“I’m saying quite honestly what I’m usually thinking about … I was thinking it might be something like the Agora of Athens in ancient Greece, where everyone came together and anyone could put up their hand and say whatever they wanted to say.”
Adelaide Festival Has A New Director – A Pair Of Them, In Fact
“Nine years after they last shared the running of Sydney’s Belvoir St theatre, Neil Armfield and Rachel Healy have been announced as the new co-artistic directors of the Adelaide festival of the arts.”
Who Will Miss Dave Letterman Most?
Americana musicians: “‘Dave was celebrating Americana artists before we knew what we were called,’ says Emmylou Harris, one of the scene’s matriarchs, who first performed on Mr. Letterman’s program in 1989.”
Leanne Cope Leaps From Ballet To Broadway With Ease
“Big ballet companies grade their artists by rank, like the military, and out of the Royal’s six ranks, Cope is in the second. From the bottom.”
Big Changes Coming In The Way Songwriters Are Paid?
“Right now, publishers and songwriters are required to license their songs to anyone, at rates that are set by a special rate court. ASCAP and BMI have been pushing to raise those rates, but Pandora and other streaming services have pushed back. So far, the courts have sided with Pandora. Now, the publishers are trying a new approach.”
Tunisian First Novel Wins “Arab Booker Prize” (And Is Banned)
“Shukri al-Mabkhout’s award comes just a week after his publishers learned from an Abu Dhabi bookshop that the novel was banned from bookshops across the Emirates. ‘The Italian’ is the eighth winner of the $50,000 (£33,000) prize known as the “Arabic Booker”.
Study: Facebook Doesn’t Create Echo Chamber, Our Behavior Does
“In a new peer-reviewed study published today in Science, Facebook data scientists have for the first time tried to quantify how much the social network’s formula for its News Feed isolates its users from divergent opinions. According to their findings, Facebook’s own algorithms aren’t to blame. It’s us.”
Does Tory UK Election Win Mean Disaster For The Arts?
“Proposals for further enormous cuts that have more to do with ideology than necessity, combined with the Conservatives’ politically desperate promises not to destroy the NHS or education, mean the cultural sector will effectively be demolished by a second Cameron government.”
LA School District’s Ambitious Technology Bet – And How It Failed
“If one of the country’s largest school districts, one of the world’s largest tech companies, and one of the most established brands in education can’t make it work, can anyone?”
Boston Unveils an Enormous, Rainbow-Colored Spiderweb
“The untitled piece hangs above the Rose Kennedy Greenway and was made by local artist Janet Echelman … Though it appears lightweight, the 600-foot-wide entanglement weighs 2,000 pounds and required 100 miles of rope and a half-million knots.”
Producers Turn To Indiegogo To Finance Completion Of Orson Welles’s Last Film
“Add a few more twists to the decades-long quest to release The Other Side of the Wind, the unfinished final film of Orson Welles.” Says Peter Bogdanovich, one of the film’s stars, “I think it would amuse Orson to have the fans able to contribute to the completion of the film. As you know, he didn’t like Hollywood very much.”
At Venice Biennale, A Historic Church Becomes A Real Working Mosque
On Friday, the old Santa Maria della Misericordia “will open its doors as a functioning mosque, its Baroque walls adorned with Arabic script, its floor covered with a prayer rug angled toward Mecca and its crucifix mosaics hidden behind a towering mihrab, or prayer niche.” The project constitutes all of Iceland’s pavilion, and it has evoked more than a little ambivalence, despite a centuries-long Muslim presence in the city.
Why It’s No Good Blacklisting Theater Critics From Shows (According To A Theater Critic)
Lyn Gardner: “While the producers of any show may argue that as it’s their party, they can invite whoever they want, the principle of extending invitations across the board to established newspapers and reviewing outlets is a sound one. Trying to exclude particular reviewers is not – if for no other reason that it makes that individual critic seem more important than they are and hints at, if not outright censorship, than at least an over-developed desire to manipulate coverage and ensure good reviews all round.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 05.07.15
The bad guys won
AJBlog: Sandow Published 2015-05-07
The Shocking Cooper Hewitt, Part Two
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2015-05-07
Election night at the theatre
AJBlog: Performance Monkey Published 2015-05-07
Tad Smith, Sotheby’s New CEO, is Silent at Perfunctory Annual Meeting
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2015-05-07
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The Arts Patron Of Teheran
“Almost overnight nearly all of Tehran’s billboards, which are owned by the city and are a prime source of income, stopped showcasing South Korean dishwashers and the latest bank interest rates (now 22 percent) and sported still lifes by Rembrandt and images by the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.”
Viewers Are Increasingly Turning Away From Paying For Cable TV
“Some homes are turning to over-the-air signals because they can’t afford cable. But a growing number of them are millennials who use over-the-air TV for live sports and broadcast network shows on ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox while getting a wide array of programs from streaming video services such as Netflix, Amazon and Hulu. They are happy to pay for broadband Internet, but not TV.”
Here’s What Happened When Frank Gehry And Mark Zuckerberg Collaborated On A Building
“Architects have long sought to design so sensitively to circumstances that the result looks inevitable, as if it emerged without the hand of the designer. Mr. Gehry has so subsumed his bravura tendencies to Facebook’s pragmatism that Mr. Zuckerberg’s vision—for better or worse—emerges with extraordinary clarity.”
New York City Ballet Usher Gets To Design New Production of “Sylphides”
“For Ms. Tammany, an artist by day who moonlights as an usher, the job was a reunion of sorts. She designed La Sylphide when Mr. Martins first staged it 30 years ago for the Pennsylvania Ballet, in a production that was later broadcast on public television. But she said she was stunned when Mr. Martins approached her about doing it again at City Ballet.”
Why Sappho Is One Of The Most Important Figures In All Of Literary History
“With a single poem, which says that her beloved Anactoria is more valuable than the splendor of any cavalry, infantry, or fleet, she created a tradition of ‘love-not-war’ lyrics whose future stretches from Propertius to Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Bruce Springsteen. As the definitive ur-voice of lyric ecstasy, she is so consequential that poets of every generation, from Catullus to Sylvia Plath and Anne Carson, have used her to define their aesthetic manifestos: among the ancients, only Homer can claim an instrumental role in literary history equivalent to Sappho’s.”