Art News from Around the World

Visual Arts Fri, 19 Oct 2018 18:04 The Art Balloon That Scandalized Australia’s Ruling Elite Is Back “With a head like a turtle, a body like a giant cetacean and ten bulbous, hanging breasts, one thing is certain: It is hard to ignore the Skywhale. When the hot-air balloon debuted in May 2013, looming over Canberra for the Australian capital’s centenary celebrations, critics said the ‘floating sculpture’ created by Patricia Piccinini did […]Source: Visual Arts Fri, 19 Oct 2018 17:28 New York Museums Rescind Use Of Saudi Money For Programs The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum said on Thursday that they would not use Saudi money for programs on Middle Eastern art that had originally been supported by groups tied to the Saudi government.Source: Visual Arts Fri, 19 Oct 2018 12:46 Sotheby’s Didn’t Know About Banksy’s Hidden Shredder, But They Did Get Very Specific Instructions From Him Two execs from the auction house talked to reporter Anny Shaw about the now-world-famous self-shredding painting. They insist that Sotheby’s was not warned in advance — and Banksy himself issued a statement that said “no collusion” [sic]. But there were some suspicious stipulations for the sale.Source: Visual Arts Fri, 19 Oct 2018 12:31 Banksy Really Meant To Shred The Entire Painting, But The Shredder Jammed “In [a] video posted on Tuesday entitled Shred the Love (the director’s cut), Banksy shows himself constructing the shredding mechanism inside a frame. It then cuts to the auction room and the moment of partial destruction. At the end, the video notes: ‘In rehearsals it worked every time …’ as it shows the piece going […]Source: Music Fri, 19 Oct 2018 22:10 The Cover Song Makes A Comeback The status of the cover song has shape-shifted throughout pop-music history. Well into the 1950s, it barely even needed a name: It was just the routine way of doing business. During the rock era, covers became suspect as inauthentic, the stuff of the hack bar band, unless an artist “made the song their own.” With […]Source: Issues Fri, 19 Oct 2018 21:33 Why We Needed A New History Of The United States Jill Lepore has surmised, is that too much historical writing—and perhaps too much nonfiction in general—proceeds without many of the qualities that readers recognize as essential to experience: “humor, and art, and passion, and love, and tenderness, and sex… and fear, and terror, and the sublime, and cruelty.” Things that she calls “organic to the […]Source: Music Fri, 19 Oct 2018 21:01 How Music Competitions Are Reinventing Themselves Competitions, like the rest of the business, are redefining themselves. Rather than trying to produce the superstars of tomorrow, they’re increasingly focusing on the present: an end in themselves. Indeed, the line between the competition and other classical music organizations is increasingly blurred.Source: Issues Fri, 19 Oct 2018 20:32 Even As Its Economy Was Melting Down, Greece Still Invested In The Arts. Why? The principal belief is that supporting the arts and culture is not a luxury but an investment in human progress. It is the necessary scaffolding for building and sustaining civil society. It is the cornerstone for human growth and development.Source: Words Fri, 19 Oct 2018 20:02 We’re All About Feelings Now – How Literature Evolved Beyond Narratives Western literature’s gradual progression from narratives that relate actions and events to stories that portray minds in all their meandering, many-layered, self-contradictory complexities. I’d often wondered, when reading older texts: Weren’t people back then interested in what characters thought and felt?Source: Theatre Fri, 19 Oct 2018 19:32 Report: Broadway Theatre Audience Is Getting Younger The 21st publication is just out and reports the lowest age attendance since 2000, a significant bit of hope for Broadway’s long-term health. During the 2017–2018 season, the average age of Broadway theater-goers was 40.6, the lowest since 2000. For a second year in a row, there was a record total number of kids and […]Source: Issues Fri, 19 Oct 2018 19:03 Rap Is A Russian Art, Just Like Ballet, Says Russia’s Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky told a room full of worthies at an Aspen/Davos-type gathering in Sochi, “Soon we’ll be saying that rap is Russian art. Of course, it was born somewhere in America, but its flourishing occurred with us, of course.” Just like ballet. Then Medinsky pronounced that the very first rapper was, in fact, early Soviet […]Source: Ideas Fri, 19 Oct 2018 18:31 What Happens When The Great Thinking Of The World Is Reduced To Being Expressed In Tweets? So, what happens when people stop writing letters? Or when books become less central to society—a tangential diversion or eccentricity—less important than movies, which are less important than the premium cable channels, which are less important than Netflix and Amazon Prime, which are less important than video games, all of which together are less important […]Source: Words Fri, 19 Oct 2018 17:01 Icelandic Culture Has Survived Since The Age Of The Vikings, But Can It Survive The Age Of Tourism And The Internet? “Icelandic … has changed so little since then on our small and isolated island, that we can still more or less read [the Sagas] as they were first written. But Iceland is not so isolated anymore.” Novelist Ragnar Jónasson explains the factors that are making English more prevalent there than ever before (“Will Icelandic soon […]Source: Theatre Fri, 19 Oct 2018 16:31 On The Differences Between Being An Actor In The US And Europe “Certainly American culture is different from European culture. So I had expected the life of a theatre artist in Paris or London to be more refined, somehow easier, and at the same time more gratifying on a creative level than mine here in the States. But it turns out that their struggles, passions, fiscal concerns, […]Source: Music Fri, 19 Oct 2018 16:02 5,000-Year-Old Musical Instrument Found Near Rome “The ceramic shell at first appeared to be one of a kind. One hypothesis was that it might have been a cheese strainer. Then, similarities were found with two other objects, found near Naples, that had been convincingly identified as sound boxes for musical instruments.” One doctoral student determined that it was either a bowed […]Source: Music Fri, 19 Oct 2018 15:32 Brahms: Rhythms That Fight (That’s The Secret) Polyrhythms run through Brahms’s music like an obsessive-compulsive streak. You don’t have to be musically literate to know the bumpy feel of a cross-rhythm. Two-against-three can be a parent strolling hand in hand with a skipping child. Triplets on top of eighth notes are like a slow canter next to a trot: The two horses might […]Source: People Fri, 19 Oct 2018 15:03 Anthea Bell, Who Translated Kafka And Astérix, Dead At 82 She was a widely admired translator of German literature in particular, introducing works by Sebald, Zweig, and Freud as well as Kafka to anglophone readers. But she’s best known for her translations of children’s books from German and French, especially the Asterix series of comics, whose puns she cleverly rendered in English.Source: Words Fri, 19 Oct 2018 14:35 The First Pop-Up Books Weren’t For Kids — They Taught Adults Science “From about 1450 to 1750, most pop-ups appeared in scientific books. Movable paper parts were once used to explain the movements of the moon, the five regular geometric solids, the connections between the eye and the brain, and more.”Source: People Fri, 19 Oct 2018 14:04 Cicely Berry, Legendary Voice Coach For Actors, Dead At 92 “[She] was the best-known voice coach of her generation, though the term vastly underrates what she did and her attitude towards it.” In three books and 45 years at the Royal Shakespeare Company (along with extensive work elsewhere), she transformed the way that voice work for actors was taught, and even conceived.Source: Music Fri, 19 Oct 2018 13:33 The New American Songbook: The 30 Hits Of The Past 25 Years That We’ll Be Hearing For The Next 100 “Separating the most durable tunes from the millions of other would-be classics is no easy task. So we asked critics, musicians, and industry professionals to predict which [ones will last].Some of these songs our children will belt in sports arenas. Others our grandchildren will dance to at their weddings.”Source: