“As cities, counties, and states update outdated bridges, upgrading their lighting systems to LEDs is inevitable. With that move comes the opportunity to throw in some low-cost civic razzle-dazzle.”
Oxford’s Word Of The Year For 2016 Is Way Too Apt For Comfort
Collins Dictionaries’ choice was Brexit. Their Oxonian colleagues didn’t opt for Brexit or for any variation on Trump; what they did choose is all too relevant to both.
A National Museum Reopens After 72 Years – With A Religious Kerfuffle, In One Of Europe’s Least Religious Countries
At issue is a digital artwork showing an image of the Virgin Mary: press a button and it shatters. (The artist says the piece is about iconoclasm.)
Anti-Establishment Outsiderism? Our Popular Culture Gives Us A Steady Stream Of It
“They are dark and bleak and often end in death. Some double as articulations of the political exceptionalism of ordinariness itself. Most, though, do something more basic, and more pessimistic: They assume the fundamental dirtiness of politics, and the related idea that any hope we’ll have of purifying the system must come from outside of it. They leave very little room for optimism about the hulking beast that is “the establishment,” very little room for hope that the system in place—one populated by career politicians—can take compassion and make it scale.”
How Big Was Leonard Cohen’s Impact On Popular Music? Even Bigger Than You Thought
Scott Timberg follows the trail, from Cohen’s discovery by Judy Collins and then Fairport Convention through Gen X grunge and alt-rock up to today.
Los Angeles Passed A Law That Resulted In A 95% Decrease In Porn Production. Now Voters Have Done Away With That Law…
“L.A. has seen a staggering 95% drop in on-location porn permit requests in the last four years, following the passage of a separate 2012 county measure requiring condoms, according to county permit data. But porn industry leaders say they are now bullish that the defeat of Prop. 60 as well as other recent condom-related victories will reverse the exodus.”
Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, Minnesota Orchestra Conductor Laureate, Suffers Stroke
The 93-year-old, who was the orchestra’s music director for 19 years and remains beloved there, had surgery following the stroke on Sunday.
Provocative: Do We Need To “De-Colonize” Our Music?
“The companies with the financial resources and the political clout often impose a uniformity on the consumption of the music they believe is popular and therefore profitable. Given the ubiquity of their total command of the internet, the “world” becomes their colony and the “popular” tastes rule, again to the detriment of the indigenous music, but also to art music and to any other music with a limited audience and appeal. This scenario has forced indigenous music and even our beloved ‘classical’ music into competing with everything—sports, popular music, even each other.”
Smart Business? The Business World Could Learn A LOT From Dance
Turns out that the habits, discipline and creativity of dancers offers excellent lessons for business leaders…
How The Interstate Highway System Transformed The St. Louis Accent
Time was that St. Louisans said “good marning” and ate “carn on the cob.” Then along came I-55 and the Northern Cities Vowel Shift.
So The Arts Are Progressive?? Study Finds Big Gender Gap In Pay In The Arts
“Specifically, they found the mean annual income for male artists was $63,061, compared to $43,177 for their female counterparts. After further crunching the numbers, they report that a variety of factors that could influence income — including age, education, one’s specific artistic discipline, and the number of hours worked — only accounted for about one-third of that difference.”
Artists And The Non-Arts Audience – A Different Kind Of Conversation
“For the artists to figure out a way to be in a conversation with this audience — a whole community of new eyes — is really exciting. Navigating that common space and figuring out what can be done to engage with this crowd while also what can be done to make things happen outside of that space.”
Yannick: What I Love About Jimmy
The incoming music director of the Metropolitan Opera, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, writes a tribute (with anecdotes) to his predecessor, James Levine.
‘The William Faulkner Of Jazz’, Mose Allison, Dead At 89
He combined the mordant blues of his native Mississippi with sophisticated jazz rhythm – and he became a sort of minor deity to the ’60s and ’70s rockers who covered his songs. And those songs could be biting: “What Do You Do After You Ruin Your Life?”, “Your Mind Is On Vacation (But Your Mouth Is Working Overtime),” and “Everybody’s Crying Mercy.”
Munch’s ‘Girls On The Bridge’ Sells For $54.5 Million
It’s the second-highest price ever paid for a Munch (after you-know-what). Yet it was the only bid on the painting, and that was by a party that guaranteed the sale. In fact, the entire evening was disappointing sales-wise.
Jules Eskin, 85, Longtime Principal Cellist Of Boston Symphony
The man Yo-Yo Ma considers a mentor became BSO principal in 1964 and co-founded the Boston Symphony Chamber Players in 1967.
Top Posts From AJBlogs 11.15.16
Your organization sucks at ‘community’ and let me tell you why
by Ronia Holmes, Assistant Director of Communications for Arts + Public Life at the University of Chicago … read more
AJBlog: Engaging Matters Published 2016-11-15
Mose Allison Is Gone
Mose Allison has died at the age of 89. A Mississippi pianist, singer, composer, songwriter and sometime trumpeter, Allison made his New York debut in the 1950s as a bebop pianist. … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2016-11-15
Propwatch: the lace in Giselle
It’s only a moment. Giselle, a migrant seamstress made rootless by a changing world, confronts the dauntingly affluent Bathilde. Their encounter ripples with instinctive distrust (unwittingly, each loves the same guy; this is ballet). … read more
AJBlog: Performance Monkey Published 2016-11-15
The Inexorable Decline Of Arts Criticism Is Picking Up Speed
Bill Marx looks at the Wall Street Journal and New York Times’ cutbacks in arts coverage: “Too many of today’s arts editors and reviewers embrace a lilliputian vision of arts criticism, a crabbed sense of its possibilities. I teach a class at Boston University on writing arts criticism, and can testify that most of these wanna-be critics have not read any reviews that date earlier than 2000.”
Robert Fulford: A Culture That Marginalizes Humanities Becomes The Poorer For It
“Traditionally, the humanities (history, literature, art, philosophy, etc.) have provided a place for broadening life in the democracies. Today universities have become a site for a bitter struggle between no-nonsense job training and the grander possibilities of the imagination.”
Vagueness Is A Useful Tool. But It Also Threatens Our Sense Of Logic
“You can find aspects of vagueness in most words of English or any other language. Out loud or in our heads, we reason mostly in vague terms. Such reasoning can easily generate sorites-like paradoxes. Can you become poor by losing one cent? Can you become tall by growing one millimetre? At first, the paradoxes seem to be trivial verbal tricks. But the more rigorously philosophers have studied them, the deeper and harder they have turned out to be. They raise doubts about the most basic logical principles.”
Why Hasn’t Art-Selling Been Uberized?
The art market has expanded enormously, but despite many schemes, selling art online in a big way has been elusive. “Most of its incumbent players recognise that technology is powering the sheer volume of interest in the market, but believe that, for now, it is more of a tool than a game changer.”
As Strike Drags On, Pittsburgh Symphony Cancels Yet More Concerts
Performances are now cancelled through the first week in December.