Ailey O’Toole’s bizarrely brazen act of plagiarism — stealing lines, phrases, and structural elements from the work of at least three other writers — was uncovered last Friday, unraveling her career at the speed of Twitter, the medium by which her fledgling reputation lived and died. Within 24 hours, the literary press Rhythm & Bones had canceled her forthcoming book of poems, and the insular world of poetry Twitter had already gone through a cycle of blame, bafflement, and measured defense. – New York Magazine
Why Do So Many New Apartment Buildings Look Just Like Each Other?
Boxy shapes, flat windows, bland façades. How did American apartment architecture get conquered by the style one wag calls “Spongebuild Squareparts”? Reporter Patrick Sisson writes that “it boils down to code, costs, and craft.” — Curbed
Publisher Cancels Award-Winning Poet’s First Book Because It Turns Out She Plagiarized A Lot Of It
“[Ailey] O’Toole’s bizarrely brazen act of plagiarism — stealing lines, phrases, and structural elements from the work of at least three other writers — was uncovered last Friday, unraveling her career at the speed of Twitter, the medium by which her fledgling reputation lived and died.” — Vulture
Using The Arts To Move Young Offenders Out Of Jail And In Restorative Justice Programs
Cecilia Olusola Tribble of metro Nashville’s Office of Arts and Culture writes about the Restorative Justice + the Arts program, which trains artists to teach and work with inmates at a Nashville juvenile detention center. — Americans for the Arts
Climate Change Report On Heritage Sites: Goodbye Venice
The map reveals the degree of threat to one evocative name after another: the Amalfi coast, the Roman city of Arles, the Greek temples at Paestum south of Naples, the crusader city of Acre, the ancient shrine of Ephesus, even the Modernist architecture of Tel Aviv. – The Art Newspaper
Salonen’s Departure From London’s Philharmonia Raises Questions About Orchestra’s Future
The simultaneous departures at the end of 2020-21 of Salonen from the Philharmonia and Vladimir Jurowski from the London Philharmonic pose big questions for the Southbank Centre. Both conductors have kept their orchestras at the top of the league. Yet both the Philharmonia and the LPO will need to ensure that the Southbank possesses a long-term commitment to the work the orchestras want to do – whatever that now is. – The Guardian
UK Local Governments Are Cracking Down On Buskers – Will They Survive?
“Councils are allowing big companies to own semi-public spaces that look and feel like public spaces, but buskers would get removed from them very quickly. Part of the debate is what responsibilities councils have when selling land to ensure there are genuine public spaces.” – The Guardian
Study: Video Games Are Getting More Popular With Girls
Despite the growing popularity of gaming among girls, there remains a large gender divide in how many children claim it as their favourite activity: for boys it is second only to football, with 14% of four- to 12-year-olds and 21% of 13- to 18-year-olds saying it was their favourite activity, compared to 3% of girls. – The Guardian
Albert Einstein’s ‘God Letter’ Sells For $3 Million At Auction
“The one-and-a-half-page letter, written in 1954 in German and addressed to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, contains reflections on God, the Bible and Judaism. Einstein says: ‘The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.'” (Even so, Einstein maintained that he was not an atheist.) — The Guardian
This Man Has Choreographed Four Different Nutcrackers (And Danced In Two Others)
Val Caniparoli has created different versions of the piece for the Cincinnati, Louisville, Grand Rapids, and Royal New Zealand Ballets, and at San Francisco Ballet he’s danced the settings by Lew Christensen and Helgi Tomasson. He talks to Avichai Scher about how he keeps them all straight in his head and different on the stage. — Dance Magazine
C’Mon People – Your Behavior In The Theatre Is Dreadful!
Every night there is bad and thoughtless behavior conducted by people who may have spent hundreds of dollars on theater tickets yet seemingly have no idea how to behave in an actual theater. Why should you check that your phone is off, because, gee, that would be way too much trouble. Puleeze, that recorded announcement doesn’t refer to you! An hour later, that ringing sound: Oh, sorry everyone, is that me? Yes, it’s you! Look, you’re in public at the theater! Who knew! – The Daily Beast
The Whole Concept Of The ‘General Audience’ Is A Myth
Playwright Alana Valentine: “Are we not part of a generation whose success has been to interrogate all forms of generalisation? So why do we continue to refer to a general audience? And please, I’m not taking issue with the nature of the adjective as a collective descriptor, I’m actually leaning into the definition of general as imprecise, inexact, sweeping, and vague. I’m questioning what it is that we’re referring to as general.” — ArtsHub (Australia)
Meet The Formerly Homeless Choristers In The Soup-Kitchen ‘Amahl And The Night Visitors’
“It brings people together and gives them discipline and self-esteem. … When I first joined I really didn’t think much of it. And after a certain point I thought: You know, I think I have a voice, and I’m finding it.” — New York Times
What Happened When A Maasai Delegation Visited An Oxford Museum To See Where Their Sacred Belongings Ended Up?
“The Pitt Rivers has more than 300,000 objects in its collection, many of which were ‘acquired’ by colonial functionaries, missionaries and anthropologists in the heyday of the British empire. … Keenly aware of its problematic origins, the Pitt Rivers, like many museums, engages ‘originating communities’ – in the museum-world lingo – to allow them to reclaim the narrative around their objects. Last month, [elder Samwell] Nangiria, with four other Maasai from Tanzania and Kenya, and help from the Oxford-based NGO InsightShare, returned to do so.” — The Guardian
‘Call Me By Your Name’ Author André Aciman Says He’s Working On A Sequel
The director of the novel’s 2017 film adaptation, Luca Guadagnino, has said several times that he planned to do a sequel (or perhaps even a franchise along the lines of the Before Sunrise/Before Sunset/Before Midnight series). But the little that the author had said about it wasn’t encouraging. (The novel already includes an epilogue with the two protagonists in middle age.) But a tweet from Aciman this week indicates that he’s changed his mind. — IndieWire
Harlem’s Apollo Theater To Build Two Additional Performance Spaces
“[The] two new spaces — one with 99 seats, another with 199 — [are] part of the redevelopment of the Victoria Theater, a few doors away, on West 125th Street. The resulting Apollo Performing Arts Center … will be used to incubate works by up-and-coming artists, particularly performers of color, who might not be ready for the main theater’s 1,500-seat auditorium, Apollo executives said.” — New York Times
Italy’s Highest Court Rules That Getty Bronze Must Be Returned
“The ruling by the Court of Cassation was handed down Monday after a long battle over the ancient Greek bronze, which was found by Italian fishermen off the Adriatic coast in 1964 and purchased by the Getty in the UK for almost $4m in 1977. The court was rejecting the Getty’s appeal of a ruling in June by a lower court in Pesaro stating that the statue must be returned.” — The Art Newspaper
Actor Philip Bosco Dead At 88
While he appeared in roughly a dozen films (including Working Girl, Children of a Lesser God, Three Men and a Baby, and The First Wives Club) and guest-starred on many a television series, his great love was live theatre: he acted in 50 productions on Broadway alone and garnered six Tony nominations, winning in 1989 for Lend Me a Tenor. — Hollywood Reporter
Film Made On iPhone Wins 2018 Turner Prize
Bridgit, “a series of short clips filmed on an iPhone featuring the Scottish countryside from a train window, a T-shirt on a radiator and a cat pawing at a lamp has helped Charlotte Prodger win the 2018 Turner prize. … The Glasgow-based artist has been making moving-image works for 20 years and is on many contemporary art radars, but she is far from being well known.” — The Guardian
Conductor Daniele Gatti, Fired After Sexual Harassment Allegations, Gets Big New Job In Rome
Four months after Gatti was sacked as chief conductor of Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, one of the most prestigious jobs in the entire music world, he has been appointed music director of the Italian capital’s opera house, the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, effective immediately. Gatti is the first person to hold the music director post since Riccardo Muti resigned in frustration in 2014. — Gramilano (Milan)
Case studies in community engagement
The Community Engagement Training offered by ArtsEngaged is also preparing new trainers. As a culminating part of their work, they prepare a case study critiquing a project they know well. Here are the first four: Classical Roots, an ongoing program of the Cincinnati Symphony with choirs from the city’s African-American churches; a partnership between the Segerstrom Center for the Arts (Orange County, CA) and the service organization Alzheimer’s Orange County; the Cincinnati Arts Association’s production of a concert with the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition; and the productive merger of two film festivals, one larger and of general interest and the other smaller and LGBTQ-focused.
Thomas And Groenewald: A Fine Togetherness
Jay Thomas With The Oliver Groenewald Newnet: I Always Knew (Origin)
Thomas, a veteran master of brass and reed instruments, teams with Groenewald, the man he describes in his liner notes as “the perfect fit for me as an arranger.”
Esa-Pekka Salonen To Leave As Conductor Of Philharmonia Orchestra
Under his leadership, the orchestra has raised its profile and broadened its repertoire, excelling in early 20th-century music. It has also been at the forefront of imaginative and inclusive digital projects – its award-winning immersive installations, Re-Rite and Universe of Sound, gave audiences the opportunity to explore an orchestra section by section and experience music from a player’s point of view. More recently, virtual reality projects allowed those donning the goggles to get to the very heart of the orchestra and encounter symphonic music as if sitting under Salonen’s nose. – The Guardian
New York Times Book Critics Have A Roundtable About The Year 2018 In Books
“As you might imagine, as professional critics and general bibliophiles [Dwight Garner, Parul Sehgal and Jennifer Szalai] read far more than is represented on [their best-books] lists — books their colleagues reviewed, books they found by chance, books that had been teetering on their to-read piles while they attended to the demands of their jobs. Below, they talk about the wide variety of writing they enjoyed, authors who disappointed them and larger trends they noticed in the literary world.” — New York Times
The Leonardo Exception
Leonardo da Vinci was not a consummate painter. He was first and foremost a scientist, inventor and experimenter, with an excess of artistic talent to help pay the rent and a trove of notebooks to document his true obsessions. What I admire and envy about him is that thirst and drive to know everything, and his inventive imagination. I’d prefer to curl up with his codices, which is how I’d probably feel most at ease with him.