Teju Cole takes note of Taryn Simon’s work, and makes marching orders for our time: “We don’t turn to history because it is demonstrably relevant, and we don’t look at art only because it is monumental or beautiful.”
Oops! One Of Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dogs Got Smashed To Pieces At Art Basel Miami
“‘It just fell out of the display,’ said Ally Shapiro, one of the few collectors who witnessed the incident and snapped the above iPhone photo. ‘The girl standing next to it had it cleaned up in five seconds.'”
Arena Stage Launches Program To Develop 25 New Shows About Politics And Power (Oddly, That’s A Rarity In D.C.)
“Although the notion may sound like a no-brainer – presenting plays in Washington about the effect of decisions reached in the White House or on Capitol Hill – in actuality, there has long been a reluctance on the parts of many theaters here to concentrate too much on political topics.” Now the District’s leading resident theater is aiming to change that.
New York’s Middle Class Galleries Are Being Squeezed Out
“So where does that leave the middle class, those galleries in Chelsea and on the Lower East Side that have been around long enough to be somewhat established, but still have to sell enough to make rent? Now, they have to deal with a perfect storm of gallery-killing factors: a market cooling from top to bottom, plummeting prices for onetime hit artists who minted money for mid-tier galleries just two years ago, the chokehold of fair booth prices, skyrocketing rents in neighborhoods where buying a building is unthinkable.”
William Christenberry, 80, Photographer Who Captured Alabama’s Lushness And Decay With A Kodak Brownie
“The small photographs for which he became renowned evoke a vanishing world populated almost solely by dilapidated buildings, rusting automobiles, advertising signs, graves and vegetation growing out of control.” As historian and former NEH chair William Ferris put it, “What Faulkner has done in his fiction, Christenberry has done in his photography.”
British Army To Form New Unit Of Monuments Men And Women
The looting and destruction of art, architecture, rare manuscripts, and ancient heritage by ISIS (among other evildoers) has moved the U.K. Ministry of Defence to set up a present-day version of the heroic archaeologists and art historians (don’t you love that phrase?) who saved and identified countless treasures at the end of World War II.
What Makes So Many Sex Scenes In Literature So Bad? Let The Bad Sex In Fiction Award Guy Tell You
“Unlike bad sex, which is often obviously recognizable, bad sex writing can be hard to define … When describing sex, [spokesperson Frank] Brinkley says, authors feel moved to put a strain on language they wouldn’t ordinarily.”
1000 Prominent Canadian Artists Petition Government To “Fix” The Business Of Creativity
They argue that despite their creativity and innovation, many of them are being squeezed out of a marketplace that monetizes digital distribution without fairly paying content creators: “The middle-class artist is being eliminated from the Canadian economy. Full-time creativity is becoming a thing of the past,” the letter says. “The carefully designed laws and regulations of the 1990s were intended to ensure that both Canadian creators and technological innovators would benefit from digital developments. We hoped that new technology would enrich the cultural experiences for artists and consumers alike. Unfortunately, this has not happened,” the letter continues.
Reinvent Canada’s CBC Model? What A Cranky Idea!
“The idea that CBC television and radio is a frivolity, sucking up vast amounts of money to make bad TV and irrelevant radio, is the position of a small number of well-off cranks in Toronto and Montreal, aided by a number of other cranks who, one imagines, stave off personal wretchedness by ceaselessly pointing out that the CBC gets funding to make TV and radio, while they don’t.”
What It’s Like To Be A Political Cartoonist Who’s Regularly Charged With Sedition
A Q&A with Malaysian cartoonist Zulkiflee Anwar Ulhaque, known as Zunar, who’s facing nine charges of sedition (so far), and up to 40 years in prison, for cartoons about the country’s embattled prime minister.
This Year’s Story On How Third-Place Auction House Phillips Is Moving Up On Sotheby’s, Christie’s
The Phillips specialists acknowledge that their November sale was only an opening move; the larger effort to disrupt the duopoly has just begun. “We’re still in this phase when we get the sympathy vote. I don’t think it’s a giant leap. It’s just a good step to take.”
Researchers: Speaking A Second Language Makes Your Brain Smarter
“In recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age.”
National Board Of Review Honors ‘Manchester By The Sea’ And ‘Moonlight’
The Board is one of the quirkier awards-giving bodies in the American film world, but their top prizes this year went to two Oscar frontrunners. Even so, there were the usual surprises …
‘Moonlight’ Rules Gotham Independent Film Awards
The surprise hit about a young gay black man took four awards, including best feature film and a special jury prize for best ensemble cast. Don’t draw too many Oscar conclusions from this, though.
Jury Finds Creators Of ‘Jersey Boys’ Guilty Of Copyright Infringement
The verdict is that the musical’s creators used, without permission, substantial portions of an unpublished autobiography by Tommy DeVito, a founding member of the group The Four Seasons. The jury held that 10% of the show’s success is attributed to the unauthorized material – which could lead to a big cash award to DeVito’s widow.
The Met Gives Up On Getting A New Opera Out Of Osvaldo Golijov
After the wild success of his Pasión según San Marco, Golijov was one of the first composers Peter Gelb commissioned when he became the company’s general manager. Alas, Golijov seems to have a years-long case of composer’s block; this is by no means the first time he hasn’t been able to complete a major commission.
Pioneering Countertenor Russell Oberlin Dead At 88
He was the first male alto to make a solo career in the U.S.; in the 1950s and ’60s he was at the forefront of the early music revival, singing everything from 12th-century English music through Bach and Handel (not to mention Oberon in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream). And he didn’t use falsetto; alto was his natural range.
Independent Bookstores Are Making A Go Of It Again (But It’s A Lot Of Work)
“A lot of a bookstore’s success is case-by-case, but the fact that some bookstores are thriving and a lot of bookstores are opening means that there’s something inherently successful in the model.”
UK Closer To Law Banning Ticket Bots
“Although we would not want to close down the secondary market for tickets altogether, clearly the automatic harvesting of tickets sold below market price — so that fans can afford them — for resale at a higher value is wrong.”
Report: There’s A Big Shift Happening In Where UK Arts Orgs Are Getting Their Funding
“Donations increased at 316 NPOs, adding £13.2m to their revenues, but a further 253 saw the value of their donations fall by a total of £12.3m compared with the previous year. Loss of income from trusts and foundations affected 231 organisations, where revenues from this source fell by £15.7m, while 311 benefited from a growth in this income stream, worth £13.5m.”
Manuscript Of Mahler’s 2nd Symphony Smashes Record For Music Score Sold At Auction
The composer’s handwritten score for the “Resurrection” Symphony comes from the estate of Gilbert Kaplan, the financial publisher who was obsessed with the work and taught himself to conduct it.
Beethoven Manuscript Fails To Sell At Sotheby’s After On-Air Argument Over Its Authenticity
The handwritten score, of an Allegretto in B minor for String Quartet that has no opus number, was expected to fetch £200,000 at auction on Tuesday morning. But an argument the previous evening on BBC Radio 4 between Sotheby’s director of books and manuscripts and a Beethoven scholar at Manchester University threw a big old monkey wrench into the works.
And What’s At The Heart Of The Argument Over Whether Beethoven Penned This Manuscript? Natural Signs
Did Beethoven write his natural signs in this rather odd way? Yes, says Sotheby’s, which wants to sell the score; not in any of his other scores, so this one’s a copy, says a Beethoven scholar, who got into it with a Sotheby’s specialist on the radio and scared off all the buyers. Classic FM called in an expert of its own for a verdict.