“Researchers at Indiana University have been digitally preserving recordings of Native American songs made on fragile wax cylinders more than 100 years ago.” – YES! Magazine
Barbara Testa, Who Discovered One Of American Literature’s Great Missing Links, Dead At 91
“Barbara Testa had enjoyed a perfectly anonymous life in Hollywood until she crawled up in the attic one day and opened a steamer trunk left behind by her grandfather, a 19th-century attorney with powerful friends. Inside … was a handwritten manuscript that would solve a century-old literary riddle and plunge Testa into the headlines in a mounting dispute over ownership of the precious document, the missing first half of the original [manuscript] of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” – Los Angeles Times
A Decade Ago E-Books Were Going To Take Over Publishing. They Didn’t
Instead, at the other end of the decade, ebook sales seem to have stabilized at around 20 percent of total book sales, with print sales making up the remaining 80 percent. – Vox
You Probably Don’t Know This Young Indian-Canadian Poet, But She May Be The Writer Of The Decade
“[Rupi] Kaur’s achievement as an artist is the extent to which her work embodies, formally, the technology that defines contemporary life: smartphones and the internet. … I’d argue that many of the writers currently being discussed as the most significant of the last decade write in direct opposition to the pervasive influence of the internet. Karl Ove Knausgaard, Rachel Cusk, and Ben Lerner (to name but three of our best) are interested in the single analog consciousness as a filter through which to see the world. If you think their experiment is the most important of the last 10 years, you’re probably (sorry) old.” – The New Republic
Why Doesn’t Ballet Training Teach Women To Dance Allegro The Way It Does Men?
“With technically demanding feats, male ballet training tends to emphasize jumps and batterie. In general, men are more privy to additional allegro combinations at the end of multi gender classes, as well as male-only technique classes. … And the women? Most female ballet dancers today perform both classical and contemporary repertoire interchangeably, and this can include exuberant jumps similar to traditional male variations.” So why aren’t they being taught the same way? – Dance Magazine
How Culture Was Used As A Weapon During The Cold War
Not only was literature politicised: sometimes it seems that any cultural initiative had the secret services of the US or the USSR behind it. We find the Soviet Union was backing the Scientific and Cultural Conference for World Peace, whose sponsors included Leonard Bernstein, Frank Lloyd Wright, Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson. The CIA, set up in 1947, had an equivalent faith in the potency of literary debates and publications. – The Guardian
How International Multi-Company Ballet Auditions Work
“For directors, they provide a way to evaluate dancers they might not otherwise see. For dancers, they expedite the cumbersome, expensive and time-consuming auditions process. But multi-company auditions don’t follow one recipe. As these three examples prove, they’re varied in their goals, demographics and pricing, so it helps to know what each offers.” – Pointe Magazine
French Protest Proliferation Of Street Advertising Everywhere
High tech video billboards are multiplying in city spaces across the world, woven into the fabric of everyday life, from ribbon videos down escalators on the London underground, to French metro corridors, New York taxis, bus-shelters, newspaper kiosks, and – increasingly – broadcast from shop windows onto the street. They are becoming more sophisticated and interactive, with the potential to collect data from passersby; increasingly bright and inescapable – impossible to click off or block like you can online. But in France, there is fresh debate on how urban planners and local councils should limit them in the public space for the sake of our overloaded eyes and brains. – The Guardian
Ugly Eddie Murphy-Bill Cosby Exchange Bespeaks History Of Bad Blood
In response to a quip about Cosby that Murphy made during the opening monologue of his return to Saturday Night Live, the now-jailed rapist‘s publicist said that Murphy “was given his freedom to leave the plantation, so that he could make his own decisions; but he decided to sell himself back to being a Hollywood Slave.” Reporter Elahe Izadi reviews the long and unhappy relationship between the two comedians. – The Washington Post
Blackface at the Ballet Highlights a Global Divide on Race
“In the United States the use of dark makeup evokes the painful legacy of racism and minstrel shows, in which performers darkened their skin with burnt cork to play characters that perpetuated racist stereotypes about African-Americans. But while the practice is increasingly rare in North America … it persists in parts of Europe and Russia.” And a recent Instagram post by Misty Copeland, showing Bolshoi Ballet dancers in dark makeup for a performance of La Bayadère, “[has] led to weeks of debate among ballet fans, highlighting a growing geographic divide on questions of race and representation.” – The New York Times
Highlighting the Resilience of Indigenous People Through Augmented Reality
“Through multi-sensorial installations, Alan Michelson holds genocidal colonizers accountable and affirms the continued survival of Indigenous people.” – Hyperallergic
How Rose Simpson’s lowrider is an homage to Pueblo potters
“While studying automotive science, Rose B. Simpson built a moving piece of art: Maria, a black, refurbished 1985 Chevrolet El Camino named for famed Pueblo potter Maria Martinez. … Simpson, who comes from a long line of Pueblo potters, is putting a contemporary spin on the traditional art of her ancestors.” – PBS NewsHour
Hollywood Is Digitally “De-Aging” Stars – What Will This Mean To The Business?
As Hollywood continues to enjoy its ability to recast mega-stars as their younger selves, it has brought fears that younger and less experienced actors are being pushed out. At the same time, some experts fear the rise of the digital actor could one day threaten the livelihoods of all actors, with the possibility of a movie starring a fully artificial performer potentially just beyond the horizon. – CBC
Hollywood’s Looming Content Crisis – Big Franchises Squeezing Everything Else Out
This year, a huge chunk of total sales went to a handful of titles. The top 10 films at the domestic box office have accounted for 38% of ticket sales so far this year, according to data firm Comscore. That’s up from 33% in 2018 and 24% five years ago. – Los Angeles Times
Glenn Lowry On How He Thinks About The Latest Version Of MoMA
“You can never be comprehensive in some absolute way. So, in a way, we’ve gone in the opposite direction and decided we’re not even going to attempt to do that. Instead, we are going to engage again and again and again. The way we are looking at it is that, rather than thinking of this display—which sprawls across almost 170,000 square feet and consists of almost 2,500 works of art—as somehow permanent or even quasi-permanent, we think of it as a point in time that over a two-to-three-year period will virtually entirely change again.” – Artnet
Anatomy Of The Classic Art World Scandal
Overreaction is crucial: the work must prompt commentators to proclaim the end of art, to evoke the cliché of the emperor’s new clothes. – The Art Newspaper
How Are MFA Programs Teaching Young Playwrights To Earn A Living? Writing For TV
“At the top schools, administrators are fielding recruiting calls from television producers and managers, adding TV classes, and competing with high-paying shows for writers they can hire as adjuncts. While these programs say they don’t want their students to leave theater altogether, TV offers them a way to make a real living, the kind of financial stability that has ramifications not just for individual artists, but for the programs themselves.” – The New York Times
How Big Data Has (Is) Transforming The Music Industry
Analysts claim it’s not only possible to see who’s blowing up now, but more importantly, who’s going to be blowing up next. Chartmetric says it can shortlist which of the 1.7 million artists it tracks will have a big career break within the next week. Pandora-owned Next Big Sound reports its patented algorithm can predict which of the nearly 1 million artists it tracks are most likely to hit the Billboard 200 chart for the first time within the next year. – Wired
‘The Gift Of The Magi’: A History Of O. Henry’s Short Story (And Its Troubled Author)
“The mixture of sadness and sentimentality in ‘Gift of the Magi’ befits a man whose life was marked by repeated human tragedies. … The diseases of alcoholism and tuberculosis would haunt [the author]” — and his family — “throughout his life.” – Smithsonian Magazine
Hollywood’s Seven Most Influential Flops Of The 2010s
“In 2010, Hollywood was drunk on the success of Avatar and decided 3D tech was the wave of the future. … Large ensemble Garry Marshall rom-coms like Valentine’s Day were still winners, as were Harrison Ford non-franchise thrillers and Nicholas Sparks movies with indistinguishable posters. None of these things are true anymore. Conventional wisdom around movies can turn on a dime, especially in such a volatile, transitional entertainment era. And nothing changes Hollywood’s tune quite like a big fat flop.” – Fast Company
The Remix Decade: Culture Invited Us To Reconsider What We (Think) We Know
“In television, film, literature, and other media over the past ten years, artists have presented information as though it is gospel, then reframed it in ways that force us to reconsider our assumptions. These cultural works challenged us to realize that there’s always something more to learn from every story, even the ones we think we know.” – New York Magazine
What’s Behind Historians’ Arguments Over The New York Times 1619 Project
“Underlying each of the disagreements in the letter is not just a matter of historical fact but a conflict about whether Americans, from the Founders to the present day, are committed to the ideals they claim to revere. … Americans need to believe that, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, the arc of history bends toward justice. And they are rarely kind to those who question whether it does.” Adam Serwer looks into the reasons historians felt strongly enough to write the letter and the reasons that a number of historians asked to sign it declined, as well as which criticisms the project’s leader accepts. – The Atlantic
Telling Quotes From Great Arts Figures Who Passed In 2019
“At their best, the artists who died this year could make us see the world in new ways — even as they made us laugh and cry. Here is a tribute to some of them, in their own words.” – The New York Times
Vienna Philharmonic Makes (Some) Progress With Its Women Problem
The august, tradition-bound orchestra, founded 177 years ago when Vienna was the capital of a now-vanished empire, would not allow women even to audition until 1997, despite years of criticism, especially from the U.S. (It was happy to employ the services of a female harpist for 26 years before that, though it would not confer membership on her.) Now the 145-member orchestra, which has very low turnover, includes 15 women, with four more in the process of joining. – The New York Times
In Toronto, Classical Music Seems To Be Thriving
Classical music and opera are not an old wooded sailing ship about to break into pieces in a fierce storm. They are the thin, iridescent film of soap bubbles stretched and borne aloft by the breath of eager, expectant believers. – Toronto Star