It’s going to be a series of apps, in fact — and they’ll be free. The first one, now out, features the General Prologue, with text and audio in the original Middle English, a modern English translation, and a digitized facsimile of an early manuscript as well as notes and commentary. (One of the project’s contributing scholars was the late Terry Jones of Monty Python.) – Smithsonian Magazine
Sculptor Beverly Pepper, 97
“After beginning her artistic life as a painter, Ms. Pepper was known from the 1960s on as a sculptor of towering forms of iron, steel, earth and stone, often displayed outdoors. … [Yet her] work was suffused with a quicksilver lightness that belied its gargantuan scale.” – The New York Times
How To Keep On Writing (Or Making Other Art) When It Feels Like The Planet Is Coming Apart
Writer Jenny Offill: “The question I was thinking about in this book … was, Can you still just tend your own garden once you know about the fire outside its walls?” – The New York Times
Fleeing War, Finding Refuge In Dance
In Burkina Faso, hundreds of thousands of refugees from neighboring countries are trying to find peace and a future in the capital. One of them, an 18-year-old dancer who’s been on the run since 2012, “knows that people like him wait years or decades to leave war zones — if the opportunity ever arrives. He must stand out to have a chance.” – The Washington Post
Banksy Is Brilliant At Manipulating The Media And Art Market. But Is He A Brilliant Artist?
The one part of the art world that has seemed resistant to him is the ultimate conferrer of status: museums. Will he be remembered as an important artistic figure? And if so, will that be as a painter, an activist, or a Duchamp-like “conceptual prankster”? – The New York Times
American Institute Of Architects Attacks Proposed Trump Rules On New Federal Architecture
“The AIA strongly opposes uniform style mandates for federal #architecture. Architecture should be designed for the specific communities that it serves, reflecting our rich nation’s diverse places, thought, culture, and climates. Architects are committed to honoring our past as well as reflecting our future progress, protecting the freedom of thought and expression that are essential to democracy.” – The Architect’s Newspaper
Christie’s Holds An Auction Of Low-Priced Art And It’s A Hit
The sale, dubbed Christie’s 100, featured 92 lots by many well-known contemporary artists, with bids starting at as low as $100. Certain works even sold for considerably less than the average New Yorker’s monthly rent, including a Louise Lawler print for $1,000, and a John Bock work on paper for $750. In all, 96 percent of the works found buyers and the sale pulled in $347,375. – Artnet
When Comedians Cross The Line (As With One Unfortunate Tweet About Kobe Bryant)
We won’t share here what comic Ari Shaffir put on Twitter about the late basketball star (it’s in the article), but it got him dropped by his agent, criticized by his colleagues, and threatened by angry Kobe fans. “Shaffir’s fans do expect this kind of thing from him. But the shocking death of Bryant hit a bigger cultural nerve, revealing how dark humor has expanded and evolved in the era of social media.” Jason Zinoman considers that evolution. – The New York Times
L.A.’s Geffen Playhouse Establishes Residency For Heavyweight Collective Of Black Theatre Talent
The group is called Cast Iron Entertainment, and includes Oscar-winning and Tony-nominated playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney and actors Sterling K. Brown, Glenn Davis, Brian Tyree Henry, Jon Michael Hill, and André Holland. They’ll have complete freedom to create and develop projects, with no requirement of an end project committed to the Geffen. – The Hollywood Reporter
Could The Big Acting Award Categories Be De-Gendered?
Some non-binary actors, and audience members, are asking the Oscars, Emmys, and other awards to eliminate separate actor and actress categories — and they’re pointing to one set of awards that did have gendered categories and dropped them: the Grammys. – The Washington Post
LA Philharmonic: How To Change The Center Of Gravity Of Programming?
“One of the big things that we’re trying to do this season,“ Chief Executive Chad Smith said, “is really advance this idea that Gustavo has been initiating for so long, which is to shift the musical center of gravity for our art form further west and further south. We come from an art form which historically was European and largely male. How do we, over time, change that?“ – Los Angeles Times
After 87 Years, A Radical Novel Of The Harlem Renaissance Finds A Publisher
Claude McKay set aside his novel Romance in Marseille in 1933 because his editor thought it too shocking to sell: its protagonist is a West African double amputee with a prostitute lover, and most of the action is “in a sexually liberated working-class milieu, where queer love is accepted as a fact of life, no more subject to judgment than its heterosexual counterpart.” Penguin Classics has just published it for the first time. – The New York Times
How Are They Dating This Set Of Ancient Australian Rock Paintings? With Mud Wasps
Dead mud wasps, in fact. The ancient artists who painted the Gwion figures in Western Australia’s Kimberley region used iron oxide pigments, which have no organic material and can’t be carbon-dated. But the remains of mud wasp nests stuck to the paintings can be carbon-dated, and researcher Damien Finch has used them to determine that the Gwion paintings are roughly 12,000 years old. – BBC
Boris Johnson’s Government Seriously Considers Abolishing License Fee That Funds BBC
“The culture secretary, Nicky Morgan, suggested the television licence” — an annual fee, currently £154.50 ($201.68), charged every household and business with a television — “was an increasingly outdated way of funding the BBC, saying that while she would guarantee its existence in the short term, it was time to look at new ways of subsidising public service broadcasting.” – The Guardian
Slammed For Doing ‘Literary Blackface’, Barnes & Noble Cancels Poorly Thought-Out ‘Diverse Editions’ Campaign
The idea of this Black History Month initiative was to take 12 children’s and young-adult classic titles — among them Frankenstein, Treasure Island, The Three Musketeers, and Romeo and Juliet — and sell them with covers depicting their characters as nonwhite. (This as opposed to promoting titles by nonwhite writers.) – The Guardian
Actor Kirk Douglas, 103
“[His] distinctive cleft chin, raspy voice and highly charged dramatic energy whose starring roles in Spartacus, Lust For Life, Champion, Ace in the Hole and Paths of Glory helped him become one of Hollywood’s foremost leading men and enduring stars.” – The Washington Post
Critic Philosopher George Steiner, 92
He was what many people call a human encyclopedia—not in the American sense, a blank vault of facts, but in the French Enlightenment one: a critical repository of significant knowledge. His long book reviews for this magazine, written over thirty years, from 1966 to 1997, were dotted with allusions of the kind that a naturally horizontal thinker couldn’t help but include. But they were never imposed or forced—his mind truly, on its way to Borges, passed through Sophocles and stopped for a moment to take in the view at Heidegger. Steiner was a lifelong traveller of those routes. – The New Yorker
Barnes & Noble’s Blackface Celebration Of Black History Month
“Seriously. To honor black people, they decided to showcase a selection of white-centered literary tomes. But, instead of acknowledging that the books were written by white people who wrote about white people, these genius marketers simply slapped a diverse selection of black faces on the books’ covers.” – The Root
Beckett: A bit of Rough at the Old Vic
Daniel Radcliffe’s sense of physical theatre is magnificent, but, finally, the evening belongs to Alan Cumming. – Paul Levy