“Northern Italy has been pounded this summer by rain and thunderstorms. About 25 opera performances have been soaked … Determined to bring an end to this unpredictability, mayor Flavio Tosi says that he’s planning to launch an international competition to draw suggestions for how the massive architectural task should be accomplished.”
Who Are We? (And Other Fundamental Things That Define Us As Human)
“Why are we the only species on earth that is concerned about things that don’t directly concern our survival or that of our offspring? Porcupines do not look up at the night sky and wonder what all the sparkly bits are; weasels don’t worry about what other weasels think of them; lobsters really don’t enjoy pub quizzes.”
Conductor Daniel Harding Cops To Having Been “Obnoxious” When He Started His Career
“I had that attention when I was a very excitable, immature young man. And I look at my colleagues because now there are so many of us, of our generation, and I’m jealous of those who started later and have their great moment in the sun when they’re kind of grown up. I’m always going to be paying for the impression I created as an obnoxious 22-year-old.”
Norwegians Just Love Their Really Slow And Boring TV Shows
“The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation has been creating some of the world’s slowest TV – shows like a 7-hour train ride or 18 hours of salmon fishing. Norwegian audiences are loving it. (audio)
Univ. Of Maryland Revives Its Proposal To Rescue Corcoran Gallery
U.Md. president Wallace Loh testified in court that, if the judge should deny permission for the current plan to break up the Corcoran and divide it between the National Gallery of Art and George Washington University, “he would be willing to quickly revive a version of the $46 million Maryland partnership plan that the Corcoran rejected in February.”
What Rembrandt Found In The Rape Of Lucretia That Other Artists Missed
Philip Kennicott: “One [hand] resolutely grasps the dagger, the other is held open, in a pose of futile resistance. And they are very sturdy hands for a woman with a face as young as the Lucretia in this image. Rembrandt’s Lucretia kills herself with the hands of a man. Which makes visual the ugly truth of the story: Her suicide is a final act of male violence.”
Dance’s Top Crimes Of Passion
Inspired by summer heat, Sarah Kaufman selects four of the most compelling hot-headed murders in the dance repertory. (You know all the characters, though the choices may surprise – for instance, Kaufman passes over Martha Graham’s depiction of Medea.)
The Greatest Real-Life Adulterous Couple Ever To Inspire Works Of Art (I’ll Take “Doomed Lovers” for $600, Alex)
“[Dante] created such a compelling portrait of undying love that [they] went down in Western cultural history … They have inspired symphonic tone poems by Tchaikovsky and others, paintings by artists such as everyone from Botticelli to Ingres to Dante Gabriel Rosetti, no fewer than three sculptures by Rodin, including his famous The Kiss – and more than 18 operas.”
Sondheim OKs A Hard Rock Version Of “Sweeney Todd”
Washington, D.C.’s Landless Theatre Company managed to persuade the famously exacting composer to approve a prog-metal arrangement of the <em>Sweeney</em> score for electric guitar and keyboards, bass and drums. Auditions for this version were “not traditional in any sense.”
Publishers: We’ve Got A Wonderful New Site, And You’ll Provide Most Of The Content
“The new meaning of ‘to platform’ is something akin to: Take a traditional media company and add technology that allows readers to upload digital content as varied as links, text, video and other media.”
Bad News For Critics: Two-Thirds Of People Going To Theatre Don’t Read Reviews
On the other hand: “Of the 36% who do read reviews, around 80% said they accurately represent the performance, the research added.”
Claiming, And Naming, Harlem For James Baldwin On His 90th Birthday
“I want people to be interested in the courage of his life choices.”
Our Huge Income Gap Is Squeezing Out ‘Middlebrow’ Culture
“Middlebrow is a name you would never call yourself, but rather a semantic shoe that belongs on someone else’s foot. It is also, however, a workable synonym, in the sphere of art and culture, for democracy.”
Why Film And TV Suddenly Love Texas
“There’s urban and then there’s small town within three miles [of Austin]. Hill Country to the west, rolling prairie to the east. We’ve got the lakes; we’ve got the pine trees. You can look like you’ve been all over the country and not get 30 miles from Austin.” And then there are the tax credits.
For Some People, Music Means Nothing – No Emotions, No ‘Feels,’ Nothing
“Ask them to name a favorite band and the point is moot. They have carved no room into their lives for any music. The way someone might not feel a connection to movies, they feel toward a medium so fundamental to most societies that many believe it is part of what makes us human.”
Who (Aside From Ira Glass) Cares If Shakespeare Is ‘Relatable’?
“To demand that a work be ‘relatable’ expresses a different expectation: that the work itself be somehow accommodating to, or reflective of, the experience of the reader or viewer. The reader or viewer remains passive in the face of the book or movie or play: she expects the work to be done for her.”
Everything You Need To Know About Amazon Vs. Hachette
“The first half of 2014 has actually seen a 5.6 percent increase in [Hachette]’s US sales relative to last year. … Nonetheless, e-book sales have fallen, now making up 29 percent of adult book sales in the US versus 34 percent a year ago.”
Maria Abramovic Institute Has Some Words For People Concerned About Unpaid Interns
Many words – and no money: “We believe in the transformational power of immaterial art and multidisciplinary collaboration and we seek volunteers who feel the same way to join us to create a future for our Institute.”
Sharknado And Its Sequel Are Changing Television
“The movie generated what looks like 67.2 million Twitter impressions, with Syfy saying it is up to a billion. At one point, Sharknado 2 held all ten trending topics in the United States.”
Just Who Are The 15 Unions Negotiating Contracts With The Met Opera?
“About 2,400 of the Met’s 3,400 employees are union members. They cover a broad swath of activities ranging from singing in the chorus, playing in the orchestra, dancing, painting sets, running the box office, singing solo roles, working in the call center, posting bills (advertising posters), running cameras and taking tickets.”
Newly-Released James Joyce Letter Reveals How Press Hounded Writer
The letter, which belongs to the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, shows how reporters went to great lengths to discover details of the ceremony Joyce had tried to keep a secret. The author told his son that anyone who thinks he married as “a publicity stunt he must be a congenital imbecile”.
So This Is PBS’s Idea Of Arts In America?
“Is PBS unaware that there’s more to art in America than Kristin Chenoweth, Melissa Etheridge and Michael Feinstein? Or does it simply not care? I hate to have to ask that question yet again, but not knowing the answer troubles me even more—and I suspect it’s also troubling at least some of the people who write the checks that keep PBS afloat. If it isn’t, it should.”
The Latest Classical-Pop Crossover Is The Worst Yet
It’s a “breathtakingly crass, spectacularly point-missing wave of pop-classical crossover. It makes one fantasise about re-education camps for the compulsory internment of whoever’s listening to this brazenly misguided bilge.”
Met Opera Debacle – It’s About Leadership
Peter Gelb is “right that opera in its current form is not sustainable — something of a given in a field that has literally no independent commercial viability, relies entirely on donations, can’t hope for significant European-style government funding in this country, and is paying hundreds of people very large salaries. The unions are also right that the problem is partly artistic.”
How Sotheby’s And Christie’s Locate New People To Spend Massive Sums Of Money On Art
“If you’re even remotely curious about starting a blue-chip art collection, there’s a good chance the world’s biggest auction houses already know who you are, and exactly how much you might spend to own a masterpiece. … They’ve dispatched armies of experts to identify potential bigwigs, and satisfy their ever-expanding art whims.”