“In interviews, mobile owners say they are trying to avoid the confines — and politics — of the gallery system; to help people think about art in different ways; or to reach more communities, especially those with young and old people who tend not to visit art districts.”
Creating Scotland In Miniature (Including Rocks And Mud) For Kenneth Branagh’s ‘Macbeth’
“Painter Richard Nutbourne hopped off a flight from England last week and headed straight to the New York’s Park Avenue Armory to check that the nearly two dozen giant artificial stones he had shipped over the ocean had arrived safely.”
San Diego Opera Names New Leader
“Only two weeks after severing ties with former director Ian Campbell and reversing its March vote to his plan and shut down the company, the board of the San Diego Opera has picked a new leader. William Mason, the highly respected former general director of the Lyric Opera of Chicago, is the opera’s new artistic adviser.”
What Those Cheekbones On Angelina Jolie In ‘Maleficent’ Mean
“So why choose to accentuate the zygomatics to transform a former Sexiest Woman in the World into a mystical villainess?” (They were prosthetics, by the way.)
The Newest Thing In Summer Festivals: The Classical Crossover
“One of the knee-jerk settings in collaborations like this is to have the orchestra do the big soupy chords, the sweeping string section. That to me is just window dressing. My intention is to bring an orchestra into contact with electronic music in order to make it do something provocative, aggressive.”
In Detroit, Creditors Demand Entire Art Collection
“The city’s bankruptcy managers have begun trying to place a value on the museum’s entire 66,000-piece collection. That’s quite an escalation from a previous appraisal of only about 1,700 works that the DIA had bought with city funds.”
Hay’s Indie Bookstores Are Dying As The Festival They Made Famous Thrives
“Hay is a market town, and it’s whatever the market will bear. At one time it was sheep, it was butter, it was cheese, it was books. And now maybe Hay is heading for the next thing, which could well be ideas.”
Is Digital Art Coming Of Age?
“Younger collectors don’t find these works intimidating. They relate to them on a generational level. The market is still nascent, but this is a direction contemporary art is going in.”
People Who Write About Technology Are Missing The Biggest Stories
“Even as we see technologies of a year or two ago decline, the tiniest shifts in the cool new thing merit microscopic dissection as though they will affect our great-grandchildren. If only we paid so much attention to climate change.”
The Perennial Question: How Can Musicians Do What They Love – And Still Make Money?
“With wedding music or random cocktail receptions, it is easy to offer rote performances and make an easy buck. But for the concerts that I’m sure most of us NewMusicBox musician fans love to perform—the concerts with music by living composers who have poured their energy and love into writing it—we can’t just phone it in. And we shouldn’t.”
Yale Gets A Big Donation For Poetry – And Opera
“The professorship comes with considerable leeway. The person selected can teach the poetry of any era, in English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Russian, ancient Greek or Latin.”
Um, It’s 2014. Why Are Theatres Still Doing Brownface, Yellowface, Redface, Blackface?
“If our media fail us and our school systems refuse to teach true American history, shouldn’t we as theater-makers do something about it? I write about these things to not be a downer, but to urge the theater community to make room for more stories.”
Libraries Have So Many Books – And Librarians Have To Toss Them
“At the heart of the [weeding] method is a formula consisting of three factors—the number of years since the last copyright, the number of years since the book was last checked out, and a collection of six negative factors given the acronym MUSTIE, to help decide if a book has outlived its usefulness.”
Dance Is Everywhere On TV, And (Basically) Nowhere In Kids’ Lives
“As humans we are compelled to create, to play, to love and to communicate through movement — after all, gesture was our first language. Dance gives us life and brings us joy and hope.”
After A Painting Gets Its Value Slashed, Australia Agrees To Return It In Nazi Restitution Case
“The gallery has now written to the sisters’ lawyer, Olaf Ossmann, to say it has established they are the rightful owners of the painting and released a statement explaining its decision.”
Struggling Shows Vie For Placement At The Tonys
“There is the public contest, where presenters hand out the trophies, packs of producers race for the microphone and creative types make teary speeches. And then there is the hidden one, perhaps more important, which involves jockeying for position in regards to which show comes out best on the televised broadcast.”
Director Ken Loach Says It’s Time To Fire The Movie Critics
“Loach has reiterated his belief that some critics find the idea of a politically informed working class ‘abhorrent.’ The reason, he told the Guardian, was that ‘by and large critics are people who live in darkened rooms – they don’t meet the people.'”
This Classical Trio *Wants* You To Fall Asleep At Performances (And Even Supplies The Pillows)
“Organisers said the success of the concert will be judged by how many people have fallen asleep by the end.”
Sam Greenlee, Whose Novel Inspired A Movie Disappeared By The FBI, Dies At 83
“The distributor, United Artists, never offered an explanation. Mr. Greenlee said that several theater owners had told him they were contacted by men who identified themselves as F.B.I. agents and ordered them to stop showing the film.”
Should The U.S. Lower The Legal Boom On Amazon?
“Somewhat perversely, until now, the closest encounter Amazon has had with antitrust authorities was when it successfully prodded them to bring a case against five major publishers and Apple. That fight, too, centered on the price of e-books.”
Wait, Who’s The Bully In The Amazon Vs. Hachette Standoff?
“No matter what you think of Amazon’s tactics, they surely don’t violate any laws. It is acting the way hardheaded companies usually act — inflicting some pain on the party in a dispute to move it toward resolution.”
The Whole Damn Amazon-Hachette Dispute Didn’t Even Need To Happen
“The publishing world that is speaking as one against Amazon is really made up of two principal factions: publishers and authors. Their interests are not identical, and authors should consider the possibility that the publishers have contributed to the difficult situation they now face. Literature could end up suffering for it.”
Keeping A Small, Indie Press Alive While The Publishing World Flails
“She was surrounded by aspiring novelists there and saw the kind of sweat and pain that can go into writing a novel. She witnessed how a promising new voice could blossom when given a little encouragement but also understood the tragedy of a good novel unpublished.”
Study: Ignoring Someone Might Be Worse Than Bullying Them
“As damaging as office bullies’ unwanted attention appears to be, however, a group of researchers believes they’ve found something even more harmful to workers: no attention at all.”
Dissonance – In The Eye Of The Beholder?
Discordant sounds are just one element of dissonance. One reason the term is elusive is that the concept is both subjective (“What is harmony to one ear, may be dissonance to another,” as the writer Joseph Addison put it in 1711) and contextual.