“French-speaking Africans have settled and opened businesses on and around West 116th Street since the 1980s, with Petit Senegal lending the bustling thoroughfare a distinctly international air with passers-by in flowing boubous, shops selling phone cards for cheap calls to Africa, and Franco-African restaurants and vegetable stands offering tropical products like hot peppers, plantain and palm oil. But since the 1990s, a small French expat community, attracted by the romanticism of Harlem, its strong sense of community and colorful history, as well as by comparatively lower real estate prices, has sprung up, and, inevitably, so have French restaurants.”
Whatever Happened To Google’s Grand Plan To Make Every Book Ever Searchable?
“Two things happened to Google Books on the way from moonshot vision to mundane reality. Soon after launch, it quickly fell from the idealistic ether into a legal bog … that finally ended last year, when the US Supreme Court turned down an appeal by the Authors Guild and definitively lifted the legal cloud … But in that time, another change had come over Google Books, one that’s not all that unusual for institutions and people who get caught up in decade-long legal battles: It lost its drive and ambition.”
Ted Hughes Was Even More Abusive To Sylvia Plath Than We Thought, Per Unpublished Letters
In correspondence with her former therapist, Plath alleged that her husband told her to her face that he wished she were dead and that he beat her just two days before her miscarriage.
Lawsuit Against Art Historian Over Fake Rothko Settled Out Of Court
“The Las Vegas billionaire casino magnate Frank Fertitta has settled his claims against the Swiss art historian Oliver Wick in one of the ten lawsuits brought against the now-defunct Knoedler gallery for knowingly selling fakes. … Fertitta bought a fake Mark Rothko from Knoedler in 2008 for $7.2m.”
Cuba’s Most Famous Dissident Artist Turns To Theatre – Samuel Beckett, No Less
Says Tania Bruguera about her directorial debut, happening this month in Portugal, “I’m interested in how Endgame brings power dynamics into our everyday lives. It feels relevant to see this piece today, when the world is seduced by so-called strong political figures and when democracy is abused instead of enacted. It feels like the end of a chapter.”
San Francisco Ballet’s Lorena Feijoo : The Exit Interview
“Even as she prepares for her company farewell gala, the Havana-born artist remains a highly critical observer of how – and what – she dances.” Allan Ulrich talks with Feijoo about the roles she did and didn’t get to dance and about her training at Alicia Alonso’s famous ballet school and what it has meant for her art.
Patricia McKissack, Children’s Author Who Brought Black History To Life, Dead At 72
In partnership with her husband, Fredrick, “[she] chronicled African American history and Southern folklore in more than 100 early-reader and picture books, including award-winning works about chicken-coop monsters and a girl’s attempt to catch the wind.”
What Does It Mean To Be A “Hispanic” Dance Company? Ballet Hispánico Seeks To Define
“One of the complexities the company faces is that the definition of Hispanic or Latino has become increasingly hybrid, complicated and personal, partly because of the blending brought by immigration and globalization. And also because Latin America is enormously diverse. Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Argentine, Colombian culture: They can seem to have little in common beyond a shared language.”
Meet The Artist Who’s Using Art Against The Turkish Erdoğan Regime
Over the course of six months, she has secretly gathered a 330-page internal police log detailing more than 2,000 cases of state-sanctioned violence against Turkish citizens over the last 11 months; she will be exposing every detail in a performance piece at this year’s Venice Biennale. Details are deliberately being kept on a need-to-know basis to avoid the very real threat of shutdown before the launch, but Onat’s headline-grabbing stunt will form part of Objection – the Pavilion of Humanity created by her and the artist Michal Cole that will transform a Venetian villa “to give an artistic home to women’s rights and freedom of speech”.
Why It’s So Difficult To Tell Stories About Abu Dhabi And Dubai
When people publish stories about the U.A.E., the country is almost always represented entirely by Dubai, which itself is almost always reduced to a glitzy, two-dimensional backdrop: a suitably strange, foreign Elsewhere, chock-full of easy signifiers of the “very old” (dark-skinned men in robes, desert sand) and the “futuristic” (Lamborghinis, postmodern architecture). It appears most commonly in mysteries and thrillers—the perfect dash of exotic spice to liven up a visitor’s investigation into some globe-spanning conspiracy.
The Problem With Trying To Tell The History Of Canada (You Inevitably Leave Things Out)
CBC, Canada’s public broadcaster says it never meant to offend “anyone or any group” and did not intend to “diminish the importance” of stories that were left out of Canada: The Story of Us, which was meant as a marquee program to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the country.
How John Coltrane’s Music Is An Expression Of Mathematical Principles
“Thelonious Monk once said ‘All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.’ Musicians like John Coltrane though have been very much aware of the mathematics of music and consciously applied it to his works.”
Artificial Intelligence Will Likely Change How We Think The World Should Work
In a world of digital assistants and computer-generated imagery, the expectation is that computers do all kinds of work for humans. The result of which, some have argued, is a dulling of the senses. “The miraculous has become the norm. Such a surfeit of wonders may be de-sensitizing, but it’s also eroding our ability to dream at the movies.”
Jeffrey Deitch Returns To LA With A Gallery
Two years ago he reopened his gallery in SoHo. And now, he’s taken his first step toward a Los Angeles comeback: He has just signed a lease for a 15,000-square-foot warehouse in Hollywood with plans to open a gallery there in the fall. The art dealer’s new space, at 925 North Orange Drive, is a few blocks from the strip of galleries lining Highland Avenue, anchored by Regen Projects and Kohn Gallery.
The First Time I Ever Acted On Broadway (Was In The Show I Wrote, Which Has Been Running For A Year Already)
“I felt sick to my stomach from the second I opened my eyes that morning, but it wasn’t the familiar queasiness of too little sleep, or too much bourbon the night before.” Singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles, who wrote the music and lyrics for Waitress, writes about taking over the show’s title role – the first time she’s performed in musical theater since she got eaten by a plant in Little Shop of Horrors in high school.
When Life Imitates Art, And Then Outruns It: ‘Veep’ In 2017
When season six of the satirical HBO series about a self-defeating female politician was written and shot, pretty much everyone involved assumed that Hillary Clinton would be president when the show aired this spring. This means that everyone involved figured that the new storyline – about the aftermath of former President Selina Meyer’s defeat in a very close election – would be a counterfactual. No such luck: as Willa Paskin observes here, “when Veep actively tries to avoid imitating life, life goes and imitates it.”
A Star-Is-Born Moment? Young Conductor Jumps In For Yannick In Philly On Three Hours’ Notice
Kensho Watanabe, the 29-year-old assistant conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, stepped in at the last minute on Saturday evening for suddenly-ill music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin – and reportedly brought the house down. With a Q&A, David Patrick Stearns introduces readers to Watanabe and gets the story of the fateful night.
Linda Hopkins, 92, Gospel Star And Tony-Winning Singer-Actress
After a four-decade gospel career (she was discovered by Mahalia Jackson), she began performing on Broadway in such shows as Purlie, Inner City, Me and Bessie (as in Smith), and Black and Blue.
Top Posts From AJBlogs 04.11.17
Doin’ It: Museums
In my last couple of posts, I introduced the idea of participatory experiences as being a potentially critical element in the work of arts organizations … In my next two posts I want to focus on examples of both the practice and practitioners of this type of work. … read more
AJBlog: Engaging Matters Published 2017-04-11
Can You Spot the Fake?
The exhibition that Winterthur recently unveiled, Treasures on Trial: The Art and Science of Detecting Fakes, comes at an opportune time. … read more
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2017-04-11
What I learned in El Paso
In the musical part of my visit … read more
AJBlog: Sandow Published 2017-04-11
Correspondence: About A New Jazz Club
Rifftides reader Arthur Hill writes from somewhere in Oregon:
Yes, Virginia – there is a jazz club in Salem, Oregon, called Christo’s, … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2017-04-11
Why America’s Retail Stores Are Closing Down
“There’s little doubt that e-commerce companies have dramatically changed the retail industry, and delivered enormous gains in efficiency and productivity. Yes, there would be more traditional retail jobs in this country if Amazon didn’t exist. Companies like Amazon are able to produce the same amount of economic activity as traditional retailers, with many fewer man hours of work. But, in general, those kinds of productivity increases are considered a good thing; it’s virtually impossible for the economy to grow in a meaningful way without such leaps in productivity.”
Study: Romantic Relationships With Someone Outside Your Culture Stimulates Creativity
It reports “close intercultural romantic relationships” stimulate creativity — even after the affair is over. This finding offers “a compelling reason for people to go out of their comfort zone to develop meaningful and long-lasting relationships with individuals from other cultures,” a research team led by Jackson Lu of Columbia University writes in the Journal of Applied Psychology.
Are Human Rights Anything More Than A Legal Construct?
“Philosophers have debated the nature of human rights since at least the 12th century, often under the name of ‘natural rights’. These natural rights were supposed to be possessed by everyone and discoverable with the aid of our ordinary powers of reason (our ‘natural reason’), as opposed to rights established by law or disclosed through divine revelation. Wherever there are philosophers, however, there is disagreement.”
Polish Government Dismisses Head Of Big New WWII Museum After Nationalist Government Complains Museum Is “Too Universal”
The Polish historian Pawel Machcewicz has been dismissed from his role as director of the newly-opened Second World War Museum in Gdansk, one of the world’s largest historical museums. The move comes shortly after a court ruling paved the way for a controversial merger with the still-unbuilt Westerplatte Museum, allowing Poland’s right-wing PiS government to create a new state-sanctioned institution.
Jeff Koons’s Latest Metaphysical Meditation Is – A Handbag?? Yes, A Whole Line Of Louis Vuittons, In Fact
Koons says, “They touch on the metaphysical: the right here right now and its connection to the past and the future. They’re about shine, the basics of philosophy, passion, what it means to be a human, what it means to be an animal, the idea of transcendence.” Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? Lady Bracknell is not amused.