01.02.17 – ArtsJournal

Barry Hessenius’ Three Resolutions For The Arts Sector

ISSUES Posted: January 3, 2018 10:01 am

Odds it will happen? Given our history of willingness to be political animals, the odds are about zero the field will see its own self interest as a legitimate cause.

How Reading Has Shaped Who We Are

WORDS Posted: January 3, 2018 9:32 am

“Literature, since it emerged 4,000 years ago,” has “shaped the lives of most humans on planet Earth.” We are what we read. ‘The Written World’ makes this grand assertion on the basis of a set of theses. Storytelling is as human as breathing. When fabulation intersected with writing, stories were empowered to propagate themselves in society and around the world as civilization-forming “foundational texts.”

Could The Big Changes At ArtForum Finally Make It The Art Magazine We’ve Wanted All These Years?

VISUAL Posted: January 3, 2018 8:33 am

“Change happens when strong voices are allowed to mature in public, when people take stands without preset or puritanical agendas, aren’t afraid of giving up hierarchies, being wrong, and are honest and earnest. Having a “hot faith in art” has always gotten us through times like these. I haven’t felt this way about this magazine in a long long time. As of today Artforum is no longer a lost cause or a dream anymore. It may be the real thing.”

The International Language Of Science Is English. Alas, That Leaves A Lot Out

WORDS Posted: January 6, 2017 1:03 pm

“This problem is a two-way street Not only does the larger scientific community miss out on research published in non-English languages. But the dominance of English as science’s lingua franca makes it more difficult for researchers and policy makers speaking non-English languages to take advantage of science that might help them.”

Book Prizes Are Harming New Fiction, Warns Agent

WORDS Posted: January 4, 2017 6:17 am

“Cutting-edge British literary fiction risks being undermined by its growing reliance on a handful of powerful book prizes, a leading literary agent has warned. But the associated costs of entering the biggest awards mean independent publishers willing to take risks on ‘difficult’ works without obvious marketing potential are being shut out of contention.”

‘I Disowned My Native Language’: A Writer’s Confession

WORDS Posted: January 3, 2017 2:33 pm

Yiyun Li, who writes only in English: “Yes, there is something unnatural, which I have refused to accept. Not the fact of writing in a second language – there are always Nabokov and Conrad as references, and many of my contemporaries as well … It’s the absoluteness of my abandonment of Chinese, undertaken with such determination that it is a kind of suicide.”

How To Get More People Into Movie Theatres? Start Screening TV Shows!

AUDIENCE, MEDIA Posted: January 3, 2017 1:30 pm

“Television companies are looking for ways to build hype for their new shows and make them stand out amid a glut of high-quality original programs. This year there could be as many as 500 scripted shows on TV and streaming services, compared with about 300 in 2015, according to estimates from the cable network FX. Theater owners, meanwhile, are eager to fill seats during slow periods including the autumn months, and hoping to diversify their businesses as the box office becomes increasingly unpredictable.”

Dividing Movie Types Between “Coastal Elites” And “Ordinary Americans” Is Tempting But Dangerous

MEDIA Posted: January 3, 2017 11:31 am

Thoughts of “the bubble,” and of its rhetorical cousin “real America” kept coming up as I tried to organize my feelings about the year’s movies. The phrases are both booby traps—labels that, when applied to culture, seek to impose a divide between art that is oblivious and art that is aware, or between movies that are about and for honest plain-spoken Americans (current example: Patriots Day) and movies that are for “coastal elites” who think rural white dudes are scary as hell (I don’t know … Nocturnal Animals?

Brian Eno Creates Music That Grows Like A Garden As You Listen To It

MUSIC Posted: January 3, 2017 8:04 am

His latest release has a regular CD version that’s a single long track of Enonian ambient music. But the iTunes version is a mini-app in itself, using algorithms to create music that’s always changing – “growing” – and never ends.

We’ve Been Completely Missing The Message Hidden In ‘Hamlet’, Says Scholar

THEATRE Posted: January 3, 2017 5:33 am

Gary Taylor, editor of The New Oxford Shakespeare and professor at Florida State, thinks that the figure of Fortinbras, the Norwegian king and deus ex machina who takes over Denmark after Hamlet has killed what’s left of the Danish royal family, is meant to be a flattering allusion to James I coming from Scotland to take the English throne.

No, We Had ‘Hamlet’ Right Already, Says Skeptical Professor About New Theory

THEATRE Posted: January 3, 2017 5:32 am

“I envy Gary Taylor his confidence. I am increasingly coming to think that the most useful new discoveries about Shakespeare are the negative ones.” Jonathan Bate, who edited the complete First Folio for the RSC, has his doubts about Gary Taylor’s theory. (James I’s Danish queen, for one, might not have found Hamlet very flattering. And there’s documentary evidence Taylor’s overlooking.)

A Practical Real-World Debate About Public Money And The Role Of Artists

One Story: Some Context Posted: January 2, 2017 10:51 pm

Ohio’s Cuyahoga County voters approved a cigarette tax to fund artists. So the question was how to allocate those funds. The country’s arts commission decided that the program would

emphasize community engagement over studio practice. Originally, the proposal was to have a Washington DC-based nonprofit organization replace the Cleveland-based group that had administered the individual artist grant program since its inception in 2008.

But artists got upset that criteria emphasized change over artistic merit.

Artists who work at making art in their studios and exhibiting it in galleries—as opposed to creating community engagement programs, seeking partners, and other social practices—feel like that kind of guideline writes them out. It pits one type of artist against another. And it feels not like public support, but like government direction.

The protests led to a community meeting at which there seemed to be broad agreement that the arts should advance racial equity and be a force for reflecting and improving the community. But where does the quality of art factor in, and who defines it? With voter-approved money on the table and a need to show that the money is being spent effectively, agreeing on how that happens is both a practical question but also a philosophical debate about the role of art and artists in their community.

Today’s AJBlog Highlights 01.02.17

AJBlogs Posted: January 2, 2017 8:35 pm

Monday Recommendation: Andrew Cyrille Andrew Cyrille Quartet, The Declaration Of Musical Independence (ECM) Andrew Cyrille, a bold drummer, long since established his audacity and the independence underscored in the album title. This collection is notable for subtlety and daring … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2017-01-02

12 Plays of Xmas: 7 Egor Bulychev by Gorky I’ve seen a lot of Chekhov. I mean, a lot. Last year, I marvelled at Vanya at the Almeida and spent a day with the National Theatre’s Young Chekhov trilogy. I can almost sing … read more
AJBlog: Performance Monkey Published 2017-01-02

Patti Smith’s New Year’s Eve vow: “We must not behave!” Patti Smith, Dec 31 2016, Park West Chicago. Photo by Lauren Deutsch. Ushering in 2017 with Patti Smith and band at Chicago’s Park West New Year’s Eve was inspiriting for us of a certain age and … read more
AJBlog: Jazz Beyond Jazz Published 2017-01-01

What Neurologists Are Learning From 125 Years Of Movie-Watching

IDEAS Posted: January 2, 2017 5:31 pm

“Over 125 years, the global filmmaking community has been engaged in an informal science of vision, conducting a large number of trial-and-error experiments on human perception. The results are not to be found in any neuroscience or psychology textbook, though you can find some in books on cinematography and film editing, and in academic papers analysing individual films. Other insights are there in the films themselves, waiting to be described. In recent years, professional scientists have started to mine this rich, informal database, and some of what we have learned is startling.”

Way Out There, Where Art Meets Science And They Converge

IDEAS Posted: January 2, 2017 4:31 pm

We evolved here, on this spinning planet, we grew from abiotic material to life, became complex, and eventually, after billions of years, became us. You. Me. Our sense of beauty and wonder and curiosity turned our gaze to the sky and allowed us to discover the pieces of Universe that were our origins, looking back across countless light years to how we came to be. This in turn inspires art, prose and music, a unique outlook and perspective on nature that we can share and appreciate. The science created the art, and the art informs the science. Perhaps one could exist without the other. Perhaps. But together they are more than either individually or summed.

Critic, Writer John Berger, 77 – Questioned Relationship Between Art And Society

PEOPLE Posted: January 2, 2017 2:16 pm

Susan Sontag once described Berger as peerless in his ability to make “attentiveness to the sensual world” meet “imperatives of conscience”. Jarvis Cocker, to mark a recent book of essays about Berger, said: “There are a few authors that can change the way you look at the world through their writing and John Berger is one of them.”

Reconsidering JS Bach And His Relationship With God

MUSIC Posted: December 30, 2016 1:31 pm

Many of us grew up with an Enlightenment Bach, a nondenominational divinity of mathematical radiance. Glenn Gould’s commentary on the “Goldberg Variations” spoke of a “fundamental coordinating intelligence.” One German scholar went so far as to question the sincerity of Bach’s religious convictions. But the historically informed performance movement, in trying to replicate the conditions in which Bach’s works were first played, helped to restore awareness of his firm theological grounding.

Can You Make A Dance About Race And Politics That’s Also Truly Good Art? This Man Can

DANCE Posted: December 30, 2016 9:01 am

“The ideal, of course, is a piece in which the artistic qualities – in dance, those would be shape, tempo, rhythm, attack, etc. – are such as to elicit a feeling that you recognize as being on the side of justice. But you never know whether that’s really justice or just your wish for a piece you admire to share your politics.” Joan Acocella writes that choreographer Kyle Abraham manages to transcend the dilemma.