“Always at the forefront in plastic and sculptural movements, Kosice was the first artist to ever use water and neon gas as part of an artwork in 1946. … Among his most impressive pieces, Kosice was the creator of hydraulic sculptures which used water and light as their fundamental elements.”
Using Graphic Design To Guide Concertgoers Who Don’t Read Music Through An Orchestral Work
“The Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s ‘listening guides’ make use of symbols and Morse code-like notation to aid the experience of a live performance. We talked to their creator, Hannah Chan-Hartley, about how she is helping the TSO to visualise its repertoire.”
The Paris Bridge Once Covered In Locks Is Now Covered With New Sculpture
“For years, lovestruck visitors to Paris had affixed locks, often inscribed with their initials or names, to the wire mesh panels along the Pont des Arts, flinging the keys into the Seine River below. But last year, after a section of the bridge’s railing collapsed under the weight of some 700,000 declarations of fidelity, the city removed the locks, citing reasons of aesthetics and security.” Now, though, the bridge really is a pont des arts.
What Is Awe, Exactly? Psychologists Try To Figure It Out
“First, what is it? And, second, is there a way to use its emotional power in other contexts?”
Bronx Museum Of Arts Plans Expansion And First-Ever Endowment Campaign
“The Bronx Museum of the Arts, whose attendance has quadrupled since it instituted free admission in 2012, announced Wednesday that it had started a $25 million capital campaign to renovate and expand its building along the Grand Concourse and to establish an endowment for the first time.”
Years Later We’re Still Debating What Shostakovich Meant
“What Shostakovich’s music had to do with history has been one of the most fraught questions in the history of music. He lived through the most terrifying decades of the Soviet Union to become its most celebrated composer.”
To Boycott Or Not To Boycott? Considering How Artists Should Respond To North Carolina’s House Bill 2
“An established artist in high demand will likely make a much bigger impact by canceling than a lesser-known artist would, so the payoff for the risk is much greater in terms of awareness. And an established artist has more leverage – both with the public and with administrators, agents, and venues – because he can draw on decades of goodwill.”
Arts Orgs And Artists Help Flint, Mich. Deal With Its Water Crisis
“From documentaries to spoken-word performances, from urban revitalization actions to conventional gallery shows, they serve diverse ends that include raising political awareness, assuaging grief, anticipating long-term educational needs, and encouraging the resumption, as much as possible, of everyday life. Because normalcy, even when it’s far from easy, is a way of coping with crisis.”
The Louvre’s Pyramid Has Disappeared
“JR, best known for mounting women’s portraits onto building facades in a Brazilian favela and his Inside Out global art project, had a specific idea in mind: to combat the selfie ‘phenomenon’ of tourists snapping themselves in front of the Louvre without really observing its architecture.”
Forty-Five Years With The National Symphony Orchestra (A Lot Has Changed)
“Copland was pretty good. He eschewed the modern fast tempos and loud playing. He’d say to the brass, ‘Noble, gentlemen, noble. I don’t understand why everyone takes this so fast.'”
These Chicago Ballerinas Mixed Ballet And HipHop And Millions Are Watching
“After Frostine Shake proved that ballet should welcome all body types, a new group of young women are getting loads of love online for showcasing an entirely new form of dance, mixing ballet with hip-hop.”
How A 17-Year-Old Started Her Own Dance Company
“I always enjoyed teaching, but a part of me wanted more. I wanted to be my own boss, to train the students differently, participate in competitions and create a family environment for every class. I wanted to have my own dance company. I learned how during my Grade 11 co-op placement at Kinetic Fitness.”
Should You Be Afraid Of Artificial Intelligence?
“What happens to life when AI is everywhere? It promises to dissolve into the background, like the best technology does, automating tasks and maybe telling us a quip or two along the way. But at least now you can throw your phone into a lake. AI won’t offer that kind of escape; it will just be waiting for you when you get home.”
‘What Was Needed Was Not More Communism But More Public-Spirited Pigs’ – When Editor T.S. Eliot Rejected ‘Animal Farm’
“We agree that it is a distinguished piece of writing; that the fable is very skilfully handled, and that the narrative keeps one’s interest on its own plane – and that is something very few authors have achieved since Gulliver. … On the other hand, we have no conviction … that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time.”
British Library Opens Its 20th-Century Lit Website With 300 Never-Before-Seen Documents
Among the goodies now on view: “Virginia Woolf’s manuscript draft of Mrs Dalloway and an early travel notebook in which she begins to explore her ‘stream of consciousness’ technique; George Orwell’s notebook in which he lists ideas for what would become Nineteen Eighty-Four, including ‘newspeak’, ‘doublethink’ and ‘two minutes of hate’; [and] a letter from TS Eliot declining to publish George Orwell’s Animal Farm.”
Seiji Ozawa Cancels His Tanglewood Concerts, Citing Poor Health
“The former Boston Symphony Orchestra music director” – now 80 and a survivor of esophageal cancer – “had been scheduled to conduct the ensemble for the first time since 2008, but doctors have now recommended otherwise.”
‘What A Waste’ – How One Barely Provocative Email Got Two Yale Professors Hounded Out Of Their Residential Positions
Conor Friedersdorf revisits what befell Nicholas and Erika Christakis last fall when she suggested that students could advocate for themselves when they found someone’s Halloween costume offensive rather than demanding that the college police how students dress up.
Researchers Are Teaching Robots To ‘Feel Pain’ With An Artificial Nervous System
The researchers … are developing a system that would allow a robot to ‘be able to detect and classify unforeseen physical states and disturbances, rate the potential damage they may cause to it and initiate appropriate countermeasures, ie reflexes’, they explained. Just as human neurons transmit pain, the artificial ones will pass on information that can be classified by the robot as either light, moderate or severe pain.”
‘Creating A New Canon’ Of Latino Theater
The Sol Project “plans to partner with 12 Off Broadway companies to produce one play per season. So far six companies have been announced: New Georges, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, the Public Theater, Labyrinth Theater Company, Atlantic Theater Company and Women’s Project Theater.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 05.26.16
The Tosca effect
Implausible things in opera staging, things any TV show gets right, things that can mar even opera productions that, overall, are quite good — that was the subject of my previous post. This weakens us, … read more
AJBlog: Sandow Published 2016-05-26
Speaking of Politics: ‘A Study in Depravity’
Pamphleteering in England goes back nearly 300 years, represented most famously by such 18th-century polemecists as Henry Fielding and Daniel Defoe, and in America by the British-born Thomas Paine. Even the poet John Milton was … read more
AJBlog: Straight|Up Published 2016-05-26
An Analytical Cornucopia, Wanted or Not
Over the last eleven years, I’ve given at least seventeen keynote addresses and conference papers, and in recent weeks I’ve managed to post all but two of them … read more
AJBlog: PostClassic Published 2016-05-26
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Does Shakespeare Have Anything To Teach Us About Donald Trump?
“If even Marshall McLuhan, the 20th century expert on the merging of media and politics, would require a crash course in Twitter, Facebook and “The Apprentice,” how could we expect Shakespeare to shed light on this reality TV star turned standard-bearer of the GOP?”
Dublin Is Losing Its Artists. Here’s Why
“Dublin is again renewing a chronic pattern of hemorrhaging its artists. Many of Irelands most important artists – Dorothy Cross, Alice Maher, or James Coleman – have born the brunt of the Dublin property market, lost their studios, and subsequently moved out. Very few established artists remain here. And right now the sense is that, just as my own generation are attempting to consolidate firm working arrangements in the city, we are being forced out too.”
Sydney Theatre Company Director Quits After Just 9 Months On The Job
Jonathan Church “has stepped down from the post in Sydney, stating that he had not been able to do the role alongside his other ventures. The outgoing Chichester Festival Theatre had already announced his own production company, Jonathan Church Productions. Earlier this week, the company announced its first production.”
Asian-American Actors Speak Out About “Whitewashing” In Hollywood
“The mainstream Hollywood thinking still seems to be that movies and stories about straight white people are universal, and that anyone else is more niche. It’s just not true. I’ve been watching characters with middle-age white-guy problems since I was a small Indian boy.”
The Redemption Of David Hume
“In 2009, he won first place in a large international poll of professors and graduate students who were asked to name the dead thinker with whom they most identified. … This is quite a reversal of fortune for Hume, who failed in both of his attempts to get an academic job. In his own day, and into the nineteenth century, his philosophical writings were generally seen as perverse and destructive.”