“Initially founded in 1974 as organization providing dance classes, Hubbard Street evolved in 1977 to include a troupe of professional dancers under founder Lou Conte. … The growth of the dance organization has prompted the board to seek possible alternatives to the 53,000-square-foot facility where Hubbard Street Dance is now based.”
Scholarly Writing Is Supposed To Be Precise. But Can’t It Also Be Interesting?
“Shouldn’t there be ways of improving academic writing without sacrificing scholarly credibility? Journalists, essayists, and even memoirists make use of academic research all the time to bolster their prose. Why couldn’t scholars steal some literary techniques from them?”
Creativity Is Not What A Lot Of People Think It Is
“There’s a critical misunderstanding of the over-used C word. The first thing most of us think of when we hear that someone is creative is: artist, poet, musician, or entrepreneur. That’s not to say that creative people don’t fall into those categories, but what I’m suggesting is that creativity is a state of mind rather than a set of skills in a particular area.”
Read Gustavo Dudamel’s Keynote At The National Medal Of Arts Ceremony
“Some people think that art is a luxury and must be cut back in times of crisis. These people must understand that precisely during times of crisis the unforgivable sin is to cut access to art. In my beloved home of Venezuela such a crisis is happening right now. People are spending their days looking for food, medicine and the necessities of life. The same arguments exist — how can we fund music — the arts — when basic needs are not being met?”
Funding Turns Towards Creative Placemaking Experiments
“High-profile funders, be it the NEA, Kresge, Surdna, Knight, and ArtPlace America—just to name a few—agree that, much like the cultivation of wheat, creative placemaking is an art and a science. Trial and error is to be expected. And the larger the body of literature gets around getting creative placemaking right, the better off we’ll all be.”
Critic Jonathan Jones And Artist Grayson Perry Duke It Out In A War Of Words
“Grayson Perry is what happens when art becomes a pseudo intellectual entertainment for a world that is too busy to look and too distracted to feel: an artist for people who can’t be bothered with art. Now put that on a pot.”
Data: Is The Art Market Racially Biased?
“To find out how African American artists fare at auction, we take a look at data from the last 30 years, focusing on American artists born after 1955. For this analysis, rather than individual prices, we focus on auction volume (the total of their sales in a given year), which offers a broader reflection of the appetite for artists’ work.”
Washington’s National Gallery Unveils A Spruced-up East Building
“Although the improved East Building wasn’t exactly swamped its debut weekend, oddly angled tower rooms make sharing the space with culturally curious strangers a strenuous exercise in loving one’s fellow man.”
Salvador Dalí’s Surrealist Cookbook Is Back
“Dalí’s lavish and erotic cookbook Les Diners de Gala was first published in 1973, featuring 136 recipes compiled by the painter and his wife Gala. Divided into 12 chapters with titles such as ‘Prime Lilliputian malaises’ (meat) and ‘Deoxyribonucleic Atavism’ (vegetables), the book also features sumptuous Dalí illustrations and photographs of the painter posing alongside tables loaded with a banquet’s worth of food.”
‘Delicacy And Violence, Danger And Control’ – A History Of The Choker
“The choker is, on the one hand, simply one more way that the current culture has been looking back nostalgically to the ’90s. But they evoke much more than ’90s grunge: Chokers were common across ancient cultures, and cycled in and out of style during the most recent centuries in the West – prized for their ability both to conceal the neck and to highlight it. Today they most readily suggest the romantic (and the Romantic). But they also carry a note, visually slicing as they do across the most vulnerable part of the human body, of violence. And, with it, control.”
The Man Who Invented The Modern Bookselling Business
“Today, few people are likely to remember James Lackington (1746-1815) and his once-famous London bookshop, The Temple of the Muses, but if, as a customer, you’ve ever bought a remaindered book at deep discount, or wandered thoughtfully through the over-stocked shelves of a cavernous bookstore, or spent an afternoon lounging in the reading area of a bookshop (without buying anything!) then you’ve already experienced some of the ways that Lackington revolutionized bookselling in the late 18th century.”
Lost Film From 1904 Turns Up In Prague
“Researchers at the Czech national film archives said Tuesday they had found a film by early cinema pioneer Georges Méliès that was thought to have been lost forever. The silent two-minute Match de prestidigitation (‘Conjuring contest’), dating from 1904, was found on a reel given to the archives by an anonymous donor, labelled as another film.”
Study: Reading Literature Can Bridge Political Divide
The linguist Roman Jakobson once contrasted political conventions with literary ones: the problem with political conventions, he said, is that they encourage people to “mindlessly agree” with slogans, which in turn, create unnecessary antagonism between different groups of people. Literary conventions, on the other hand, where individuals get together to read and talk about books, were different.”
Cameron Mackintosh: Weakened Pound Sterling Is Boosting West End Theatre Ticket Sales
He highlighted how surprised he was to see so many people in the West End on a Monday night, and added: “It’s the best September I can remember across my theatres.”
The Complicated And Colorful “Father Of Dance” In Canada
“So how did ballet come to Canada? Like so much else, it arrived in waves, beginning with ambitious 17th-century colonists who brought European culture to the shores of North America in the form of dance lessons for indulged children. Only in the early 20th century did professional ballet training begin; pioneers of Canadian ballet such as Ottawa’s Gwendolen Osborne brought their tradition and training to students who could manage almost perfect 180-degree turnout. The country’s first major choreographers then looted indigenous cultures in search of something saleable.”
Was It More Than A Bad Back That Led La Scala Ballet’s Director To Resign?
One of Italy’s leading dailies is reporting that the company dancers’ public rebellion against Mauro Bigonzetti’s repertoire choices did indeed figure in his resignation last week – and that, while his back troubles were a deciding factor, the concern wasn’t solely about Bigonzetti’s own well-being.
Violinist Daniel Hope Named ‘Artistic Partner’ At San Francisco’s New Century Chamber Orchestra
“Ever since the announcement by New Century Chamber Orchestra that its music director will leave at the end of the current season, the organization has been faced with Mission Impossible: replacing the irrepressible and – not to mince words – irreplaceable Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. And yet, the news today is of success.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 10.11.16
Keep It Simple
In speeches, presentations, and workshops, I frequently get to the Q&A session and find myself faced with not a few perplexed expressions. In general, people understand the importance of community engagement. However, staff members … read more
AJBlog: Engaging Matters Published 2016-10-11
Picasso and the Perfectly Bearable Likeness of Being
Picasso was, of course, a great and natural draughtsman. Even as a child he had a fluent and steady line, and was capable … read more
AJBlog: Plain English Published 2016-10-11
[ssba_hide]
Does The Nobel Committee Have A Bias Against American Writers?
“While the Nobel committee has yet to set a date for any announcement for a literature prize this year (they’ve skipped a few years previously), it does seem unlikely that phones will ring in the homes of Joyce Carol Oates, Don DeLillo, or any other U.S. author.”
Are We All Living In A Giant Simulation? (Don’t Scoff Just Yet!)
“If one progresses at the current rate of technology a few decades into the future, very quickly we will be a society where there are artificial entities living in simulations that are much more abundant than human beings.”
Yale Rep Celebrates 50 Years – As Its Founder Worries
“Leave it to Robert Brustein, the outspoken founding director of Yale Repertory Theater, to raise tough questions at a celebration of the theater’s 50th anniversary this weekend. … At a celebratory banquet, he worried out loud about whether nonprofit theaters like Yale’s were straying from their original mission.”