Art News from Around the World

Visual Arts Fri, 22 Feb 2019 22:30 Museums Are Being Criticized For Taking Money From Robber Barons (And The Like). What To Do? Obviously, take the lead, realize there’s a problem as standards change. Instead, protests driven by social media are shaming some of the world’s most venerable cultural institutions, and they’re looking pretty bad. But there’s a balancing act to consider, writes Adrian Ellis… – The Art NewspaperSource: Visual Arts Fri, 22 Feb 2019 20:03 Robert Rauschenberg Once Threw His Paintings Into A River Because A Critic Said So The artist’s 1953 exhibition in Florence wasn’t well-received by the conservative public of the city: one critic was appalled at the art’s “barbaric metaphysics” and another called it “psychological garbage and that it must be thrown into the Arno.” So, when the show was over and Rauschenberg saw how much it would cost to ship […]Source: Visual Arts Fri, 22 Feb 2019 13:46 Met Museum Gets Major Gift Of Colonial South American Art “It was either a dream come true or a prank: a man living in São Paulo with no previous relationship with Metropolitan Museum of Art cold-called the New York institution one day in 2017 and said he wanted to donate some of his paintings. And not just any paintings, but Spanish colonial works, a category […]Source: Visual Arts Fri, 22 Feb 2019 12:29 Eduardo Chillida’s Sculpture Park In Spain To Reopen For First Time Since Financial Crisis “Chillida Leku, the private museum and sculpture park devoted to the work of the Spanish sculptor Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002) in the Basque countryside, will reopen fully to visitors on 17 April.” Since 2011, it had been only by appointment. – The Art NewspaperSource: Ideas Fri, 22 Feb 2019 23:02 When Good People Do Bad (And Why) You might wonder how people who seem so good by occupation could be so bad in private. The theory of moral licensing could help explain why: When humans are good, it says, we give ourselves license to be bad. – NautilusSource: Issues Fri, 22 Feb 2019 22:04 A Jiffy Lube Owner Talks About His Business’s Relationship With The Arts Steve Sanner: “Small business owners like me don’t often view the arts as an area in which we can make a real difference. Even our “stretch” sponsorship levels are overshadowed by the huge dollar amounts that wealthy individuals, banks, law firms, and insurance companies can generate. For us, philanthropy is difficult to plan for, so […]Source: Music Fri, 22 Feb 2019 21:25 Remembering Composer Dominick Argento Argento was always a force apart. He belonged to no compositional school, preferring a distinctly eclectic language that appealed both intellectually and emotionally to his audiences. At a time when most of the celebrated American composers were based on either the East or West coasts, where they could work together and help promote one another’s […]Source: Ideas Fri, 22 Feb 2019 21:01 Will AI Ever Be Artists? Be Creative? Produce Art? A Philosopher Argues No “Human creative achievement, because of the way it is socially embedded, will not succumb to advances in artificial intelligence. To say otherwise is to misunderstand both what human beings are and what our creativity amounts to.” – MIT Technology ReviewSource: Ideas Fri, 22 Feb 2019 20:30 Machines Can Now Write Compelling Fake Stories. Soon We Won’t Be Able To Tell What’s Real Jack Clark says it may not be long before AI can reliably produce fake stories, bogus tweets, or duplicitous comments that are even more convincing. “It’s very clear that if this technology matures—and I’d give it one or two years—it could be used for disinformation or propaganda,” he says. “We’re trying to get ahead of […]Source: Media Fri, 22 Feb 2019 19:28 The Troubled Oscars – A Timeline Have we ever seen a more chaotic lead up to an awards telecast? A host is announced, then revoked. Categories are added, then rescinded. Awards are to be televised, then not. Then televised again. It’s enough to make you think the Academy doesn’t know what it’s doing. At the least, it shows a collapse in […]Source: Words Fri, 22 Feb 2019 19:04 Explaining ‘The Satanic Verses’ — Any Why We Won’t Be Seeing Anything Like It For A While “The increasing prominence of radical Islam, or Islam as a political force, is obviously one factor. The other factor, especially in the West, is the increasing emphasis on culture and ethnicity, religion included, as a means of self-definition. … Rushdie’s satirical look at religion comes across quite differently when Islam is conceived of as an […]Source: Theatre Fri, 22 Feb 2019 18:29 Ah, The Scourge Of Jukebox Musicals… Except… They’re Really Fun! The critics aren’t wrong: We really do want that crisp, new snap. But Broadway has deep roots in vaudeville — no story, just acts — so audiences are right: We’ll always crave performances that revel in that singing, dancing beat. – Washington PostSource: Words Fri, 22 Feb 2019 18:01 Using The Oxford Comma Makes You A Hotter Prospect On Tinder “On an internet occupied by as many finger-wagging ‘grammar Nazis’ as slovenly texters who prefer emoji to verbal displays of emotion, the Oxford comma has become a cause célèbre. This is especially true on dating apps, where many users have deemed the punctuation mark something they ‘can’t live without’ — a designation that’s put it […]Source: People Fri, 22 Feb 2019 17:31 The Blazing Talent (And Mental Illness) Of Pianist Oscar Levant “To read about Levant is to be struck by how his seeming compulsion to blurt the details of his mental illnesses into the nearest microphone foreshadowed the modern-day “oversharers” who chronicle each twist and turn of their private lives. Even so, there was more to him than his madness, and the story of his career […]Source: Music Fri, 22 Feb 2019 17:02 What Went Wrong At Ireland’s Two National Orchestras, And How To Fix It An investigation last year found that the national broadcaster’s two orchestras, the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra and the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, were under-utilized, underfunded, and plagued by low morale and mistrust. RTÉ National Symphony general manager Anthony Long talks with a reporter about how things got to such a pass and what’s being done to […]Source: Media Fri, 22 Feb 2019 16:32 What Netflix Has Discovered About International Tastes In An Era Of Nationalism Netflix’s strategy is fundamentally different. Instead of trying to sell American ideas to a foreign audience, it’s aiming to sell international ideas to a global audience. A list of Netflix’s most watched and most culturally significant recent productions looks like a Model United Nations. – The New York TimesSource: People Fri, 22 Feb 2019 16:13 ‘Empire’ Producers Write Jussie Smollett’s Character Out Of Script “While these allegations are very disturbing, we are placing our trust in the legal system as the process plays out,” said a statement from the series’s producers at 20th Century Fox. “We are also aware of the effects of this process on the cast and crew members who work on our show and to avoid […]Source: Issues Fri, 22 Feb 2019 16:03 Jussie Smollett’s Alleged Hate-Crime Hoax Won’t Change A Damn Thing Evan Urquhart: “A hoax like this would never have worked if we weren’t already divided about how seriously to treat hate crimes and whether victims should be believed — too divided for an isolated incident to make things worse.” – SlateSource: Issues Fri, 22 Feb 2019 15:35 What Does The Jussie Smollett Saga Reveal About 2019 America? Victimhood Chic John McWhorter: “Smollett doesn’t need the money he would get from a court settlement, and he isn’t trying to deny someone higher office. So why in the world would he fake something like that attack — if he did indeed fake it? The reason might be that he has come of age in an era […]Source: People Fri, 22 Feb 2019 15:04 Actor Jussie Smolett Charged With Felony For Staging Hate-Crime Attack The 36-year-old actor, a star of the Fox series Empire, received an outpouring of national attention and sympathy after he was reported to have been violently attacked in Chicago by two white men shouting anti-black and anti-hay epithets. After the police found and interviewed the ostensible attackers, who turned out to be two Nigerian-American brothers, […]Source: