol of the country’s new social order after the end of apartheid. … Mandela famously referred to her as the country's 'first lady of song,' and the title stuck." - The New York Times
"The new regulations … mandate that dealers must conduct specific checks on clients and report suspicious transactions that may suggest money laundering to the government. … The report found that asking art buyers for personal information — including identity documents and proof of address — remains art business's biggest concern." (And the paperwork's a pain in the neck.) -...
"Books are now published in numbers so vast that the writing of one can no longer be presumed to be an act of communication between writer and reader. Yet even books that aren’t read, and stand little chance of ever being read, can have their value." - LitHub
“I’d say that size, discipline, history of percentage split of earned/contributed revenue, and dependency on partnerships and fee-for-service have all played a role in an organization’s ability to adapt, survive and even thrive during the pandemic.” - Colorado Sun
