Part of what seems awry with contemporary fitness culture is its artifice, symptomatic of the wrongness of modernity, prior to which, one imagines, real life was excessively challenging and exercise blissfully inadvertent. Condemned to an “active” lifestyle, pre-modern humans would surely never have dreamed of inventing excuses to expend extra energy for the sake of it. - New Statesman
The Small Business Administration oversees the $16 billion portion that will offer grants to concert halls, theaters and museums. But soon after the process began on April 8, the application portal shut down. The apparent cause? Technical glitches — as in plural. The SBA has said it hopes to reopen the portal by the end of the week. -...
“It was amazing to be able to sing with my friends again,” said Ian Bass, a seventh grader in the Ragazzi Boys Chorus, a Silicon Valley choir that has made online rehearsals work through a technology called JackTrip that eliminates the dreaded delay. “Sometimes I forget I am not in a normal practice because it feels so real.” -...
"Each of the attendees submits a screening form in advance and undergoes a COVID rapid test on-site, in an ivory-walled corridor that suggests a 1940s hospital on a Ryan Murphy set. Face masks are mandatory; wearable “passports” reflect row assignments, and the “Social Distance Ground Crew” lights the way with tarmac-style batons. To me—effectively a pandemic-era shut-in, having spent...
"For me, as a psychologist with a special interest and expertise in the arts, our fascination with art raises two long-standing and fundamental questions, ones that have engaged philosophers, psychologists and art lovers. First, why are we so drawn to works of art? For their beauty, of course, but that can’t be all, as the thought-experiments above show us....
He left behind "thousands of audio and video recordings; the countless notes scrawled on countless piles of music manuscript paper; and, of course, the memories of family, friends, and fans." Just about everyone who plays jazz today owes something to Corea, whether they know it or not (and most do). - Jazz Times
" Patwardhan views his filmmaking practice as comprehensive — not just researching, shooting, and completing films, but also taking them on tour and holding discussions, involving the communities and people he profiles. … Even if he is routinely cited as India's leading documentarian, actually showing his films there is a bedeviling challenge" — especially his latest, Vivek ("Reason"), about...
"The two-hour format which was so ideally suited to theatrical, we’ve now trained young people for fifteen months not to see that as a primary way to have audiovisual entertainment. Now, how they come back or if they come back . . . they’re certainly not going to come back in the way they once were." - The New...
"It took all of six minutes for Massimo Pulini to realise that the small oil painting due to go under the hammer in Madrid earlier this month with a guide price of €1,500 ($1,800) could be worth millions. … Within two weeks, Spain's culture ministry to impose an export ban. The painting was pulled from auction. Pulini, a...
For their study, the researches utilized artificial intelligence technology to examine the writing on the scrolls, comparing the look of certain letters and analyzing patterns that appear in the ink. The study did not offer details on the identities of the two possible authors of these texts. - ARTnews
"If you live and die at the box office, as does Broadway, you are not rewarded for indulgence or self-involvement. More importantly, you often are better able to reach non-elites. Broadway attracts more lower-middle class theatergoers than many pretentious nonprofit institutions; it pulls more young people to shows like “Mean Girls” and “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and it is...
Stéphane Lissner has been the superintendent/general director at the two most notoriously contentious companies in the world: La Scala and the Paris Opera. Now he's at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, financially stabilized after years of crisis, with the brief of bringing back artistic glory. Here he talks about the ingenious ways he's kept staffers working through...
From reducing waste and maximising urban greenery to collaboration and lobbying for change, solutions to reduce pressure on the planet are now taking centre stage. - Dezeen
It seems that, in many places, a multitude of vermin took advantage of the lack of traffic in museums during the pandemic to stage an invasion and, potentially, a delicious banquet. (Mmmm, priceless historic textiles!) A sharp-eyed conservator at the Getty in L.A. noticed an increase in noxious lepidopterae last April, early on — and so began the museum's...
While the "Combating Public Disorder Act" just signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis is most notorious for its provisions aimed at street protests (classifying blocking cars during a demonstration as rioting, protecting drivers who plow into a crowd of protestors from civil liability), it also makes the damaging of any "memorial" (defined as a marker that "honors or recounts the...
