That’s pretty much the tenor of this essay by Rob Buscher, Festival Director of the Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival, on the blog of Opera Philadelphia, which just completed a run of Puccini’s final work.
Fine, Let’s Talk About Sombreros And Lionel Shriver
Francine Prose: “Like much of Shriver’s talk, this paragraph contains a kernel of truth encased by a husk of cultural and historical blindness. It seems clear that one part of the fiction writer’s job is ‘to step into other people’s shoes.’ But to paraphrase Freud, sometimes a hat is more than just a hat. Sometimes it is a symbol—and a racist one, at that.”
TV – Even Peak TV – Does Not Work In A Film Festival
“Frankly, it felt weird to be watching TV at a film festival. A movie is a closed loop: it begins and an hour and a half or two or three hours later, it ends.”
The Trouble With Sombreros At Tequila Parties: Francine Prose On Lionel Shriver’s Cultural Appropriation Speech
“The topic is a complicated and sensitive one, and Shriver’s first mistake, I think, was to ignore that complexity and sensitivity by adopting a tone that ranged from jauntiness to mockery and contempt. … To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a hat is more than just a hat.”
Professional Byzantine Chant (!) Choir In Oregon (!) Has Thrived For 20 Years
“[Cappella Romana], the Portland-based vocal ensemble, which performs annual concert series in its hometown and Seattle, has released more than 20 recordings. Its tours have brought the group’s sometimes ethereal, sometimes austere, always powerfully moving music to venues such as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles’ Getty Center, the Smithsonian Institution, Stanford and Yale universities and festivals throughout Europe.”
Banksy Painting In Liverpool Parkng Lot Is Taken Away To Museum
“The work, dubbed the Love Plane, was painted in 2011 and showed a biplane leaving a heart-shaped trail behind it. The plane has now been removed from the wall of the outdoor car park on Rumford Street – but the heart has remained. The plane will be displayed alongside other Banksy works from Liverpool in an indoor gallery specialising in street art in the city’s Baltic Triangle.”
$150 Million For “Stairs To Nowhere?” What Are They Thinking?
“The whole eyesore would almost be acceptable, in a humorous, nihilistic kind of way, if we didn’t know just how much money was going down the drain on this. To repeat, it will be a full $150 million—or $200 million if you factor in the money going toward the surrounding park. (Given Heatherwick’s apparent penchant for cost overruns, who knows just how high that price will soar, though?) This project comes about at a time when many of New York’s largest museums have been struggling financially.”
Rethinking The Permanent Collection – The Politics Of How Museums Are Rehanging
Several major museums have rehung their permanent collections in the past year, looking for alternative versions of the stories they tell. “The inclusion of such works, rescued from deep storage—if they were even collected at all—serves as an important historical corrective, giving certain artists a belated recognition and blurring the familiar borders of canonical movements.”
He Changed The Theatre, And He Changed America: Tracy Letts Remembers Edward Albee
Writes the playwright of August, Osage County and Killer Joe, also the actor who won a Tony for playing George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, “His plays not only altered the trajectory of world theatre; their impact is felt beyond the scope of arts and letters. He affected attitudes about race, sex, class, marriage, family, addiction, illness, death. He helped shape the postwar American character. He partly defined the postwar American sense of humor.”
Live By The Movie Ratings, Die By The Movie Ratings
The Motion Picture Association of America rates movies – G, R, M-18, etc. But “power creates its own temptation. MPAA itself has been accused of rating independent films more harshly than those produced by MPAA’s own member studios. And this year, a class action lawsuit seeks to force MPAA to use its ratings system to eliminate tobacco imagery from children’s films.”
R-Rated Opera (Seriously): Alt-Classical Stars Adapt Lars Von Trier’s ‘Breaking The Waves’
“‘Would you go to R-rated things as a grown-up? Of course you would,’ said Opera Philadelphia general director David Devan. ‘We’re making disclaimers. We’re telling people there is nudity and stylized violence. … We did talk to the cast. … To do the job you have to be prepared to be nude for certain portions.'” Says soprano Keira Duffy, “There are moments when I’m thinking, ‘What is my Irish Catholic family going be thinking in certain scenes?'”
Embarrassed Egyptian Government Bans Unauthorized Public Sculptures
A cabinet official who asked to remain anonymous said Wednesday’s decision came after “the repeated setting up in the country’s squares of bad statues that do not conform with Egypt’s deep-rooted history”. The controversial statue of a soldier hugging a woman from behind in Sohag’s town of Balyana was the latest in a series of statues that have become a laughingstock on social media.
Celebrity Art Explained: How The Mona Lisa Got To Be A Superstar
Eighty percent of visitors to the Louvre go just to see the Mona Lisa. But is it really THAT much better than all the other art? Herein a cynic’s explanation for why Lisa gets all the attention.
The Compleat MoMA Online – An “Exhibition Of Ghosts Created By Ghosts”
The Museum of Modern Art puts records of every exhibition it has ever presented online. These photos of paintings hanging in galleries are erie, writes Robinson Meyer, and they say a lot about what curators of the day were thinking about how to look at art. How “modern” of them..
Could This Really Be True? In The Gig Economy Jazz Instructors Can Make More Than Lawyers
“FlexJobs came up with a list of 10 of the best-paying part-time jobs based on real job listings from over 40,000 companies… For instance, you stand to make more money as a part-time jazz instructor than you can as a government contracts attorney. Part time clinical pharmacists make almost as much as part-time dentists.”
Eight Diversity Takeaways From The 2016 Emmys
“Last night, as Rami Malek, Courtney B. Vance, Regina King, and Sterling K. Brown all won major acting awards, Alan Yang and Aziz Ansari picked up recognition for their writing, and Key & Peele won for Outstanding Variety Sketch Series, the inclusiveness of the ceremony really did seem worth celebrating. But how diverse were this year’s winners, really? And how did they compare to years before?”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 09.19.16
What Neuroscientists Know About The Brain And Creativity: It’s Disruptive, Not Systematic
It appears many of us want a formula for creativity. There are 11,386 books on creativity for sale on Amazon, most of them promising to unlock the secrets of being creative. Scientists studying how the brain works are … read more
AJBlog: diacritical/Douglas McLennanPublished 2016-09-19
Kraftwerk at the Hollywood Bowl
Krautrock has rarely been my cup of ale … But I’ve heard so many good things about the shows Kraftwerk — who all but invented the genre, and scored its first big U.S. hit with “Autobahn” — performed at Disney Hall a few years ago, that their Bowl show was hard to pass up. … read more
AJBlog: CultureCrash Published 2016-09-19
‘Street Gangs of the Lower East Side’
It’s rare that the tireless staff of thousands agrees to post a guest review. But there are exceptions. … read more
AJBlog: Straight|Up Published 2016-09-19
Interim
In 2003-04, I served as Interim Dean at the North Carolina School of the Arts. It was quite an education, an introduction to the niceties and nastiness of arts administration. … read more
AJBlog: Infinite Curves Published 2016-09-19
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The Latest Hotel Amenity? Artists In Residence
“As hotels work harder to distinguish themselves in the age of Airbnb, many have focused on using local art to give their décor a one-of-a-kind look. But with artist-in-residence programs, some hotels in the United States and abroad are going further, aiming to make the art experience even more immersive for guests.”
Andrew Sullivan: My Life Online Nearly Killed Me
“By the last few months, I realized I had been engaging — like most addicts — in a form of denial. I’d long treated my online life as a supplement to my real life, an add-on, as it were. Yes, I spent many hours communicating with others as a disembodied voice, but my real life and body were still here. But then I began to realize, as my health and happiness deteriorated, that this was not a both-and kind of situation. It was either-or. “
How My Jazz Track “Accidently” Got 2 Million Plays
“Enter stage left the “Spotify playlist”. Though I far from realised it at the time, this is the holy grail for independent artists such as myself. Overnight I was lifted out of the musty basement section where men with National Health spectacles hang out, and up on to the shiny new rack next to the checkout counter.”
How’s That Art Flipping Strategy Going, Then?
Not well. “Such is the new art season. At auction houses in London and New York, sellers are preparing to bail on their investments after the emerging-art bubble burst and the resale market for once sought-after artists dried up.”
Even The BBC Wants To Be ‘The Netflix Of’ Something (In This Case, Music Radio)
“Radio needs to take a leaf out of the hugely successful US streaming service’s book by making content available to listeners when they want it and not tie all output to the broadcast schedule.”
After A Theatre Cancels A Black Lives Matter Benefit, Actors And Playwrights Protest
“Earlier this month, the owners of 54 Below decided to cancel the concert, set for Sept. 11, titled ‘Broadway Supports Black Lives Matter,’ saying in a statement that they supported the Black Lives Matter movement but disagreed with a ‘platform that accuses Israel of genocide and endorses a range of boycott and sanction actions.'”
The Violinist Speaks Of Musical Guilty Pleasures, And Three Ways To Improve Classical Concerts
Tamsin Waley-Cohen: “Most of all, I would take them out of the modern concert hall (I often find older halls are better for this!) to get rid of the separation between the performer and the audience.”
The Color Of Liberty
“As might be expected, when the Statue of Liberty turned green people in positions of authority wondered what to do.”