“For one thing, the most obvious candidate to replace one genius seems to be another genius. No surprise, maybe, but it makes you wonder whether the much-derided “great man” view of history, which ascribes historical trajectories to the actions and decisions of individuals, might not have some validity in science. You might wonder whether there’s some selection effect here: We overlook lesser-known candidates precisely because they weren’t discoverers, even though they could have been. But it seems entirely possible that, on the contrary, greatness always emerges, if not in one direction then another.”
When Mariachi Ruled The Airwaves Of Yugoslavia
In the 1950s, thanks to an odd confluence of postwar economics and intra-Communist rivalry, Mexican music became arguably the top pop genre in Yugoslavia. Most of its practitioners weren’t Mexican; they were local..
Even A Century Ago, There Was A Campaign Against The Crass Commercialization Of Christmas
Here’s the story of the Society for the Prevention of Useless Giving, co-founded by a famous stage actress and the daughter of J.P. Morgan.
Ten Contemporary Operas By Ten Women
“I’ve often been referred to as ‘that impudent brat.’ You’re impudent when you’ve no claim to power. But does anyone call a young man ‘impudent’? Instead he’s ‘that gutsy fellow,’ and ‘gutsy’ in this context means he commands respect and attention. Some male presenters proudly broadcast: ‘Now we’re presenting an all-women festival’ or ‘Now we’re focusing exclusively on women conductors,’ and yet if their inner attitude is ‘Now we’ve done our part and may continue on as before,’ nothing changes.
British Film And TV Academy Says Non-Diverse Films Won’t Be Eligible For Major Awards Starting In 2019
“To be eligible for the two awards, films must prove they have worked to improve diversity in two of the four following areas: On-screen characters and themes; Senior roles and crew; Industry training and career progression; Audience access and appeal to under-represented audiences. The measures comply with the diversity standards the BFI (British Film Institute) uses to guide its activities and the projects it funds.”
Cruise Ship Art – It’s The Biggest Art-Selling Gallery In The World
“Park West was founded in 1969, is based outside Detroit, and boasts it’s the world’s biggest art gallery. It sells pictures and sculptures at thousands of live auctions held on more than 100 ships each year. Norwegian, Royal Caribbean, and Carnival all host Park West. And they all get a cut of the revenue. Park West has had annual sales as high as $400 million and counted more than 2 million customers. With those big numbers come bitter complaints.”
The Hazards Of David Foster Wallace Disease
“The specific quality of Wallace I wanted to mimic is what I’d call his gift of sight. He had a way of generating luminosity by perfectly capturing tiny pieces of sensation spliced out from even the most banal moment of consciousness—his descriptive powers could give the sound of an air conditioner the consequence of a dying star. He had seemingly endless receptivity.”
What We’ve Lost With The Destruction Of Aleppo’s Old City
“Lina Sergie Attar, a writer and architect who grew up in Aleppo, remembers a city that has been nearly lost after years of conflict.” (audio)
Nashville Symphony Posts First Budget Surplus Since Bankruptcy Scare
“It’s been a trying three years for the Nashville Symphony, which was teetering financially and barely avoided foreclosure on its iconic Schermerhorn Symphony Center. Now, audited financial statements show an organization that is operating in the black.”
An Obama Speechwriter Looks Back At The Last Eight Years, And Helps Prepare For The Next Four, Through The Lens Of Books
“It became more real: This good man was in fact going to be our president. He was going to call other presidents and be in charge. So if you ask me what I remember most from that day? The sunlight; my wife’s small brown hand in my own; the feeling that from this moment, our history could be amended, our Union made more perfect, our lives more free.
*
Now we are here.”
Pedro Almodóvar Talks About Adapting Alice Munro’s Words For The Screeno
“Despite the cultural and geographic distance, I have always felt very close to Alice Munro’s themes: the family and family relationships in a rural, provincial, or urban setting. And also the desire, the need to escape from all that; always one thing and the opposite, without that meaning the slightest contradiction.”
The Strongest Performance Art Of 2016 Comes From The Black Lives Matter Movement
And that’s because Black Lives Matter understands how performance art interacts with the public. One piece “included a public prayer, titled ‘A Litany,’ composed of bits speech from victims of police violence, and a procession that featured women carrying banners that bore the words ‘joy’ and ‘grief.’ The performance offered the memorable sight of clutches of black women, all dressed in red, parading around the streets of Lower Manhattan.”
Does This 300-Year-Old Ruggieri Violin Look So Good Because It Was Buried With Its Owner?
Violinist Chun-Yee owns the instrument, and it is pristine. After a performance in Israel, an audience member asked her about her Ruggieri. “My father often wondered about your violin,” she says he told her. “The reason he was wondering is he had heard that it had been buried with one of its owners.”
Canada’s Essential National Culture Question
“How does a mid-sized power maintain any notion of cultural sovereignty in the face of the aptly acronymed FANG? (That’s Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google.) France, more aggressive than Canada in protecting and promoting its cultural industries, has always lent a sympathetic ear, and Paris is the home of UNESCO, the United Nations body charged with protecting culture internationally.”
New York Times Classical Critics Pick Their Favorite CDs Of 2016
Five titles each from Zachary Woolfe, Anthony Tommasini, David Allen and James R. Oestreich. (Where’s Corinna?)
Rising US Visa Fees, Longer Processing Times, Are Making Touring Difficult For Canadian Musicians
“At $325 (U.S.) a band, it’s not cheap – particularly for new musicians trying to get a foothold in a crucial music market that, on a map, looks otherwise easy to enter from here. And there are other troubles for artists: The processing time for these visas has ballooned over the past several years from 45 days to nearly 120, according to the Canadian Federation of Musicians (CFM), which helps artists file for permits.”
How A City Can Use Tax Policy To Kill Creative Activity
In Toronto’s hot real estate downtown property taxes are set to rocket. A small creative cluster at Trinity Square pays about $4,000 per month in rent for a 1,700-square-foot space. In 2016, the annual tax bill was $3,566. In 2017, it jumps to $6,808, and by 2020, it will be $11,900. The small arts groups that use the space will have to leave. They’ve protested, “but the message here is, ‘No, sorry — we don’t care.’ That really speaks to the issue: What do we want the downtown core to become?”
Daily Mail Reports: Trump Offers Sylvester Stallone Top Job At NEA
“Sources have told DailyMail.com the president-elect sees Hollywood icon Stallone as the perfect choice to make art great again. The likely position would be Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency that doles out funds to aspiring artists and creative projects.”
How The New York Times Book Review Really Works
Pamela Paul, editor of the Sunday Times‘s literary supplement, did a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” this week, and Emily Temple has dug out from it ten things that most people probably don’t know about the Book Review – not least, its differences with the daily paper’s book reviews by staff critics.
Cornelius Gurlitt’s Hidden Hoard Of Art Can Go To Swiss Museum, Rules Court
“Cornelius Gurlitt, son of one of Hitler’s art dealers, was of sound mind when he bequeathed his extensive art collection to Bern Museum of Fine Arts in 2014, a Munich court has ruled. A cousin had launched an inheritance counter-claim. Bern can now take possession of the collection.”
Unknown Velazquez Portrait To Go On View At Prado
“William B. Jordan, the art historian, said that he took his painting” – a portrait of Philip III of Spain – “to the Prado’s art experts last year to have it authenticated after acquiring it in an auction in 1988.”
Poland’s Great National Epic Play Becomes The Same Sort Of Cultural Battleground That ‘Hamilton’ Just Became In The US
Adam Mickiewicz’s Dziady (usually rendered in English as Forefathers’ Eve), a text every Pole studies in school, has been used to make strong cultural and political statements for decades. And, as in the States, a low-turnout election recently brought a right-wing nationalist government to power. So the new production of Dziady at the 2016 Theatre Olympics in Wrocław this past fall was potentially far more fraught than Hamilton became after Mike Pence saw it.
City Of Birmingham Symphony Sees Local Funding Cut By 25%
The orchestra known as the platform from which Simon Rattle and Andris Nelsons launched their world-beating careers – and where young wonder-woman Mirga just took over as music director – will be receiving the same amount of city funding it received in the 1980s (and that’s not adjusted for inflation).
UK’s Second City Slashes Culture Funding By A Third
“On Thursday, Birmingham Rep, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO), Birmingham Royal Ballet and the Midlands Arts Centre were among organisations told they would receive heavy cuts to funding. The cuts are not out of the blue and organisations had been braced for the news. But it is the scale and, they said, lack of time to implement them that is striking.”
‘Brexit’ Leads 2016 List Of New Entries In Oxford English Dictionary
“Fiona McPherson, senior editor on the OED, told The Guardian the word had been one of the fastest to move from coinage to definition and listing.”