“The southern Italian regions of Sicily, Calabria and Campania have failed to spend hundreds of millions of euros in European Union (EU) culture and tourism funding,” which Brussels has now taken back.
GWU Cuts Faculty At Corcoran Gallery As Enrollment Falls
“Ten full-time faculty members who came to George Washington University when it took control of the Corcoran school were told Monday that their one-year contracts would not be renewed. … The cuts come as enrollment dropped 24 percent since the university assumed control of the school in August of 2014.”
Pranksters Jailed For Staging Bogus Art Heists For YouTube
“Four men have been jailed for pranks filmed for YouTube channel Trollstation, including a ‘terrifying’ fake art heist in the National Portrait Gallery. … Later that day, the pranksters, who have 718,000 subscribers, staged another fake robbery … [at] the Tate Britain gallery.”
‘Bio-Techne’: Robots And Replicants In Ancient Greek Myth
“The beloved myths of Hercules, Jason and the Argonauts, the sorceress Medea, the engineer Daedalus, the inventor-god Hephaestus, and the tragically inquisitive Pandora all raised the basic question of the boundaries between human and machine.”
Teacher Suspended For Selling Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ To Students At A Loss
“Todd Friedman, a 29-year public-school veteran who teaches at Midwood High School [in Brooklyn], was put on administrative duty – and faces possible termination – after the city Department of Education slapped him with disciplinary charges. His crime: He personally ordered 102 paperback copies of the novel from a publisher last September for his Advanced Placement students.”
The Insane Life Of America’s First Famous Nude Art Model
“‘That which is the immodesty of other women has been my virtue – my willingness that the world should gaze upon my figure unadorned,’ Audrey Munson, the favorite nude model of the Beaux Arts movement in the United States, once proclaimed. … Yet following those Gilded Age years as the ‘American Venus,’ she had a failed silent film career …, was caught in a murder scandal, attempted suicide by poison, and was ultimately committed to a mental institution.”
Arts Org CEO Warns Of Embezzlement, Gets Attacked With Lye; Board Fires Her, Then Votes To Shut Org Down
“Scandal has rocked a Queens-based arts charity that abruptly shut down on May 11. Healing Arts Initiative (HAI), founded in 1969, offered performances and workshops for the city’s poor, disabled, and elderly, but was brought down by a $750,000 embezzlement scheme that left director D. Alexandra Dyer disfigured after she was attacked with lye while investigating the organization’s finances.”
The Little Journal Of Theatre Criticism That Could, Now Turning 40
“That was before email. Our writers would come in and drop the text off at our offices — Susan Sontag came by to bring the intro to a volume of plays by Maria Irene Fornes; agents came, artists. They all came to deliver their articles and plays and we’d talk for a long time. I remember one particular day when Jonathan Kalb dropped by; we stopped everything and we talked a few hours. He said to us, ‘Is it always like this?'”
BBC To Start Paid Subscription Streaming Service
“BBC plans to launch a homegrown rival to Netflix and Amazon Prime are a step closer to reality after the government gave it the green light to launch a new paid-for subscription service.”
Sold Out Symphony Concerts For 20-Somethings: How Does That Happen?
“They need the ritual, they want to be part of the whole spectacle. Sometimes people think that for student concerts you have to be casual and the orchestra has to be casual too. What we are doing is quite the opposite, and we are very successful in it. I think you should take the audience seriously. You should take the young audience and treat them like adults.”
Consciousness Isn’t A Great Mystery, It’s Just A Physical Process
“It’s the most familiar thing there is, whether it’s experience of emotion, pain, understanding what someone is saying, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting or feeling. It is in fact the only thing in the universe whose ultimate intrinsic nature we can claim to know. It is utterly unmysterious. The nature of physical stuff, by contrast, is deeply mysterious.”
You Can Now Tour The Studio Where The Whitney Was Born
“The New York of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s day did not respect female artists, did not prize contemporary artists and did not appreciate American artists. Mrs. Whitney set out to change all that.”
Marvel Turned A Female Villain Into A Male Villain Because, You Know, Toys
“Iron Man 3 writer and director Shane Black explained that although he had written the film with a female villain, there wasn’t one on screen because Marvel feared it would hurt toy sales.”
We Think Sea World Is Cruel, But Then We’re Wowed By The Use Of Live Animals As Art
“It is hardly debatable that the employment of animals (beings incapable of consenting to spending days, weeks, or merely hours, confined to, and on display in, galleries or museums … ) is exploitative, reflecting a form of domination that does not simply regard living animals as material so much as it deforms animals into material.”
Lufthansa Denies Boarding To Cellist Leaving For European Tour
“A cellist traveling to Spain for the start of the Curtis [Institute] European tour was not allowed to board a Lufthansa flight Saturday at Philadelphia International Airport … But this was apparently not a case of an airline simply refusing to let on a large instrument.”
Critic Sasha Frere-Jones Out At L.A. Times, Accused Of Expensing $5K Tab At Strip Club
The music and culture critic, who won awards and gained fame during his years as a New Yorker staff writer (2004-2015), “has abruptly exited the L.A. Times after less than a year amid allegations of expense-account shenanigans involving a strip club and accepting expensive freebies from sources.”
The Compromises David Adjaye Had To Make To Get The National Museum Of African-American History And Culture Built
“Like so many things in Washington, it has been debated, refined and amended. In the process, it has become both a better and a worse building than the 2009 winning design concept presented by the team of Freelon Adjaye Bond.” Philip Kennicott gets into the details.
More Art On Rails: Paris-Versailles Suburban Trains Decked Out Louis XIV-Style
The new decor “feature[s] details such as bookcases, sconces, decorative wall and ceiling panels, and scenes from the sumptuous gardens” – all made and installed with a new specialized plastic film developed by 3M. The company has also partnered with the Musée d’Orsay to create Impressionism-themed cars for several intercity trains.
Is There No Accounting For Taste? The Complex Psychology Of Why People Like Things
Tom Vanderbilt, author of the new book You May Also Like, says that taste is partly “a way of filtering the world, of ordering information” and partly “another form of social learning” – but “always a mixture of exposure, of culture, of a person’s personality. And none of these are particularly static or fixed.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 05.16.16
This Week In Audience 05.15.16 – New Audience V. Old Audience Edition
A confluence of stories this week that rocket between new and old, digital and physical. Physical books making a comeback while e-book sales fall. Downloads collapsing as streaming takes hold. Transitions sure are messy … read more
AJBlog: AJ Arts Audience Published 2016-05-15
An Asterisk for Twombly Record* at Sotheby’s? Bloomberg Reports Payment by Art-Swap
When is an “auction record” not really an auction record? That’s a question that may be raised regarding a wobbly Twombly benchmark set at Sotheby’s last November. In her Bloomberg report on that auction house’s … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2016-05-16
Cattle And Kenny Dorham
A cycling expedition this morning found me in cattle country. As I pulled over to enjoy the bucolic scene, who should pop into my mind but Kenny Dorham. A native Texan who spent considerably more … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2016-05-16
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Britflix And Chill
“It’s just a rumoured working title. It’ll be great. The government has given the go-ahead for the BBC to develop a subscription streaming service and it’s going to partner with ITV and loads of others to make it happen.”
Could Theatre Ever Unite Cities The Way Sports Do?
“Just as we need to widen and diversify the stories we tell on stage and who is telling them, so we need to do the same about conversations around theatre. Otherwise we are only ever talking to ourselves. Why do some people go to the theatre and why do so many people never go, thinking that it’s some kind of exclusive club that’s not for them?”
This Museum Is About To Open Its Beautiful New Building, Without A Single Exhibit
“The long-planned — and much-promoted — inaugural exhibit, ‘Never Part,’ highlighting artifacts of Palestinian refugees, has been suspended after a disagreement between the museum’s board and its director, which led to the director’s ouster.”
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s 87-Year-Old Bassist Collapses, Dies During Final Thirty Seconds Of Encore
Jane Little “debuted as a bassist in Atlanta on February 4, 1945, at the age of 16 and never stopped playing.” She was the world’s longest serving orchestra musician.
The Man Who Invented The Psychological Novel (He Was A Moralistic Prig)
“His self-serious moralizing and the ostentatiousness of his characters’ rectitude make Richardson difficult to embrace. Yet, unlike the more urbane and congenial Fielding, Richardson has a knack for psychological realism and an ability to craft characters whose clamorous inner lives continue, almost three centuries later, to feel real to us.”