“Historians now credit him with having pretty much invented the American pop song in its purest form: the bastard stepchild of the parlor song and the minstrel song, of the European and African strains of American music.” (And that child is very much a bastard – ever heard the second verse of “Oh, Susannah”? Yikes.)
Will ObamaCare Create A Boom In The Number Of Artists Who Can Now Be Artists?
“The Affordable Care Act made some of its most sweeping reforms in the arenas of health care for women and health care for the self-employed. This means that female freelance musicians are among the Americans whose lives have been most deeply affected by this policy.”
War, Secret Love, Death – Keys To Tove Jansson’s Moomintrolls
“You could read this as being the lesbian love between Tove and Vivicka. They have their secret love in this suitcase, and when they open the suitcase and show it to the whole of Moominvalley it is also a picture of how they show their love to the world. It’s a really beautiful story.”
Decline Of The Public Intellectual
“A generation ago, political scientists were public intellectuals. We wrote lucid prose. We spoke to the issues of the day. We advised President John F. Kennedy. But now all we care about is math, jargon and one another.”
Amazon Publishing Makes a Move Into Germany
“Amazon Publishing is starting a new German-language publishing program that will be based in Munich … Many of the titles first released in Germany will [subsequently] be published in English-language editions by AmazonCrossings.”
There’s More to Making Non-Sexist and Non-Racist Art Than (Thinking You’re) Not Being Sexist or Racist
“The folks at South African game development studio QCF Design have a post which addresses this issue in some thought-provoking ways” – which they tried putting into practice in their game Desktop Dungeons.
‘In the Black Box, You Can Do Really Anything. We Have Always Abused That.”
That statement pretty much sums up the famously confrontational Belgian theatre troupe Ontroerend Goed. You’ll love how they got their start: “Suddenly we were told that what we made was theatre, and given money to make more.”
How Do You Dramatize Depression? With Werewolves, Of Course
Matt Osman, author of The Boy Who Cried: “My mind hit on werewolves, the original lunatics. I would create a world where it was depression that was the myth and werewolves were treated by the state as a common occurrence to be quietly put away.”
Budapest Launches An Architectural Competition To Build Five New Museums At Once
“Officials say that the total estimated costs for the five museum buildings in the cultural quarter is 75 billion Hungarian forints (€239m), with much of the money coming from funds allocated to the country by the EU.”
A Utopian Society – One Group’s Quest To Build A Floating Country That Creates Its Own Culture
“About six years ago, a group based in California’s Bay Area, led by the grandson of U.S. economist Milton Friedman, began designing and raising money for a floating ocean city-state, whose citizens could harness the sea to solve hunger, cure sickness and fix climate change.”
Sotheby’s Under Attack (And How What The Auction House Does Might Utterly Change)
There’s a “battle between the Sotheby’s Old Guard and a financier who views artworks as financial assets that trade in a market made by the auction houses. The confrontation figures to get bitter and bruising between now and May, but at its center there sits a rather more exalted question: How do you properly value art?”
Is This True: Audiences Are More Open To New Choral Music Than To New Instrumental Music?
“Choirs routinely look for and program new music and that draws audiences, but instrumental ensembles suffer at the box office when presenting new works. In my opinion, there are a few reasons for this, with the main reason having to do with the difference between the human voice and instruments.”
36 Ways The World Wide Web Has Changed Us
“With more than 4 billion indexed Web pages, thousands imploding and starting up by the day, any thorough accounting of the Web’s impact would be impossible.”
When Was the First E-Book, Anyway?
Well, that depends on what you think qualifies as an e-book …
Who’s Designing the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion This Summer?
A Chilean architect named Smiljan Radic – and it will look like a cross between a flying saucer and Stonehenge.
Why Can’t Conservatives Pull Off a ‘Daily Show’?
“Political philosophy isn’t what keeps Republican-leaning comics from succeeding – it’s corporate hurdles, cultural forces, and the demographics of show business.”
Why We Can’t Stop Liking the Brands We Loved as Kids
Derek Thompson describes it as the Concrete-Mix theory of habit formation.
The Most Famous Playwright Most of Us Have Never Heard Of
Jon Fosse is “perhaps Europe’s most-performed living dramatist, translated into 40-odd languages. In 2010, he won the biggest prize in global theatre, the £275,000 Ibsen award,” and last year he was thought to be a frontrunner for the literature Nobel. Why does the English-speaking world know so little of him?
Russia’s Upstart Ballet Company Finally Schedules U.S. Debut
The Mikhailovsky Ballet, the well-funded St. Petersburg company that famously lured Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev away from the Bolshoi, was going to appear in New York in 2012 – until ABT, which also engaged the couple, invoked a non-compete clause. But they’re coming stateside at last.
Top Posts From AJBlogs 03.12.14
Randolph College’s Maier Museum Is Punished
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts | Published 2014-03-12
Economics of deaccessioning (a bit theoretical)
AJBlog: For What it’s Worth | Published 2014-03-12
Speak, memory
AJBlog: Performance Monkey | Published 2014-03-12
Making it as a Writer: MFA vs NYC
AJBlog: CultureCrash | Published 2014-03-12
Pierre Boulez video interview: ‘I am a composer. I still am a composer’
AJBlog: Slipped Disc | Published 2014-03-12
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Here’s What LA’s Creative Economy Looks Like In 2014
“The distinction in creative labor, put simply, is that artists have autonomous control over the direction of their creative output, whereas members of the “creative industries” produce products on spec. While both trade the products of their labor for capital, the latter, professionalized class dwarfs the former in economic clout, and so is dramatically more lucrative and stable an avocation.”
Giant Paper Sculptures on Park Avenue
They’re not actually made of paper (they’re aluminum and fiberglass), but they sure look like it. The seven pieces make up Alice Aycock’s Park Avenue Paper Chase, now going up in the median of Park Avenue in upper midtown Manhattan.