Art News from Around the World

Visual Arts Fri, 14 Jun 2019 22:00 Does Owning A McMansion Make You Happier? To be clear, having more space does generally lead to people saying they’re more pleased with their home. The problem is that the satisfaction often doesn’t last if even bigger homes pop up nearby. “If I bought a house to feel like I’m ‘the king of my neighborhood,’ but a new king arises, it makes […]Source: Visual Arts Fri, 14 Jun 2019 19:34 The Bauhaus Was Built On Ambitious Ideas (That Both Succeeded And Failed) This new vision for an art school was explicitly intended to combine knowledge of modern techniques for making things with a medieval attitude toward how and why you are making them. Gropius and his allies were going to save the modern world by shoving it as hard as they could both backward and forward at […]Source: Visual Arts Fri, 14 Jun 2019 18:28 How Conservateurs Dismantled And Reassembled An Angkor Temple To Save It “In recent decades a shift in the flow of water across Phnom Bakheng amid heavy tourist traffic had jeopardised its long-term viability, prompting the WMF to seek a solution. Devotional shrines erected on the various levels had become destabilised because of a gradual change in the pitch at the ground level of the various terraces.” […]Source: Visual Arts Fri, 14 Jun 2019 12:16 Why Is Google Street View Blurring The Faces On Philadelphia’s Murals? “Of a random sampling of 30 Philly murals that included people, about three-quarters had some degree of facial blurring applied in Street View.” Why? According to a Google spokesperson, the technology that blurs the faces of actual people in Street View images “may be a little overzealous, likely because some of the faces appeared so […]Source: Visual Arts Fri, 14 Jun 2019 11:30 Huge Number Of Works In East Germany’s Museums Were Stolen From Citizens: Report “Starting in 1945, East German art owners fell victim to an array of inventive methods of expropriation. … In each of the four collections [studied], between 200 and 1,500 objects were discovered to have provenances suggesting they were unethically acquired, accounting for between 1% and 8% of their total inventories.” – The Art NewspaperSource: People Sat, 15 Jun 2019 14:58 Franco Zeffirelli, 96 “Critics sometimes reproached Mr. Zeffirelli’s opera stagings for a flamboyant glamour more typical of Hollywood’s golden era, while Hollywood sometimes disparaged his films as too highbrow. But his success with audiences was undeniable.” – The New York TimesSource: Theatre Fri, 14 Jun 2019 21:25 Evening Standard’s Sacking Of Its Theatre Critics Doesn’t Mean Criticism Is Going Away – It’s Just Moving On “Mainstream theatre criticism is unlikely to disappear. But professional, full-time critics, whose only real job is to review plays, may be a dying breed. It is unfortunately possible for publications to be committed to criticism whilst being utterly cavalier about individual critics.” – The StageSource: Music Fri, 14 Jun 2019 21:01 Palm Beach Opera Director Daniel Biaggi Stepping Down When Palm Beach Opera promoted him to general director in February 2009, the company was struggling. It was posting unsupportable deficits and the chief administrator job was a revolving door. Under Biaggi’s leadership, the company stabilized and grew. It slashed the budget, reducing the number of operas it produced at the Kravis Center from four […]Source: Words Fri, 14 Jun 2019 20:32 How The Internet Has Changed (Is Changing) Book Culture “The personal touch sometimes takes some of the critical edge out of books conversation online. Like many outlets, Bustle is fazing out professional book reviews, and Electric Literature did away with its reviews a couple of years ago now. Instead, these websites are prioritizing personal essays from a diverse group of writers, and both of the aforementioned sites have […]Source: Issues Fri, 14 Jun 2019 20:01 A New Funding Model For Opera, Ballet In Europe That Aims For Younger Audiences “Since 2014, Fedora has awarded €1 million to help launch 10 new opera and ballet projects, co-produced by 64 cultural institutions across Europe. To do this, they’ve tested new models of raising money and new ways of awarding it to operas and ballets.” – ForbesSource: Dance Fri, 14 Jun 2019 19:04 Choreography As Conflict Resolution — A Retired Dancer Becomes A Professional Mediator Dana Caspersen, William Forsythe’s wife and a former member of his company, Ballett Frankfurt, “develops choreographic methods that let groups address differences in nonverbal ways. Many of her projects center on participatory ‘action dialogues,’ which allow groups as large as 250 to tackle fraught issues like racism and polarization.” – Dance MagazineSource: Media Fri, 14 Jun 2019 18:01 HBO’s ‘Chernobyl’ Has Turned The Actual Town Into A Tourist Mecca “In a strange turn more than three decades after the meltdown, the exclusion area around Chernobyl is gaining a following as a tourism destination, apparently propelled by the popularity of a TV mini-series about the blast that was broadcast in the United States and Britain last month.” – The New York TimesSource: Issues Fri, 14 Jun 2019 17:31 Redefining London Culturally “More of us than ever consider ourselves culturally engaged, and we are now expanding the definition of culture “possibly to the point of extinction”. ‘Big c’ and ‘small c’ culture now intermix with a day-to-day theatricality that we all welcome, and the stage for this activity is places, from small community-owned plots to large brownfield […]Source: Media Fri, 14 Jun 2019 17:02 ‘This Is Heroic Criticism, Warrior Criticism, Live-Ammo Criticism’ — Six Film Writers Give Their Takes On Pauline Kael David Thomson: “The shrewdest thing to say about Pauline Kael – beyond recognising that she was essential – is that she was kind of crazy. Yet determined to seem rational or in control.” Kate Muir: “Her language is spankingly crisp and her reactions that of a ticket-buying human, not someone sweating ink as they try […]Source: Music Fri, 14 Jun 2019 16:24 Baltimore Symphony Musicians Lobby Governor To Release Money For The Orchestra “We put $8 million into the BSO,” Governor Larry Hogan said. “They received the most money of any arts group in the state, 74 percent higher than any other arts group. . . . We continue to pour millions and millions of dollars into the BSO, but they’ve got real serious issues and problems with the management, […]Source: Theatre Fri, 14 Jun 2019 16:03 How Do You Put An Ayahuasca Trip Onstage? You cast an actual Peruvian shaman, of course. And you get the entire rest of your cast do ayahuasca rituals furing the rehearsal period. Lyndsey Winship talks with Peruvian director-choreographer Oscar Naters, and with said shaman, about their performance piece, Ino Moxo. – The GuardianSource: Issues Fri, 14 Jun 2019 15:33 Why Medieval History(!) Has Become A Modern Battleground Last week The New York Times reported in detail on YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, which is “capable of drawing users deeper into the platform by figuring out ‘adjacent relationships’ between videos that a human would never identify.” The Crusades are a plum example of a topic that turns into a thread, leading the viewer through a labyrinth towards […]Source: Words Fri, 14 Jun 2019 15:04 ‘A Great Realist Novel’: Salman Rushdie On Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’, 50 Years On “It tells us that wars are hell, but we knew that already. It tells us that most human beings are not so bad, except for the ones who are, and that’s valuable information. It doesn’t tell us how to get to the planet Tralfamadore, but it does tell us how to communicate with its inhabitants. […]Source: Words Fri, 14 Jun 2019 14:36 Allen Ginsberg Annotates Gay Pride March Photos On the backs of pictures that photographer Hank O’Neal took of the marches in the 1970s, Ginsberg commented in Ginsbergian style. “Black white brown boy girl what idealism! — Wearing their hearts on a banner for nothing but love” – HyperallergicSource: Dance Fri, 14 Jun 2019 14:05 Jazzercise, At 50, Is Big Business “Countless workout fads have come along since the heyday of Jazzercise: Tae Bo, Pilates, Zumba, boxing, spinning, pole dancing. And yet Jazzercise persists: today, according to the company, there are more than seven thousand franchises, serving roughly two hundred and fifty thousand customers in twenty-five countries and grossing somewhere between ninety-five million and a hundred […]Source: