Houston native Rebecca Rabinow, currently curator-in-charge of the [Met Museum’s] new Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, takes up her new position in July.
Megachurch Architecture Is Unusually Bad, But It Doesn’t Have To Be
“Most megachurches are located outside city centers, camouflaged into suburban sprawlscapes. Their architecture often mimics that of warehouses, shopping malls, or dome-shaped stadiums. Sometimes, the only thing distinguishing a megachurch from a defunct K-Mart is a spindly cross on its facade.”
Brooklyn Museum To Cut Staff
“The Brooklyn Museum is offering voluntary buyouts to address a budget deficit of about $3 million, the museum’s director, Anne Pasternak, informed the staff on Wednesday. ‘It’s a course correction,’ Ms. Pasternak said in a telephone interview.”
Making Stephen King’s ‘The Shining’ Into An Opera
Minnesota Opera prop master Jenn Maatman: “One of the big things about the movie that was wrong, as far as King is concerned, is that Jack used an ax. In the book it was a croquet mallet. I think that’s really fabulous.”
‘The Exorcist’ Director Says Church Let Him Film An Actual Exorcism
William Friedkin “said he was taken aback at how close the ceremony was to the exorcism depicted in his 1973 film. ‘I was pretty astonished by that. I don’t think I will ever be the same having seen this astonishing thing.'”
The New Tate Modern Director’s Plan For The New (Well, Expanded) Tate Modern
“The collection was originally built according to a dominant art history which we are very familiar with, but the real story is a much bigger one, because that dominant story left out a lot of places and a lot of practices and a lot of women artists. We haven’t rewritten the history but we are asking questions about the history and plotting co-ordinates. It’s a bigger story.”
Lorraine Hansberry’s (Too Short) Life After ‘Raisin In The Sun’
“You can’t say it’s a shame to be remembered for A Raisin in the Sun. It’s one of the great American plays. But Lorraine Hansberry was so much more than that one play.”
Apparently, The World Can Thank (Or Blame) Canada For ‘Angry Birds’
“More than three years of dedicated devotion to The Angry Birds Movie is finally reaping rewards.” Thanks, Canada?
The Most Exciting New Music In East Asia Is Written For Chinese Instruments
“In most cases, these instruments’ histories are even older than most contemporary Western instruments. For example, the ‘xiao’ (a vertical end-blown flute) and ‘dizi’ (a traverse—e.g. horizontal—side-blown flute) both have histories and performance practices that date back thousands of years.”
A Requiem For A Dancer Who Died Too Young Returns To The Stage
“Just before he turned 19, he tested positive for HIV, and his dance, ‘Lacrymosa,’ became a reaction to the 1980s AIDS crisis. Many dancers and artists around Stierle were dying from the disease, and as he worked on the ballet, he knew he would become sick too.”
You Know Portland People Like Tattoos, But Check Out These Temporary Tattoo Artists Of Social Change
“Tattoos can heal people and offer a release, both mentally and physically, for pain and processing for whatever ails ya. They can be very healing.”
Colorism – Why America Still Has Trouble Talking About It
“In a 1983 essay, the writer Alice Walker coined the word to explain ‘prejudicial or preferential treatment of same-race people based solely on their color.’ Simply: lighter is better. … Yet even as terms like ‘yellowface’ and ‘whitewash’ sink into our cultural vocabulary, there remains confusion on basic matters of colorism.”
What ‘The Good Wife’ Was Really About
Joshua Rothman: “The Good Wife has never just been a show about power; it has also been about knowledge and the ways it can change an argument, a court case, a life. … Alicia’s insistence upon the truth (for, it must be said, her own practical ends) was part of a larger debate, staged in the final episode, about the question ‘How much do you want to know?'”
‘Unethical Amnesia’ – How We Conveniently Forget The Times We’ve Behaved Badly
“We hold ourselves to be moral agents in the world, so evidence of wrongdoing creates all sorts of dissonance between our ideas about ourselves and our actual behavior. The unethical amnesia acts like an ‘adaptive defensive behavior,’ helping our egos sidestep unpleasant truths.”
Miró Etchings Auctioned By Grandson To Benefit Syrian Refugees
Joan Punyet Miró: “My grandfather would have done the same thing. He always wanted to help the most disadvantaged, the refugees and those in exile, and would be aware that what is happening today in Syria could happen tomorrow in Spain.”
Artists In Brazil Protest New President’s Dissolution Of Culture Ministry
There have been demonstrations this week at several cultural landmarks in Rio de Janeiro, and “thousands of others have congregated at cultural institutions in the past week, most directly associated with the Ministry of Culture, in Brasília, Curitiba, Belo Horizonte, Salvador, Fortaleza, and other cities.”
An Email Conversation With Elena Ferrante
“The idea that every ‘I’ is largely made up of others and by the others wasn’t theoretical [in Naples]; it was a reality. To be alive meant to collide continually with the existence of others and to be collided with … The dead were brought into quarrels; people weren’t content to attack and insult the living – they naturally abused aunts, cousins, grandparents, and great-grandparents who were no longer in the world.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 05.19.16
My concert, at last online
I’ll interrupt my posts about the DC Ring, and some of its implications for the future of classical music. Because I want to tell you something special for me — that video of my April … read more
AJBlog: Sandow Published 2016-05-19
So you want to see a show?
Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. … read more
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2016-05-19
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Ai Weiwei, Who Has Been Spending Time With Refugees, Says The EU’s Stance Is Immoral
“Speaking in Athens, where the works are going on public display for the first time from Friday, Ai said that although he had seen and experienced extreme and violent conditions in China, he ‘could never have imagined conditions like this’.”
Morley Safer Of ’60 Minutes’ Dead At 84
“To an earlier generation of Americans, and to many colleagues and competitors, he was regarded as the best television journalist of the Vietnam era, an adventurer whose vivid reports exposed the nation to the hard realities of what the writer Michael J. Arlen, in the title of his 1969 book, called ‘The Living Room War.'”
The Subterranean Sound Chamber Meant To Host An Invisible Orchestra
“When layers of paint and cracked and peeling render were stripped in a £6m repair project on the terrace, intricate brickwork and hidden funnels in the ceiling were revealed.”
The World Of The Hugo Awards Keeps Getting Weirder And Weirder
“The presence of the author behind titles such as Helicopter Man Pounds Dinosaur Billionaire Ass and My Ass Is Haunted By the Gay Unicorn Colonel does somewhat detract from the grand stature of the Hugos.”
Kids Learn Through Movement, Including Dance, So Why Do We Limit Them To Desks?
“Research has shown time and again that children need opportunities to move in class. Memory and movement are linked, and the body is a tool of learning, not a roadblock to or a detour away from it.”
‘A Twisty Tale Of Mayhem And Allegorical Ridiculousness’ – 20 Years Of Pig Iron Theatre Company
Co-founder Dito van Reigersberg says the company was “super-not-built-to-last, which is maybe why it did. The three of us were really interested in working together on projects, not in creating an institution, so we fashioned just enough infrastructure to support the plays we wanted to make – an impulse that kept us pretty scrappy.”
Protestors Over BP Sponsorship Temporarily Close British Museum
“Greenpeace said it was targeting the oil company’s sponsorship of the Sunken Cities exhibition, and called on the museum to end the partnership. The protest today follows two on Tuesday at the museum’s Great Court by the group BP or not BP, which campaigns against fossil fuel sponsorship of the arts.”