Researchers in the field are having a lively dispute over the question. Matthew Hutson lays out the arguments.
When Fiction’s Not Enough (The Arundhati Roy Case For Something New)
Roy’s twenty-year turn to nonfiction makes a compelling case for the need for new forms of writing in conditions of social emergency, forms that remain resistant to commodification.
10 Great Novels On Freedom Of Expression That Aren’t ‘1984’
Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happpen Here is on the list, as is Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. (They didn’t need to include The Handmaid’s Tale.) But there are also titles by Mario Vargas Llosa, James Baldwin, Katie Kitamura, Hari Kunzru, Rachel Kushner, Jean Brunner, Antonio Tabucchi, and Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Librarian Under House Arrest In Moscow Takes Case To Court Of Human Rights
Police officers raided the Library of Ukrainian Literature in Moscow in October 2015 and arrested its director, Natalia Sharina, for distributing “extremist” literature and “anti-Russian propaganda.” She’s been under house arrest ever since and was put on trial last fall. Now Sharina is appealing to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
Ballet Companies Have To Accept That They’re Businesses, Says Major Company Director
David Bintley of Birmingham Royal Ballet: “I have lived, performed and managed dance within a generation that has, to a large extent, accepted arts funding by government as more of a right than a privilege. This financial safety net has been slowly but surely disappearing and the bald fact is: it’s not going to come back.”
An Epidemic Of Music-Related Injuries?
“Playing-related injuries are approaching epidemic levels. A 2012 Australian study on that country’s professional symphony orchestras showed that 84 per cent of musicians had experienced injuries in their lifetime and 50 per cent were currently having pain while playing. Why is this happening?”
How Should Writers Deal With Oppression? Scholar Barbara Harlow, Who Just Died At 68, Had Some Advice
Harlow wrote about women and men who lived and wrote in struggles all over the world. “One of her premises was that imaginative writing was a way to gain control over ‘the historical and cultural record.’ This, she wrote, ‘is seen from all sides as no less crucial than the armed struggle.'”
Misty Copeland Takes Issue With Her Commercial Sponsor’s CEO
Copeland made history when she became the first African-American female principal dancer with the American Ballet Theater, but prior to that, she was placed in the public eye when her 2014 commercial with Under Armour went viral.
Poll: The World’s LEAST Sexy Music Genre
“Even chamber music, thrash metal and hymns ranked higher in a survey of more than 2,000 people conducted by Birmingham’s Symphony Hall.”
Barbara Gelb, 91 – O’Neill Biographer, Playwright, Journalist
The original biography, “O’Neill,” which they started when they were in their early 30s, clocked in at 964 pages, but was energetically paced and chock-full of interviews with O’Neill’s ex-wives, friends from his boyhood and seaman days, and the real people on whom his dramatic characters were based. The book, published in 1962, became a best seller.
The City Los Angeles Might Have Been
There are the cities we have. And then there are the cities we might have had if only they had been been built. It’s probably no surprise that with all the imagination running rampant in Los Angeles, there are many fun proposed projects that never got built. Here are some of them…
LA Cracks Down On Pay-To-Play Casting Workshops
“The Los Angeles city attorney cracked down on Hollywood’s pay-to-play casting workshop scene on Thursday, announcing cases against five prominent casting firms and 25 individuals allegedly involved in schemes that violate the Krekorian Talent Scam Prevention Act, a rarely enforced state labor law.”
Is There Any Such Thing As A Good Video-Game Movie?
Hollywood keeps trying to make one, but time after time, it seems, they’re critical disasters and U.S. box-office bombs (though some do wery well overseas). Top directors tend to either avoid the genre or try it once, get burned, and then avoid it. Is a truly good big-screen adaptation of a video game even possible? Yes, argues David Sims, and, arguably, it’s happened already.
Hollywood Women Gather To Say Things Have To Change In The Biz
“Frustration was in the air at the Makers conference, where hundreds of women gathered for three days in Rancho Palos Verdes to network and hear female celebrities and luminaries speak. Just weeks after the Women’s March and the inauguration of a president who has bragged on tape about sexually assaulting women, Hollywood women in particular were openly critical of the way they’d been treated in their professional lives.”
Nicolai Gedda, 91, Revered Tenor Whose Career Spanned Five Decades
A scrupulous musician, Gedda was admired for his fantastic versatility: he was convincing and stylish in Mozart, bel canto, Italian, French, German, and Russian repertoire, capable in opera, art song, and even operetta.
Painting Languishing In A Storeroom Turns Out To Be A Genuine Brueghel
“The unsigned and undated work, Wedding Dance in the Open Air (1607-15), had been in store for several years when the [Holburne Museum in Bath’s] director, Jennifer Scott, decided to pull it out for a closer look.”
Exhibition On Maidan In Kiev Destroyed By Nationalist Gang
Security camera footage shows more than a dozen men in balaclavas bursting into Kiev’s Visual Culture Research Center, beating a guard, and destroying artist Davyd Chychkan’s show Lost Opportunity. They left behind holes in the walls and graffiti reading “Moscow’s mouthpiece,” “Glory to Ukraine,” and the like.
Top Posts From AJBlogs 02.09.17
On “Artivism” – a conversation with Amy Hunter
I met Amy Hunter in St. Louis in October 2014, less than 3 months after the shooting of Michael Brown in nearby Ferguson. At the time, she served as Director of Racial Justice for the YWCA of Metro St. Louis. … read more
AJBlog: Audience Wanted Published 2017-02-09
ICYMI: Matisse and American Art
No sooner had my review of the exhibition at the Montclair Art Museum titled Matisse and American Art run in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday than I was off, flying to another exhibition … read more
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2017-02-09
The New Robots That Are Making Vinyl Records
“The first new record-pressing machines built in over 30 years are finally online. The brainchild of some Canadian R&D guys with a background designing fancy MRI machines, the Warm Tone record press is everything that its vintage counterpart is not: safe, fast, fully automated, reliable, run by cloud-based software, and iOS-controlled. These $195,000 whiz-bang machines, the homegrown product of a Toronto company called Viryl Technologies, are the next-gen record presses our 21st century vinyl revolution has been waiting for.”
First: Grammys Consider Streaming-Only Entries For This Year’s Awards
“The music industry’s most prestigious awards, which take place Sunday in a star-studded gala in Los Angeles, this year for the first time considered releases that were only streamed online.”
Study: Here’s What Makes People See You As A Good Dancer (If You’re A Woman)
“In the study, his team asked 39 female university students in Britain to dance alone to a drum beat. The researchers used a motion-capture system to track the women’s moves. They animated each dancer as an avatar to try to make sure that only the dance movements — and no other physical features — would affect ratings. Then they recruited 57 men and 143 women to watch 15-second clips of the avatars and rate them each on a numeric scale. Hip movements were the key predictor of how positively a dancer was rated in this study.
F—Ing A: Why Profanity Is Good For Us
Joan Acocella, reviewing two new books on the subject, considers the benefits of dirty words: their “analgesic effect,” their “cathartic power,” their “barrier-crossing function,” their role in bonding.
Apple’s New Saucer HQ Suggests The Company’s Design Flaws
“If Apple designs at its best when attending closely to details like those revealed in the construction of its spaceship headquarters, then presumably the details of its products would stand out as worthy precedents. Yet, when this premise is tested, it comes up wanting. In truth, Apple’s products hide a shambles of bad design under the perfection of sleek exteriors.”
Increasingly, Creative People Are Turning To Analog Over Digital
“The virtues of digital turn out to be the vices as well. Having all the music on earth at your instant disposal turns out to be almost the same as having none; Spotify’s playlists show people picking the same tunes over and over. Digital life’s too self-absorbed—either we evolve quickly away from the social primates we have always been or else we will quietly suffer from the solipsism inherent in staring at ourselves reflected in a screen. It’s too jumpy; concentration, from which all that is worthwhile emerges, is the great loss.”