“The good news is that the arts are a significant contributor to the economy; the bad is that culture and creativity are being erased from the classroom, and that audiences for the arts are substantially white, middle class, affluent and well educated. Worryingly, there is a downward trend in participation.”
Pablo Neruda’s Remains To Be Reburied In Chile After Four Investigations Into His Suspicious Death
“For nearly two years, Neruda’s remains have been lying in forensic laboratories in three countries – and from early this year in a fourth – in an attempt to determine whether his death may have been accelerated by poisoning.”
Can Pandora Soothe The Extremely Ruffled Feelings Of The Music World?
“To repair its relationships in the music world, Pandora has created a division to work with labels and artist managers, opened its vast databanks, and begun experimenting with artist promotions.”
The Woman Who Had A Huge Influence On Sculptor Anthony Caro, But Also Made Her Own Art
Sheila Girling, who has died at 90, met Caro at art school. “Girling’s pictures often dazzle with their intense hues, and it was she who on occasion chose the colours in Caro’s sculptures, from his steel and aluminium compositions of the 1960s to more recent pieces in Perspex.”
The NSA Might Be Displeased With Hollywood After The ‘Citizenfour’ Win
The Academy voters “implicitly validated the project of exposing how government stores and monitors our private communications as a worthy enterprise rather than a discreditable one. In this way, civil society has just strengthened a core democratic norm.”
In Los Angeles, Small Theatres Are Quietly And Not So Quietly Freaking Out About Equity’s Minimum Wage Proposal
“By the time the meeting broke up it looked as if a civil war were at hand and that, in an extreme rarity for the U.S. labor movement, a substantial force within a union was mobilizing against a pay hike.”
What’s Up With The State Legislatures Threatening AP History?
“Among the Republican committee’s more specific concerns were that the framework ‘includes little or no discussion of the Founding Fathers, the principles of the Declaration of Independence, the religious influences on our nation’s history and many other critical topics that have always been part of the APUSH course'”
Indeed, Why *Did* A Certain Movie Win So Many Oscars?
“Above them all, at the Oscars at least, came ‘Birdman,’ which has very little to do with the real world, but everything to do with creative egos and hermetic artistic pursuits. This year, that seemed right and preferable to the Oscar voters. It was a movie that believed in actors, and forgave everyone’s flaws, and knew how to put on a show.”
Joan Rivers: An Appreciation, And A Reckoning
“From the nineteen-sixties on, Rivers had been the purveyor of a harsh Realpolitik, one based on her experience: looks mattered. If you got cut off from access to men and money — and from men as the route to money — you were dead in the water. Women were one another’s competition, always. For half a century, this dark comedy of scarce resources had been her forte: many hands grasping, but only one golden ring. Rivers herself had fought hard for the token slot allotted to a female comic, yet she seemed thrown by a world in which that might no longer be necessary.”
Looking For The Langston Hughes He Himself Worked Hard To Conceal
Hilton Als: “One of the architects of black political correctness, he saw as threatening any attempt to expose black difference or weakness in front of a white audience. … Hughes’s reluctance to reveal the cracks in the black world – which is to say, his own world – curtailed not only what he was able to achieve as an artist but what he was able to express as a man.”
Alex Ross Meets The Wizards Of Acoustics
John and Helen Meyer can fix just about any acoustical problem in a space – from a dead auditorium to a restaurant full of deafening chatter. Their Constellation system “undertakes a process akin to the Photoshopping of an image, with undesirable elements removed.”