“People naturally default to thinking of the arts as one of the things we choose to do with our free time and our money, depending on our taste. Looked at this way, an arts experience is no different from eating out or going to a ball game. The current debate about whether artists should speak to policy or politics from the stage is framed to reinforce the default thinking about the arts as entertainment.”
How Disney Worked Real Polynesian Culture Into ‘Moana’ – And Made It Fit Into Disney Archetypes At The Same Time
New York Times music writer Nate Chinen, who grew up in Hawaii, picks out the traditional elements and scrutinizes the ways in which Disney used and adapted them (and yeah, maybe co-opted, too).
How Did So Many Children Become Convinced They Remembered Abuse That Never Actually Occurred?
Remember the Satanic-ritual-abuse-in-day-care panic of the 1980s and ’90s? Here’s a look at how the false memories of the young victims-that-weren’t got implanted and took hold – and how some of them handled it when, years later, they came to understand that what they thought they remembered hadn’t really happened.
Does Having A Family To Take Care Of Really Interfere With Creative Success?
Siddhartha Deb: “The idea of the great, undomesticated artist is itself, of course, one of the enduring fictions handed down to us by the industrial age. … If domestic responsibilities appear singularly detrimental to artistic practice, it is not because of the repetitive tasks they involve.”
Dana Stevens: “I’ll get back to you on that question as soon as I’m done picking these rainbow sequins up off the floor one by one, then sorting this mountain of discarded clothes into boxes.”
Twitter Has Become A Playground For Poets
“Amid the trolls and politicians blasting out 140-character broadsides, poets and their readers have embraced Twitter as a vehicle for higher language. The premium Twitter places on brevity and emotional honesty is uniquely well-suited for an artform that so prizes not just candor and exhortation, but verbal economy.”
All Of The Lessons This Filmmaker Learned From Spending Four Years Making A ‘Microbudget’ Movie
First, you’re never ready to make a film. (Then there are 11 more lessons, at least in this installment of the story.)
Dear Theatre People: Now Is The Time To Stand Up
Don’t let the Hamilton cast stand alone, this editorial says: “We can choose in this moment to speak, to use our words and take a stand. And it is not only in our lives as private citizens that this work can be done. Art can be activism. And theatres can take a stand and be leaders in their communities, both modeling equity, diversity, and inclusion and speaking out about it.”
This Notion Of Fakes In The Art World Prompts The Need For A Definition Of Real
“What is it about a specific piece of art that makes it become seen as an esteemed creation, while something entirely similar can be viewed as nothing more than (quite literally) a vessel for disposing of human excrement? This was the brazen question that researchers at the Faculty of Economics and Business at the University of Leuven in Belgium recently tackled using the scientific method. They published their results in the journal Human Nature in October.”
28 Things That Would Make The Visual Art World A Better Place
“What if the art world was a lot more integrated into the world world? What if the art world and the world world existed in a state of mutual accountability to one another? What if art was valued as a shared cultural transmission that brings people together despite difference, instead of as a luxury good that promotes class division?”
Behind The Scenes Of Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” (And The Two Times He Quit)
A new book details it. “For all the fun it looked like everyone was having, it turns out the climate behind the scenes wasn’t always such a joy. (Though, to be clear, there was plenty of that, too. Tired joy, to read the staffers’ accounts. But joy nonetheless.)”
Swahili – How A Minor Zanzibar Dialect Became The Lingua Franca Of Half A Continent
An estimated 100 million people speak Swahili – more than French, Turkish, or Korean. And now enthusiasts are trying to spread use of the language all across Africa. (audio)
Reimagining A Bauhaus Ballet For The Age Of Smartphones And Artificial Intelligence
Oskar Schlemmer created his 1922 Triadic Ballet as a response to the Industrial Age. Now two curators and 30 collaborators, including Karole Armitage (choreography) and furniture designers the Campana brothers (costumes), have mounted an updated version in, of all places, Jersey City.
‘Blamegiving Day’ – For Decades, Secularists Campaigned To Get God Out Of Thanksgiving And Concern For The Poor Into It
You think the “War on Christmas” is a bitter struggle, Bill O’Reilly? Pish-posh. Repeated efforts by secularists to erase the religious element from a U.S. government-declared national holiday go all the way back to President Grover Cleveland and before.
Eight Broadway Stars And Directors Give Their Thoughts On Trump’s Tweets And Theater As Safe Space
Susan Stroman: “For somebody like me who’s done The Scottsboro Boys, it’s a space to start a conversation.”
Matthew Broderick: “We’re now talking about yet another nonissue. … It’s like [Trump] flashes a little shiny paper in front of everybody and any bit of bad news gets forgotten.”
Andrea Martin: “‘A safe place.’ Not if Patti LuPone’s onstage!”
In 19th-Century America, Theater Was Anything But A Safe Space
To judge from newspaper reports of the time, audience behavior was more like what you get at a midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Pittsburgh Symphony Strike Is About To End: Report
“The sides could agree to a deal as soon as this week, resuscitating the symphony’s dormant season, people with ties to both sides in the labor dispute told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette this week.”
Thieves Steal ‘Nutcracker’ Costumes From Rhode Island Ballet Company
Last week the artistic director of Festival Ballet Providence and an assistant went to the company’s storage space to fetch the crates full of costumes and found that many were half-empty. They have three weeks to find replacements.
David Hockney To Create Stained-Glass Window For Westminster Abbey
The window, to be unveiled in June 2018 in the church’s north transept, is in honor of Queen Elizabeth II.
Top Posts From AJBlogs 11.22.16
Snowball’s Chance in Helsinki: Guggenheim Again Seeks Council Approval (plus Abu Dhabi update)
Will the Guggenheim Helsinki, proposed in 2011 and stalled ever since, finally get off the drawing board? On Monday, the Helsinki City Board voted 8-7 to revive this persistent project, which will once again be … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2016-11-22
Research Reveals Six Story Arcs We All Respond To
They examined 1,327 stories from Project Gutenberg’s fiction collection — all English-language texts between 20,000 and 100,000 words — using three language processing filters. In the end, they found “broad support for the following six emotional arcs…”
Why It’s So Difficult To Define “Consciousness”
For most people “consciousness” will have various meanings and include awareness, self-awareness, thinking in language. But for philosophers and neuroscientists the crucial meaning is that of feeling something, having a feeling you might say, or an experience. An easy way to think about it would be pain.
Book Illustrators Demand Equal Status With Writers
Covers of novels are ‘revealed’ on social media with no mention of the illustrator, signings take place without both the author and the illustrator of a picturebook present, publishers forget to list illustrators on Amazon, and in a recent case the illustrator of Pigín of Howth by Kathleen Watkins, Margaret Anne Suggs was left off the Irish Book Awards brochure. This is not acceptable and needs to be addressed.
How The Right Is Using Left-Leaning Celebrity Angst Against Itself
“While the angry tweets, therapeutic Instagram testimonials and fiery speeches may comfort their fans, these left-leaning celebrities are also inadvertently energizing the opposition. Conservative news outlets — most notably Breitbart News Network, the right-wing populist enclave — are perfecting the art of sapping Democratic stars’ name recognition and repurposing their words and actions into pro-Trump material.”
B-Boy Zulu Rema, The Amputee Breakdancer Of Tunisia
Oh yes, he can definitely do the moves. (photo gallery)