“Even as they try to reclaim what was lost, they and others are also taking advantage of a rare scientific opportunity. The cathedral, laid bare to inspection by the fire, is yielding clues to the mysteries of its medieval past. ‘We’ve got 40 years of research coming out of this event,’ says LRMH Assistant Director Thierry Zimmer.” Here’s an in-depth look at what the teams are doing. (Well, were doing, before work was suspended.) – Science
It’s Time For Epic Self-Isolation Living-Room Dance Parties
Seriously: Dance is doable in-the-house exercise. Though the five dancers in this article all have extensive gym and group class routines, one also says that “dancing helps me appreciate my body and how much it can do for me. I can ask it to be coordinated, connected, and challenged. I like that it can surprise me, too!” – HuffPost
Does Democratization Of Culture Mean The End Of Audience?
“My current research situates audience development within work on culture as a vocation, and wider debates around the democratisation of culture and cultural democracy. Audience development both replicates and reproduces (rather than challenges) the dominant cultural hegemony – most notably in subsidised cultural institutions. As such, it has traditionally been seen as a management tool for the democratisation of culture.” – Arts Professional
Sculptor J. Seward Johnson Jr, 89
Johnson, a sculptor who may be responsible for more double takes than anyone in history thanks to his countless lifelike creations in public places — a businessman in downtown Manhattan, surfers at a Florida beach, a student eating a sandwich on a curb in Princeton, N.J. — died on Tuesday at his home in Key West, Fla. – The New York Times
Modernism And The African American Experience
Back at the beginning of the 20th century, artists such as Picasso, Braque and Matisse turned to African art for new ideas about how to represent the world, creating figures with masklike faces, flattened forms and backgrounds of vibrant patterning. They weren’t just borrowing visual ideas, however. Many of them believed in a connection between what they saw as primitive culture and the deeper wellsprings of psychological life, a way to reference and represent urges and emotional drives that had been suppressed by “civilization.” But they also were appropriating wholesale the visual material of people who were suffering colonial oppression, taking sacred objects out of context and imputing to them European-derived ideas about their purpose and meaning. – Washington Post
An Opera That Works To Reinvent The Form
“We were like, how do we do this so that we don’t let the audience off the hook — that this is the land where this happened?” says Yuval Sharon. “Los Angeles State Historic Park feels like a central character in ‘Sweet Land.’” – Los Angeles Times
Was London’s Millennium Dome Really The Enormous Fiasco Everyone Remembers? Not Entirely …
It cost more than £750 million (that was well over a billion dollars then), the grand opening at the turn of the millennium was one snafu after another, actual visitor numbers were half of projections, and the UK government eventually sold it for a pound. But families loved it at the time, and it’s now the most popular live music venue on Earth. Imogen West-Knights recounts how it all happened in this week’s Guardian Long Read. – The Guardian
A High Stress Threat To The Arts
There will soon be lots of demands for emergency funds, to bail out small businesses, cab drivers, restaurants, and so on. Cultural workers, who contribute so much to urban life in normal times and who will be so severely missed in abnormal ones, need relief starting now, before the world they belong to withers away. – New York Magazine
Virus Could Cost $5 Billion Worldwide To Live Events Business
Coronavirus-related event cancellations seem to be barreling in by the hour, and the $26 billion global live events industry is watching with bated breath. Several sources across the booking, management, and venues sectors either declined to comment to Rolling Stone on the subject because of the uncertainty around the matter, or say they do not yet have them in place. There’s also the issue of unpredictability. – Rolling Stone
Crowds Continued To Fill Disneyland As Warnings Increase
Aimee and Charlie Cotherman, of Oil City, Pa., said that ahead of their trip to Orlando last week, they were worried about the coronavirus, but decided to still visit with their children, ages 8, 6 and 3, as well as their two-month-old baby, because “percentages are in our favor,” Mr. Cotherman said, referring to the low number of children infected. – The New York Times
Egypt’s Favorite Street Music Banned By Government
“Mahraganat music, fast and loud, soared in popularity following Egypt’s 2011 Arab Spring revolts, which toppled the country’s longtime autocratic leader Hosni Mubarak, who died last month. The music provided an outlet for poor Egyptians frustrated by political turmoil, growing repression, a declining economy, high unemployment and other woes. … [But] since February, clubs, hotels, music venues and even Nile cruise boats have been ordered not to book mahraganat musicians, unless they want to face stiff fines and be taken to court.” – The Washington Post
Keeping Contemporary Dance Works From Being Lost To History
Merce Cunningham, Alvin Ailey, Mark Morris, Pina Bausch, Richard Alston … and the list goes on. Writer Lyndsey Winship gives a brief survey of the various ways (and no, video alone is not enough) that companies and archives are working to preserve modern choreography. – The Guardian
Stephen Sondheim At 90: The Master Of Mixed Emotions
Ben Brantley: “When it comes to emotions, Sondheim — more than any other composer from the Broadway songbook — is the one I trust to tell me the truth. That’s because in the world of Sondheim, feelings never come singly but in battalions. Even his simplest, most assertive melodies usually sound as if they’re being pulled in contradictory directions.” – The New York Times
Stephen Sondheim At 90: Not Just A Great Songwriter, A Great Playwright
Jesse Green: “Having long taken for granted that he is the greatest composer-lyricist the United States has produced, we can perhaps now notice that he is also an artist to place in the line of America’s foundational 20th-century playwrights. In years to come, critics will have trouble understanding how our time put him in one basket but put Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, August Wilson and Edward Albee in another.” – The New York Times
The (Nearly) Complete Musicals Of Stephen Sondheim: A New York Times Critics’ Guide
Ben Brantley and Jesse Green give their takes on the 15 shows for which Sondheim wrote music and lyrics and the three for which he was lyricist (with music by Leonard Bernstein, Jule Styne, and Richard Rodgers). – The New York Times
Composer Charles Wuorinen Dead At 81
Known for his adherence to thorny modernism and his strong opinions, Wuorinen won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for Time’s Encomium (the first piece of electronic music to earn the honor) but is best known for his opera adaptations of Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain. – Yahoo! (AP)
Chanel Miller, Edwidge Danticat, Patrick Radden Keefe Win National Book Critics Circle Awards
Miller, the survivor of the rape by Stanford athlete Brock Turner, received the autobiography award for her memoir Know My Name; Danticat’s Everything Inside: Stories won the fiction prize; Keefe’s Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland took nonfiction honors; Morgan Parker’s Magical Negro won the poetry award. – Los Angeles Times
How Dallas Opera Ran Afoul Of Social Media Algorithms
As much as it sounds like something out of Isaac Asimov, we have to say it: we can’t surrender our discernment to the computers. What we need now — what will make our social media feeds and our national discourse saner — is not better artificial intelligence but more actual intelligence. We don’t need better algorithms; we need deeper wisdom. We’re not getting that from Facebook. – Dallas Morning News
Met Museum Hikes Pay For Top Execs
The highest paid executive in the most recent financial year, according to tax filings, was chief investment officer Lauren Meserve, whose total compensation package was worth $1.6 million, up 8.3 percent from 2017–18, when she made $1.47 million. The next best-paid exec is CEO Daniel Weiss, whose total pay package was worth $1.25 million in 2018–19, a 25 percent increase over the previous year, when he made $1 million. – Artnet
Data: How Movie-going Declined In North America Last Year
A detailed report released Wednesday by the Motion Picture Association helps to explain why moviegoing dipped in North America last year by 4 percent to $11.4 billion. Two key stats: The number of frequent moviegoers declined, and the number of tickets sold to all consumers slipped across every age group compared to 2018. – The Hollywood Reporter
How Coronavirus Might Change The Arts
As was the case during the AIDS crisis and in the months following the Sept. 11 atrocities, “regicide, civil strife and anarchy” tend to be replaced with great writers musing on the existence of God or the utility of religion, as Tony Kushner did in “Angels in America,” and they start to see that there are forces in the world that level us all. And the marketplace tends to reward those writers. – Chicago Tribune
A Different Way Of Understanding Emotional Intelligence
Here’s the 20,000 foot summary: Your brain’s most important job is not thinking or feeling or even seeing, but keeping your body alive and well so that you survive and thrive (and eventually reproduce). How is your brain to do this? Like a sophisticated fortune-teller, your brain constantly predicts. Its predictions ultimately become the emotions you experience and the expressions you perceive in other people. – Nautilus
Bill Smith And McCoy Tyner Are Gone
James Moody told me that his Georgia-born grandmother said one morning while looking through the newspaper, “Folks is dyin’ what ain’t never died befo’.” The trend continues, as it always has.” – Doug Ramsey
Broadway Closing – Also Met Opera, Museum, Etc. As NY Restricts Crowds
“There is no question that Broadway shows should be closed,” Racaniello said. “Any large gatherings of people, especially here in NYC where we know the virus is circulating, need to stop.” Joining Broadway, other New York City institutions that have closed because of the pandemic include the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. – HuffPost
Rise Of The Internet Celebrity Talk Shows
The passive celebrity interview is over. Now celebrities must work for their press — or, at worst, they have to be interviewed by another celebrity. These practices makes sense in the social media era. Instagram, Twitter and other platforms are designed to let fans feel closer to celebrities than ever before, and have allowed those celebrities a control over their personas that they did not used to have. So, the new shows do what they can to soothe — or rattle — celebrities into a state resembling authenticity. – The New York Times