Art News from Around the World

Visual Arts Fri, 17 Aug 2018 19:29 3D Images Of The Uffizi’s Sculptures Are Now Online The newly launched website, which was introduced at a ceremony in Florence last Tuesday, allows anyone with internet access to see and study the Uffizi’s world-class collection. Since the project was first announced in 2016, the Indiana University team recorded 3D scans of more than 300 artifacts, fragments, and sculptures under the direction of Indiana University […]Source: Visual Arts Fri, 17 Aug 2018 18:32 Clues To How Max Hollein Will Run The Met Museum? Hollein, who as of this August is the Met’s tenth director, strikes many people as being preposterously well qualified for the position. Forty-nine years old and armed with degrees in art history and business administration, he has already directed five museums and overseen the fund-raising and building of a new wing for one of them. […]Source: Visual Arts Fri, 17 Aug 2018 17:32 Why Is Chinese Art Around The World Being Stolen? In the face of China’s repatriation campaign—and the recent robberies—museums are now scrambling. Some have stood their ground, arguing the legitimacy of their acquisitions or touting the value to the Chinese of sharing their culture abroad. Others have quietly shipped crates of art back to China, in hopes of avoiding trouble with either the thieves or […]Source: Visual Arts Fri, 17 Aug 2018 16:28 Fifty Years After An Earthquake In Italy: A Radical Public Art Experiment While such “Concrete Utopias” are now getting attention in museums, it was actually the concrete Utopian city of Gibellina Nuova that became an open-air laboratory for assessing the healing capabilities of public art. Today, 50 years since the earthquake struck, many look back on Carrao’s radical experiment in civic engagement, rehabilitation, and unification as a […]Source: Visual Arts Fri, 17 Aug 2018 15:31 Banksy Protests A “Banksy” Show In Russia In Banksian Fashion When Banksy’s correspondent implores the artist to put out a press release expressing his displeasure, he replies with appropriate irony: “Hmm—not sure I’m the best person to complain about people putting up pictures without getting permission.” Instead, it seems, he just chooses to post the text exchange as a dig at the Russian “Banksy” show.Source: Visual Arts Fri, 17 Aug 2018 13:02 Empty The Museums – Most Of What’s There Belongs Elsewhere Simon Jenkins argues for the return not just of artifacts looted from other countries, but pretty much any art not created for a museum or gallery: “I want to see the Parthenon marbles as Phidias intended, even if recarved by a computerised jig. … Sensible people would long ago have replicated them and sent the […]Source: Visual Arts Fri, 17 Aug 2018 11:44 Banksy Disavows First Show Of His Work In Russia; Organizer Says That Means Show’s A Success Told of the show via his Instagram page, Banksy replied, “You know it’s got nothing to do with me, right? I don’t charge people to see my art unless there’s a fairground wheel.” On the other hand, he allowed, “[I’m] not sure I’m the best person to complain about people putting up pictures without getting […]Source: Blogs Sat, 18 Aug 2018 04:31 Remember the Members: Parsing Max Hollein’s Letter to Metropolitan Museum’s Most Devoted Fans Smart is the adjective that always crops up when people describe Max Hollein, the Metropolitan Museum’s new director. Yesterday, he made one of his first smart moves by issuing a detailed letter to Met members.Source: Blogs Sat, 18 Aug 2018 04:29 Bernstein at Brevard — Take Two: The Artist and Politics The Bernstein Centenary celebration at the Brevard Music Festival last month was multi-faceted. I was invited to explore the Bernstein story for a week with Brevard’s exceptional high school orchestra.Source: Blogs Sat, 18 Aug 2018 04:25 Excavate, Reassemble, Create What? My name listed in the Jacob’s Pillow program among the twenty-four people whom Netta Jerushalmy was gracious enough to thank for the “insights” they contributed to her Paramodernities?Source: Blogs Sat, 18 Aug 2018 04:15 Can we call someone “pretty”? The seventeenth episode of Three on the Aisle, the twice-monthly podcast in which Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I talk about theater in America, is now available on line for listening or downloading.Source: Words Fri, 17 Aug 2018 22:12 Controversial: Where Our Speech Patterns Come From Tracing the linguistic path of mmhmm, and many other words commonly used today, from West Africa to the U.S. South is difficult, is riddled with controversy — and experts say it has lingering effects on how the speech of African-Americans is perceived.Source: Theatre Fri, 17 Aug 2018 21:32 London’s National Theatre Commits To Telling Actors If They Haven’t Been Cast “It is vital that we pay respect to the actors we meet by always acknowledging their work and contribution to the casting process, which is why the NT wholly supports the #YesOrNo initiative.” He added that while the NT is not always able to make decisions right away, it will let actors know if they […]Source: Issues Fri, 17 Aug 2018 21:02 Closing Down UK Ticket Reselling Sites Won’t Stop Ticket Reselling “Live music is the one part of the music industry generating sustained profits, which has meant that the balance of power has swung from record labels and artists to promoters such as Live Nation and its subsidiary Ticketmaster. The defence offered until now by Ticketmaster is that Seatwave existed to facilitate fans – both those […]Source: People Fri, 17 Aug 2018 20:31 Aretha Is A Shooting Star (No, Really – They Named An Asteroid After Her) 249516 Aretha measures two to three kilometers, or less than two miles, across. It orbits between Mars and Jupiter, one of hundreds of thousands of known asteroids that reside between the two planets. It takes about five and a half years to make one trip around the sun.Source: Ideas Fri, 17 Aug 2018 20:01 Morality And US Higher Education, A (Fascinating) History The transformation of American colleges and universities into corporate concerns is particularly evident in the maze of offices, departments and agencies that manage the moral lives of students. When they appeal to administrators with demands that speakers not be invited, that particular policies be implemented, or that certain individuals be institutionally sanctioned, students are doing […]Source: Music Fri, 17 Aug 2018 19:03 A Rock Critic Has His First Experience With Near-Total Silence In the final entry of his 18-year column “Resonant Frequency,” Mark Richardson writes about the joys of a life lived with music blasting through headphones (and for him, those joys are very real), and his middle-age exploration of silence, culminating in a visit to an anechoic chamber.Source: Media Fri, 17 Aug 2018 18:04 Time For Asian-Americans To Forgive ‘The Joy Luck Club’? “If you want to see a community turn against an artwork that depicts them, make it the only one. If that artwork is by a woman, about women, and openly feminist, half the job’s already done. … [The Joy Luck Club‘s] greatest achievement — becoming the most prominent example of Asian-American representation on screen for […]Source: Media Fri, 17 Aug 2018 17:01 A Color-Blind – Make That ‘Color-Inclusive’ – Film Of ‘David Copperfield’ In the upcoming adaptation by Armando Ianucci (Veep, The Death of Stalin), Dev Patel takes the title role, with black, Asian, and white actors spread throughout. Says producer Kevin Loader, “I think we felt this was how you’d get the best cast more than anything else. And suddenly you can have Benedict Wong coming in […]Source: Words Fri, 17 Aug 2018 16:02 If There Can Be A Single Book That Defines Iran And Iranians, It’s This One The 11th-century verse epic Shahnameh (Book of Kings), the longest poem ever written by a single author (Abolqasem Ferdowsi) is perhaps the single most important source of the history and lore of pre-Islamic Persian civilization. It’s also considered the founding work of the modern Persian language, and some give it credit for the language’s survival.Source: