“The Musée du quai Branly in Paris, the ethnographic museum located in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, could soon have a different name. The museum’s director, Stéphane Martin, has submitted a request to the French culture and higher education ministries.”
We’re All Feeding Facebook’s Giant, Sucking Content Hole
“It’s tough to be creative every day when your life is fundamentally ordinary. It’s tiring. And, since most writers toil in relative isolation, it’s anything but social.”
Is Theatre About The Working Class, But Made For The Middle Class, Always ‘Poverty Porn’?
“It can be troubling to sit in an expensive theatre seat – that might cost close to what some people live on for an entire week – and watch actors portray the less fortunate.”
Eight Possible Alternatives To The Turing Test
“The Turing Test, which is intended to detect human-like intelligence in a machine, is fundamentally flawed. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be improved or modified. Here are eight proposed alternatives that could help us distinguish bot from human.”
What The New Yorker’s Comics Editor Looks For In Great Work
“Often, we separate intellectual discourse from emotional reaction. But I take such genuine pleasure in things that are intellectually well architected. It’s definitely an integrated experience for me. Much more than any kind of cheap, emotional pulls that you get in popular culture, when I read a sentence and it’s beautifully written, it can bring me to tears.”
Whatever Happened To LACMA’s Missing Goya? Imelda Marcos, That’s What
Turns out that the museum, concerned about its authenticity, sold deaccessioned Portrait of the Marquesa of Santa Cruz in 1978. The then-First Lady of the Philippines acquired the canvas for her personal aggrandizement the benefit of her nation. (The Philippine government finally took possession of it last year.)
Raw Nerve: Françoise Mouly
The art editor of The New Yorker – the woman who has chosen hundreds of striking, witty, and sometimes powerful covers – talks with Grace Bello about using visual imagery to master English, what comics can tell us about the state of a culture, and collaborating with husband Art Spiegelman on the seminal graphic magazine Raw.
Remember Q, The CBC Program That Used To Star Jian Ghomeshi? It’s Been Rebranded As q
Marketing expert: “Personally, I think that that’s probably not enough of an effort.”
Movie Editing Must Have Been a Shock To The Eyes When It Was First Developed
“Movies are, for the most part, made up of short runs of continuous action, called shots, spliced together with cuts. With a cut, a filmmaker can instantaneously replace most of what is available in your visual field with completely different stuff. This is something that never happened in the 3.5 billion years or so that it took our visual systems to develop. You might think, then, that cutting might cause something of a disturbance when it first appeared. And yet nothing in contemporary reports suggests that it did.”
Choreographer Akram Khan Defends His Criticism Of British Dance Training
“It wasn’t about dropping a bombshell – if I didn’t give a shit about young dancers, then I’d just keep quiet. I don’t need to work with British-trained dancers as we have a bunch of dancers from Asia and get half of those in our company from PARTS [in Brussels]. The only reason why I am saying this is because I care for these young people.”
Occupy The Whitney Museum! (And The New Place Hasn’t Even Opened Yet)
“At 11 p.m. [Tuesday], activists from groups including Occupy Museums and Occupy the Pipeline gathered on the street in front of the museum for a performance art-style demonstration about a natural gas pipeline that is adjacent to the $422 million building and its vast art collection. A corner of the Whitney’s building became a canvas for their slogans, projected in light over the glassed-in lobby.”
Dictionary Of American Regional English, Short Of Funding, Faces Shutdown
“DARE, as the dictionary is known, has announced that it will shutter most of its operations this summer unless it can find new sources of funding to cover its roughly $525,000 annual budget. The print dictionary had been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, among other sources. More recently, the budget was covered in large part by stopgap grants from the university, which are set to run out.”
UK’s Royal Ballet Starts New Residency For Young Choreographers
“Called the Royal Ballet Young Choreographer Programme, the scheme is a year-long position in which the chosen choreographer will be mentored by Royal Ballet director Kevin O’Hare and choreographer Wayne McGregor. They will also shadow the company and create new work.”
The Chauvet Cave Art Replica Is Bogus And Ridiculous, Says Jonathan Jones
“Picture this. Visitors to the Vatican arrive in St Peter’s Square … After looking at a display on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes, they are filtered into a full-scale replica, with a ceiling that is a giant photograph of the famous artwork. Perhaps one day this may come about, as the Vatican worries about preserving its artistic treasures. But I suspect no one would be very happy to visit a substitute Sistine Chapel. What would be the point? … Why then is it considered perfectly reasonable to offer fake ice age art as a cultural attraction?”
E-Short Stories For 99 Cents, Just Like Singles From iTunes
“Vintage/Anchor Books is now experimenting with selling short stories à la carte, through its Vintage Shorts digital imprint. Throughout May, to mark Short Story Month, Vintage will release a digital short story each day for 99 cents, the price of many iTunes singles.” The range is wide, form Poe, Chekhov, and Cather to Alice Munro, Jhumpa Lahiri and Junot Diaz.
Alan Gilbert’s Manifesto On The Future Of Orchestras
“The problem has been that as orchestras are involved in more and more areas, it is often not clear why they are doing what they are doing, When it does not connect to the core of the organization, you start to wonder what the point is. This has led to an industry-wide existential soul-searching in which at least some forces have pushed back, not wanting to see their beloved old-world musical traditions altered.”
Three Major Cultural Leaders Have Stepped Down In London. They Leave A Legacy Of Achievements
Neil MacGregor at the British Museum, Nicholas Hytner at the National Theatre and Kevin Spacey at the Old Vic Theatre. “As the three men all took up their posts between 2002-4, their incumbencies have overlapped for a decade and all faced a very similar challenge: how to attract larger and broader audiences at a time when, in the case of Hytner and MacGregor, their public funding was diminishing in real terms and, for Spacey, was non-existent.”
Wallace Foundation Makes Major Investment In Building New Audiences For Arts
“The grants announced Wednesday total $10.2 million. They cover a 12- to 22-month “cycle” in which each recipient will conduct research needed to solidify a plan that might involve different kinds of performances, taking shows to different kinds of venues, using different marketing approaches and providing educational add-ons to help audiences connect more deeply with what they’re seeing.”
Toronto Film Festival To Start Including TV Shows
It’s a sign of the surging quality of television. “Given how many filmmakers work in television, it’s certainly a natural fit from a creator standpoint.”
Defending British Dance Training: Well, Everybody Seems To Like Our Choreographers
Kevin O’Hare, artistic director of the Royal Ballet: “Look at Benjamin Millepied’s first season for the Paris Opera. He’s got Wayne McGregor, Chris Wheeldon and Liam Scarlett involved, and Arthur Pita. In Britain, we’ve got choreographers that people around the world want.”
Food Has Now Become A Category Of Media Celebrity, Like Actresses
“Celebrity profiles are infamous, at this point, for their distinctive combination of erudition and ennui. Their adjective-happy explorations of hot-lady celebrities … treat their subjects like ‘irreducible mysteries, floating so high above the mortal (male) writers that they can only be described in terms of their effects.’ … Celebritized food profiles – celebrations of, among other things, actual rump roasts – treat their own subjects with a similar mingling of mysticism and frustrated desire.”
John Cameron Mitchell – He And Hedwig Have Both Changed A Lot Over 20 Years
“Sitting on his upholstered couch in his rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan’s West Village, we talk about being an openly gay actor in the ’80s, the healing that comes with watching parents age and why he says [his late ex-boyfriend] Jack was the best man he ever knew.” (podcast)
It Had To Happen: Author Of ‘So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed’ Gets Twitter-Shamed
And it was over a passage that didn’t even make it into the published version of the book. Laura Miller explains the what and how.
Top Posts From AJBlogs 04.15.15
Overserved
AJBlog: Engaging Matters Published 2015-04-15
‘One-Way Ticket’s’ Missed Connection: Lawrence’s ‘Migration’ Show at MoMA Bypasses a Crucial Stop
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2015-04-15
Not Since Robbins
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2015-04-15
Just Because: Dave Frishberg And Friends
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2015-04-15
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Study: Creativity Can Be Boosted By Artificial Stimulation
Artificially activating “cortical oscillations in the alpha frequency band”—a type of brain wave that has previously been linked with creativity—leads to higher scores on a standard test measuring innovative thinking, according to researchers from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.