“The digital counter-tradition of what it means to be a Deadhead has long been in the ascendant through technology-based exegesis and curation of recorded materials. And the more time passes since Jerry Garcia’s death, the more being a Deadhead means streaming shows from the Internet.”
Contradictions: Why So Many Artists Are Such Sensitive People
“Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identified openness and sensitivity as oppositional personality elements that not only coexist in creative performers, but form the core of their personalities. This paradox helps explain how performers can be bold and charismatic on the one hand and emotionally fragile on the other.”
Art Basel Miami Stabber Pleads Not Guilty To Attempted Murder
Siyuan Zhao, a 24-year-old graduate student and a Chinese national who lives in New York, allegedly “had been following the victim, 33-year-old Shin Seo Young, and repeatedly bumped into her. When Young finally confronted her, Zhao stabbed her suddenly and repeatedly in the neck and shoulder with an X-ACTO knife.” Onlookers at first assumed it was performance art.
Is Tyler Perry A Traitor Or A Savior Or A Little Bit Of Both?
“It comes down to the question of who gets to decide what’s good for black people. Should all kinds of blackness be shown, or should its representation be curated? To Perry, no one should have the authority to make that call.”
What The Mainstream Can Learn From 2015’s Queer Indie Cinema
“The problem is that, even though mainstream viewers have learned to appreciate queer stories, creators still think that a story or its characters’ queerness is enough to create a successful work of art, commercially or otherwise. Or worse, that depicting a character queer in a nuanced way will scare away audiences. But that’s not the case, and it’s becoming obvious.”
Why This Theatre Critic Loves British Christmas Pantomimes
Lyn Gardner: “Sometimes friends look at me with sympathy when they ask if I’m on the annual panto patrol. But it’s a great art form that creates a special bond between performers and audience – and helps keep many theatres in the black.”
The Subversively Comical Adult Coloring Books Of The Early 1960s
“‘This is my suit. Color it gray or I will lose my job,’ reads a caption next to a picture of a man getting dressed for work” in 1961’s Executive Coloring Book. “The coloring books that followed managed to cover, between them, a selection of the decade’s neuroses: national security, the red scare, technology, sex, mental illness. … There were coloring books that made fun of communists and coloring books that made fun of people who were scared of communists.”
Tiny Malibu Radio Station Was Going To Be NPR’s Smallest Affiliate – Until …
KBUU, the low-power FM station in the isolated L.A. beach community, had gotten a surplus NPR satellite dish and lots of support from two larger area public radio stations (whose signals don’t reach Malibu), and was set to go – until NPR unexpectedly denied permission, apparently at the request of another nearby affiliate (whose signal doesn’t reach Malibu).
Martin Luther, Communications Technology Pioneer And Marketing Genius
“He used new media to circumvent the traditional gatekeepers and ordered structures of legitimacy and communication. Luther used the printing press to create a grass-roots movement four centuries before anyone would have understood the term.”
‘The American Matisse’: Jerry Saltz On Ellsworth Kelly
“A small confession: I came to appreciate the paintings of Ellsworth Kelly … in only the last ten or 15 years. Now, his work stuns me from its own Platonic eternity. I see one of his paintings, and I wake from my habitual self and feel like I’m in the presence of some shimmering undead vampire, something incessantly present.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 12.28.15
Performing arts and cities and (again) the creative class
A new study just published in the academic journal Economic Development Quarterly looks at the links between big (budget over $2 million) performing arts organizations and the change in the proportion of the metro workforce … read more
AJBlog: For What It’s Worth Published 2015-12-27
Monday Recommendation: Mette Henriette
The mystery, melancholy and minimalist magic of Mette Henriette Martedatter Rølvåg’s music stems in part from her family origins in the Sámi, the indigenous people of northern Scandinavia. … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2015-12-28
The Year in CultureGrrl, 2015 Edition
2015 was, for me, a high point of my CultureGrrl “career” – the only year when my dogged blogging was generously compensated, thanks to the munificent Art Writers Grant from Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation. This windfall … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2015-12-27
Shared Birthday: Crow, Budwig, Scofield & Dickerson
December 26th is the birth date of several notable musicians including Bill Crow (b. 1927), John Scofield (b. 1951) and Dwight Dickerson (b 1944). We wish them a happy birthday and remember Monty Budwig (1929-1992). … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2015-12-27
Immodest me, in Steve Cerra’s Jazz Profiles
Howard Mandel, photo by Salvatore Corso Thanks to Steve Cerra of Jazz Profiles for asking me a few questions by email, and letting me go on and on. Of course my answers are far from … read more
AJBlog: Jazz Beyond Jazz Published 2015-12-26
Smyth: Early, Late, and Best
I’ve found what I think is the best available music by Ethel Smyth: this recording of her Serenade in D (1890) and Double Concerto for Violin and Horn (1927). (Pardon the generic suffragette image on … read more
AJBlog: PostClassic Published 2015-12-23
Puerto Rican/European: Francisco Oller’s Hybrid Paintings at the Brooklyn Museum
Like the works of Archibald Motley, now featured at the Whitney Museum, the art of Puerto Rican painter Francisco Oller, subject of a concurrent retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum (to Jan. 3), inhabits two separate … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2015-12-23
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Taiwan Opens A Major New Branch Of Its Popular National Museum
“The flagship Taipei museum boasts more than 655,000 Chinese artefacts spanning 7,000 years from the prehistoric Neolithic period to the end of the Qing Dynasty in 1911. They were removed from the Beijing Palace Museum in the 1930s by China’s Nationalist government to prevent them falling into the hands of invading Japanese troops.”
Remembering Ellsworth Kelly
” He remained to the end a resolutely independent artist, and never wavered from his vision of colorful austerity, producing art that was resistant, yet never trivial, always clean, bold and deceptively simple.”