The National Alliance for Audition Support, launched by the League of American Orchestras, the Sphinx Organization, and the New World Symphony, “offers a range of supports to help musicians of color truly compete for the limited number of orchestra slots … NAAS matches participants with mentors, offers them three-day training intensives with professional musicians, provides them with travel stipends and places them in pre-audition showcases.” – Colorlines
Reconciling Rich Board Members And Their Compromised Money
It’s a particularly stark reminder that no organization is purely good when money is the major organizing principle. The art and search for meaning that constitute the best expression of humanity will always be diluted here. In this case it’s cut by the worst expression of humanity, war. It’s also a stark reminder that people with blood on their hands will always have a chance to rehabilitate their image. – The Baffler
The Smithsonian And National Zoo Will Be Shut Down In The New Year
All of the museums, and the National Zoo, will be closed as of January 2 because of the government shutdown. – NPR
Pittsburgh’s Mattress Factory Has Had A Truly Terrible 2018
Are things looking up at the contemporary art museum that lost its founder and saw labor complaints related to abuse by a staff member? Maybe. – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
A New Chapter On Restitution Of Plundered Art
All eyes are now on France. Despite the legal hurdles, restitutions are possible but only through a drawn-out process. President Macron’s decision earlier this month to return 26 plundered items to Benin “without delay” will have to be approved by parliament. Similarly, when the Muséum de Rouen discovered a “toi moko”—a tattooed head of an ancient Maori warrior—in its collection in 2011, restitution to New Zealand had to be approved by a special act of parliament, which took four years. – The Art Newspaper
Live-streaming Games Is The New Media Frontier
From a critical remove, streaming is a strangely liminal space, one not yet secure in its place in the media landscape. It’s a land of opportunity and nonsense, a media format beyond its Wild West stage yet not quite formed into something that can be subjected to mainstream media analysis. Streaming is a place for big-time, multi-million-dollar celebrities. It’s also a place where marginalized people form communities around games and people they love, where niche gaming communities like speedrunning can grow healthily. – Wired
The BBC’s Film Critics Show On TV Goes Bust
The BBC has promised to replace Film with another show, but the challenge is how do you cover movies for a BBC One audience? The problem the BBC has is that movie broadcasting has been subject to a populist online revolution.
John Waters Says All His Work Is Political (‘But I’d Never Say That!’)
Among the other things he says: “The National Brainiac, that’s what I really wish I could edit. Imagine me being the editor of a tabloid for intellectuals. Imagining hiding outside their apartments for bathing-suit pictures of Philip Roth.” (Also: “Sample sales are vicious.”) — ARTnews
How Our Brains Know Where We Are (Our GPS)
The recent marriage of neuroscience with the fields of computer science and artificial intelligence that have really strengthened this perspective. Work at this interface has shown that a brain that uses an absolute, invariant model of the world to model and negotiate changing environments requires more computational resources than one that uses relative information. – Nautilus
Actor-Director Hunter Foster, New Artistic Director Of Redhouse In Syracuse
The 49-year-old is a Broadway veteran, with leads in Urinetown and Little Shop of Horrors under his belt, but he didn’t start directing in earnest until five years ago, at Bucks County Playhouse, where he stayed on as artistic associate until this job came up. — The Post-Standard (Syracuse, NY)
Women Are Inventing Their Own Nashville Country Music
Even though the stranglehold of bro country has given way to various softer, smoother gestures, the men of the format still dominate terrestrial, satellite, and streaming playlists. But it’s not like country’s rising generation of women are content to keep following a prescribed promotional path that’s leading only to frustration and a sense of futility. I’ve found it illuminating to consider how the moves that Morris, Cam, Musgraves, and so many others are making count as artistic and professional survival strategies. – Slate
‘On The Basis Of Sex’, The Ruth Bader Ginsburg Biopic, Was Very Much A Family Affair
The justice’s nephew, Daniel Stiepleman, wrote the script; her grandson has a part; her daughter reviewed drafts of it, as did RBG herself. (“As if it were a contract.”) As Jane Ginsburg said, “There wasn’t going to be a movie, at least not by [Stiepleman], if my mother wasn’t comfortable with it.” — The New York Times
New York Times Dance Critic Alastair Macaulay’s Farewell Column
“There have been breakthroughs and positive changes in the dance climate this century. They’ve made me happy. Yet, Cassandra-like, I foresee ills ahead. … We’ve now entered a Silver Age, in which theatrical dance is a less radically creative art than before. Where once choreographers forged their dance language, now they tweak within lexicons they have inherited from others.” — The New York Times
‘It’s Never Too 21st-Century For The Rockettes’: Sarah Kaufman On Why The World’s Most Famous Kick Line Still Pulls People In After 85 Years
“The Rockettes are all about power and cheery domination — they are a glittering army in heels — but there is no hierarchy. Their power is group power. It’s a collective whose uplifting force is greater than what any single dancer could achieve. There is something reassuringly American about them, their natural athleticism, their beauty, their wholesome sexiness.” — The Washington Post
Meet The First Dancer To Go From AileyCamp To The Main Ailey Company
As a 12-year-old on Chicago’s South Side, Solomon Dumas was interested in the arts but had never thought much about dance. Then his mother sent him to AileyCamp. “After that camp, I was completely obsessed.” — The New York Times
Italy’s New Nationalist Government Makes Leonardo Da Vinci A Battleground
“Nationalism — taboo for half a century following World War II and the fall of Mussolini — is suddenly in, as every possible political dispute is cast in chauvinist hues. Culture had long been a relatively neutral terrain. Not anymore. And deliberately so.” — The New York Times
“To Kill A Mockingbird” Sets New Broadway Box Office Record
The new Broadway adaptation from Oscar winner Aaron Sorkin made Broadway history for the week ending December 23, taking in $1,586,946 at the box office, shattering the house record at the Shubert Theatre for the highest weekly gross of any Broadway play (non musical) in the Shubert Organization’s 118-year history. – Playbill
Roxane Gay’s Radical Honesty
It is hard to read the abuse Gay gets for her size. If there is anything useful in the experience it is, she has said, in the way it engenders empathy, for other lives, for difficult lives, for different lives. Reading, she says now, does the same – fiction mostly, but also non-fiction, “because you just think, ‘Oh my gosh, imagine if that were my life, imagine if that were my children, how would I feel?’ – The Guardian
Turkish TV Is Hot. But Can It Export Internationally?
The shows are a phenomenon in the Middle East and Latin America, and have become such a symbol of Turkish soft power that they have been used as counters in political disputes. On March 1, for instance, the Saudi Arabia-based satellite broadcaster MBC abruptly dropped all Turkish drama, cutting off some shows midseason, apparently in response to Turkish support for Qatar. – The New York Times
A Record Year Worldwide For Movie Box Office
That would mark a healthy 2.7% gain from last year, with most of that hike coming from North America. Year-end projections released Thursday by Comscore predict that domestic grosses will hit $11.9 billion, a 7% increase from 2017. International grosses look to reach $29.8 billion, a 2.7% bump compared to the previous year.
You Don’t Own Your Tattoo Art (The Artist Does). That Can Be A Problem
Any creative illustration “fixed in a tangible medium” is eligible for copyright, and, according to the United States Copyright Office, that includes the ink displayed on someone’s skin. What many people don’t realize, legal experts said, is that the copyright is inherently owned by the tattoo artist, not the person with the tattoos. – The New York Times
Warring with Warhol: What I Most (& Least) Appreciated About the Whitney’s Retrospective
Although I gave Andy Warhol — From A to B and Back Again (to Mar. 31) a mixed review last week, one focus of the Whitney Museum’s widely praised extravaganza particularly interested me. It’s an aspect that general audiences, who usually pay more attention to the art than the writing on the walls, could easily miss. — Lee Rosenbaum
‘Miriam, Part 2, The Chair’
“A woman trapped in domestic boredom moves toward a nervous breakdown. Institutionalized, she attempts to create a performance for a shortly expected visit from her children, but can find no words to express her feelings. Only her instrument can serve as an expression of her deepest emotions.” — William Osborne & Abbie Conant
How Children’s Art Shapes Activism
“The idea that our political values might express themselves in how we think about children shouldn’t be surprising to us. In the wake of World War II, philosopher Theodor Adorno collaborated with a group of psychologists at the University of California at Berkeley to trace how early childhood experiences might make people more susceptible to either developing or revering what they described as ‘the authoritarian personality’.” – Los Angeles Review of Books
Theatre And Critics Are Not On Opposite Sides
The artist–critic war of attrition is boring. It’s a cliché — and if there’s a common enemy that all artists and all critics should share, then cliché is that enemy. When people give me that look upon discovering that I’m a critic and I’m a director — that look that says they’re suddenly not sure where to put me, that I must be a traitor to one camp, and which one is it? — I generally laugh it off, as if to say, Yeah, crazy world isn’t it? But what I really want to tell them is that at heart, criticism and directing are the same. – New York Magazine