National Museum Cardiff has put on display a painting of a Madonna and child that had for decades been dismissed as a crude copy of Botticelli’s style. Ironically, it had been thought a Botticelli by the collector, Gwendoline Davies, who bequeathed it in 1952. Experts soon began to doubt that and downgraded it to the status of copy. – The Guardian
We Are Our Memories, Right? So When We Get Dementia…
Of course, people with dementia experience significant changes in their self-concept, self-knowledge, social relationships, perception of their own capacity, and even their physical appearance. Yet the essence of the person endures. Recognising this has important implications for approaches to care. – Aeon
Using Aroma As A Stage Effect
“From at least the late 19th century, when David Belasco had actors cook and brew coffee on stage to heighten the realism of domestic scenes, to recent efforts to evoke a piney forest or the tang of gunpowder, directors have tried to involve an audience’s olfactory sense to intensify their experience. In his screen-to-stage adaptation of John Cassavetes’s 1977 film, Opening Night, Cyril Teste — the French director known for his ‘filmic performance’ technique that uses real-time video, live acting, music, and some audience participation — has added scent to the storytelling of this play within a play.” – Hyperallergic
Urban Dictionary Has Become A Research Tool, A Legal Resource, And Sometimes Even A Style Arbiter
Writer Christine Ro gives an overview of the ways the crowdsourced slang dictionary, now 20 years old (ancient in internet terms), is being used by (among others) linguists and sociologists, state DMVs, and attorneys and judges. (Then there was the time IBM tried using Urban Dictionary as a data set to feed the famous AI computer Watson.) – JSTOR Daily
Next-Gen Critics?
“I think a big part of the role of a critic is being somebody who holds artists accountable as well. When you are an artist and you’re presenting a work of art to your community, you know that you’re held accountable to your audience, no matter what your intentions were with putting out that piece. Artists can go out there and make whatever they want and say whatever they want, but its meaning is going to be received, and that merits a response.” – Howlround
How Gentrification Squeezes Out Culture
Capitalism has its own rhythm, but also its own specific geography. Urban space is profoundly transformed by financial capitalism. Urban spaces are becoming expensive, and the closure of cultural spaces is, metaphorically and by extension, a reduction in the space for ideas and expression. – The Conversation
Should We Worry About Knowing The Social Class Of Our Audiences?
“As long as we continue to make vague generalisations about the social background of our audiences and users, we further the conditions in which a culturally entitled minority can continue to benefit from the majority of publicly supported arts and heritage.” – Arts Professional
Root Of All Music: The Marginalized Fringe
Ted Gioia argues that that is music’s basic pattern throughout history – for symphonic music, church music, operas, chamber music, atonalism, you name it. No matter how disciplined, codified and venerated the music may be now, it always started on the fringe, rooted in sex, blood and altered states. – Art & Seek
She Gave Up On A Pro Basketball Career To Sing Opera. Now She’s One Of The Met’s Next Stars
In younger days, J’Nai Bridges, who’s been getting terrific reviews for her house debut as Nefertiti in Philip Glass’s Akhnaten, really was a championship-level basketball player back home in Washington state. (When a singing rehearsal conflicted with a finals game, she made her choice.) But Bridges still plays, often with fellow musicians, for exercise and stress relief. Says her best friend, pianist Sakura Myers, “J’Nai is a low-key sadist when it comes to exercise.” – T — The New York Times Style Magazine
Shoji Sadao, 92, Architect Who Realized Visions Of Buckminster Fuller And Isamu Noguchi
“Fuller was pursuing out-there ideas in design and architecture, and it often fell to Mr. Sadao to do the practical work of implementing them. … [He] filled a similar role with Noguchi, the acclaimed sculptor and landscape architect. He helped turn Noguchi’s concepts, whether for the Hart Plaza fountain in Detroit or the 400-acre Moerenuma Park in Sapporo, Japan, into reality.” – The New York Times
Why Wile E. Coyote Is A Great Mythic Protagonist
“The Road Runner … can run through paintings, or invisible brick walls, or across vast stretches of open sky. His pursuer cannot. Wile E. Coyote’s schemes and traps sometimes fall apart due to his own hubris, but like any Greek tragic hero, he’s doomed from the start. The universe has it out for him.” – Vulture
China Gives Surprise Endorsement For Greece’s Campaign To Get Parthenon Marbles Back
Xi Jinping’s support is just one measure of the growing affinity between the countries, underscored by a two-day visit during which their leaders signed 16 new agreements, and China committed millions more in investments in Greece. – The New York Times
How Technology Has Changed How Comic Books Are Made
“I recall in the late ’80s, we were all so sure that every discipline of comics creation would switch over to being done with the aid of the personal computer. Well, 30 years later, people pencil and ink comics in relatively the same way that they have since the art form began. But the job of colorist and letterer has changed and been completely taken over by the computer.” – The New York Times
Should We Be Casting Only Disabled Young Actors As Tiny Tim In ‘A Christmas Carol’?
“Now, in an era in which authenticity and representation have become entertainment industry watchwords, the presenters of some of the many theatrical adaptations that are staged every winter are rethinking who gets to play this iconic role … In London, the casting call for the role made it clear: ‘Applicants without a disability will not be considered.’ In New York, the language was subtler: ‘Performers with disabilities are encouraged to audition.'” – The New York Times
The One-Sentence-1,000-Pages Novel Missed Out On The Booker, But It’s Won This Prize
Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport was an obvious choice for the £10,000 Goldsmiths Prize, which honors “fiction at its most novel.” Jury chair Erica Wagner said, “In her gripping and hypnotic book, Ellmann remakes the novel and expands the reader’s idea of what is possible with the form.” (In a separate essay, fellow judge Anna Leszkiewicz writes about why Ducks, Newburyport is the winner.) – New Statesman
Joshua Bell Extends As Music Director Of Academy Of St. Martin In The Fields To 2023
“Bell is only the second holder of the music director role at the Academy, succeeding the Academy’s founder Sir Neville Marriner, who held the post from the orchestra’s formation in 1958 until 2011 … The violinist first collaborated with the orchestra in 1998, when he was 21 years old, in a recording of Bruch and Mendelssohn concertos, with Marriner conducting.” – The Strad
Philadelphia Has Had A Major Antiquities Museum For Well Over A Century. Finally, It’s Truly Welcoming The Public.
The Penn Museum (officially, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology) has theoretically been available to visitors since its opening in 1887, but it was actually used almost entirely by researchers until 2012. Since then, attendance has risen to about 180,000 a year — a figure which should leap dramatically starting this weekend, when 10,000 square feet of new exhibition space will house hundreds of items never before shown to the public. – The New York Times
Arts Institutions In Venice Reeling From Record Flooding
Salt water from the lagoon covered 80% of the city, reaching levels of up to six feet, the second-highest since records began about 90 years ago. The Biennale, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, La Fenice opera house, and St. Mark’s Basilica are among the many museums, archives, and other institutions that have temporarily closed while trying to contain the damage. – Deutsche Welle
Desperate Rio Art Museum Gives Layoff Notice To All Staff, May Shut Down
The Museu de Arte do Rio, opened in 2013 in the Praça Mauá on the city’s waterfront, has not been receiving its scheduled payments from the Rio de Janeiro prefecture government; all 126 employees, who haven’t been paid since September, received the legally required advance notice for layoffs this week. – The Art Newspaper
Jayne Wrightsman’s “No Loans” Edict for Gifts & Bequests to the Metropolitan Museum
Today’s announcement by the Metropolitan Museum about the “exceptional bequest” by trustee emerita Jayne Wrightsman (who died in April at 99) omits mention of a crucial way in which this windfall of some 375 objects, along with “substantial [but unspecified] additional funding,” is indeed “exceptional”. – Lee Rosenbaum