“The Shakespeare’s Globe production of Titus Andronicus, which was so bloody it caused more than 100 audience members to faint or leave during its theatre run, is to go global as it is screened in cinemas across the world.”
What If We Made College Free? (It Actually Wouldn’t Cost That Much)
“According to the most-recent calculations of Strike Debt, the debt-resistance group I work with, the cost would be relatively modest. The federal loan program is propped up by a motley assortment of subsidies and tax exemptions that amount to tens of billions of dollars.”
University Of Iowa Removes An Anti-Hate-Speech Art Work For Being “Offensive”
“Created by Serhat Tanyolacar, a UI visiting professor and printmaking fellow, the klansman sculpture was decoupaged in newspaper coverage of racial tension and violence throughout the past 100 years. The piece was meant to highlight how America’s history of race-based violence isn’t really history and “facilitate a dialgoue,” as Tanyolacar told university paper The Gazette.”
The Pressure Mounts For Museums To Return ‘Stolen’ Objects
“Dubious purchases had been made for years by Western museums, but the practice is now widely considered to be immoral. The prevailing wisdom today is that illegal excavations and trade in archeological objects is destroying our world cultural heritage.”
Staging A Performance Piece With – Or On – The NYPD
“It became clear, over the course of listening to a variety of experiences, that the exercise worked not so much to disarm cops against us, but to disarm us against cops.”
Why Art Censorship Is On The Rise
“Why have these recent demands to censor been so successful? It’s worth reflecting on who is protesting, because this is also different from the earlier, top-down attempts to censor.”
Backstage At The “Edward Scissorhands” Ballet
Vanity Fair gets a look at Matthew Bourne’s adaptation of the cult film. (slideshow)
The Most Controversial Novel In Israeli History Finally Hits U.S. Shelves
“In 1949, the publication of a short novel Khirbet Khizeh, about the forceful [sic] evacuation of a Palestinian village by Israeli soldiers, created a stir in the newly established state of Israel. Now, 65 years later, the controversial Hebrew classic by S. Yizhar is taking on a new life in English.”
Ten Important Things Happened At Art Basel Miami Beach This Year
From the debut of one museum and reinvention of another, to the new prominence of certain artists and dealers, to the triumph of dance, to the night when supposedly superficial Miamians found their outrage …
Letting The Audience Set The Ticket Price – After The Show
That’s just what one venue in England is doing for the first half of next year: free entry for all theatre, spoken-word and dance performances, with each audience member deciding after the show is over what it was worth. How will they make this work?
L.A. Philharmonic Gets Surprise $20 Million Gift
David C. Bohnett, founder of GeoCities (remember GeoCities?), intends half of the amount to fund efforts to spread classical music through technology.
Jane Freilicher, 90, New York School Artist Who Dared To Paint Landscapes
“She was not widely known by the general public, but her consistent, steady experimentation earned her intense acclaim throughout her life, particularly from contemporary critics and poets, many of whom were her close friends. In 1958, the poet James Schuyler termed her ‘a poet’s painter who may yet become the public’s painter” – an apt description for her entire career.”
Today’s Most Revolutionary Documentaries Are Being Made By A Group You’ve Never Heard Of
“[They] come not from a brand-name auteur or even some up-and-coming, Sundance-anointed visionary. Rather, they come from a place called the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, which sounds more like somewhere an ophthalmologist might send you than a source of great filmmaking.”
Michael C. Hall on Being Hedwig
“You get [from audience members] the stand-offish, I’m-not-gay-don’t-look-at-me-that-way vibe; you get the I’m-not-gay-but-I’m-kind-of-feeling-funny-in-a-way-that-I’m-not-entirely-uncomfortable-with vibe; you get the I’m-gay-and-I-entirely-approve-of-your-behavior vibe … And I think it’s compelling for a woman to see a man behave as a woman, and it might be liberating for her to watch a man jump off of hoods of cars in platform heels.”
Oronyms Lead To Mondegreens (How We Mis-Hear Song Lyrics)
Maria Konnikova explains the processes by which some people come to think Queen did a song called “Bohemian Rap City” and children wonder why Olive the other reindeer was mean to Rudolph.
Top Posts From AJBlogs 12.10.14
Excellence Is Heterogeneous
AJBlog: Engaging Matters Published 2014-12-10
Conundrum
AJBlog: Sandow Published 2014-12-10
Menil Repurposes Sacred Space For Contemporary Art
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2014-12-10
Stubbornly Figurative in an Age of Abstraction: Jane Freilicher, 90, Dies
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2014-12-10
Other Matters: Risk And Playing From The Heart
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2014-12-10
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Oops! Scottish Theatre Mistakenly Sends Porn DVDs To Children
“The theatre had meant to send recordings of its summer schools for children. But the DVDs were reported to have featured explicit sexual content.”
National Endowment For The Humanities Funds Video Games
“The NEH announced $17.9 million in grants this week to support scholarship and education in the arts and letters, including the two grants of $100,000 each for online gaming projects, which are part of a new funding initiative for online cultural resources called Digital Projects for the Public.”
A Dismaying Idea Of What Theatre Is
“To say the kind of theatre performed in the West End (which is what she believed she was talking about) is one invented by white people is one thing, to say white people invented theatre ignores a whole host of other storytelling and performance traditions from Kabuki to Indian dance.”
London (Ontario) Orchestra On The Ropes
“The publicly funded group is lurching into the third major financial crisis in recent history after its biggest-ever donation recently fell apart, leaving it with a massive deficit for the 2013-14 season.”
Hollywood’s 100 Most Powerful Women In Hollywood (And The Battles To Get On The List)
“Forget the Oscars. One of the most fearsome competitions in show business involves landing in the right spot on The Hollywood Reporter’s annual ranking of the 100 most powerful women in entertainment. For certain executives, agents and producers, this has become a blood sport.”
Patrick Modiano’s Nobel Speech: Literature Is Not In Danger
“Today, I get the sense that memory is much less sure of itself, engaged as it is in a constant struggle against amnesia and oblivion. This layer, this mass of oblivion that obscures everything, means we can only pick up fragments of the past, disconnected traces, fleeting and almost ungraspable human destinies. Yet it has to be the vocation of the novelist, when faced with this large blank page of oblivion, to make a few faded words visible again, like lost icebergs adrift on the surface of the ocean.”
Mysterious Italian Author Reveals – A Little Bit
The novelist known as Elena Ferrante: “I didn’t choose anonymity. The books are signed. Instead, I chose absence. More than 20 years ago, I felt the burden of exposing myself in public, I wanted to detach myself from the finished story; I wanted the books to assert themselves without my patronage.”