Art News from Around the World

Visual Arts Fri, 06 Dec 2019 20:01 Saddam Hussein Tried To Reconstruct The Ancient City Of Babylon, And His Abandoned Buildings Are Still There “In the 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam Hussein became obsessed with the Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar, who is notorious for waging bloody wars to seize large swaths of current-day Iran and Israel. Saddam saw himself as a modern reincarnation of Nebuchadnezzar, and to prove it, he spent millions building a massive reconstruction of Babylon. … […]Source: Visual Arts Fri, 06 Dec 2019 19:03 Feminist Art Show In Kyrgyzstan Includes Nude Women, And Kyrgyz Conservatives Flip Out “On December 3, one day after Mira Dzhangaracheva resigned her post as director of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Bishkek, a commission of officials from the Culture Ministry confiscated half a dozen exhibits. Organizers the maiden Feminnale of Contemporary Art in Bishkek placed signs reading ‘censored’ in their place.” – EurasianetSource: Visual Arts Thu, 05 Dec 2019 22:59 Washington’s Freer Sackler Galleries Want To Be Called Something Else Don’t call it a name change, though. Museum officials say it is a rebranding that clarifies the missions of the joint institutions. And, they say, it has absolutely nothing to do with international protests over the Sackler family’s connection to the opioid crisis. – Washington PostSource: Ideas Fri, 06 Dec 2019 23:01 The Creativity Artificial Intelligence Might Bring “In the future, we can expect computers to produce literature different from anything we could possibly conceive of. Our instinct is to try to make sense of it if we can. But when a new form of writing appears, generated by sophisticated machines, we may not be able to. As we learn to appreciate it, […]Source: Dance Fri, 06 Dec 2019 22:01 Performance Art Of Intimacy That desire for usefulness has always been a knotty issue for performance art, since it is often both accessible (live and affordable) and inaccessible (challenging and unfamiliar). Intimacy and ritual seem to be buzzwords in the poetry and art world at the moment. – Times Literary SupplementSource: Ideas Fri, 06 Dec 2019 21:01 A “Soft” Science? Philosophy And Its Search For Answers We can’t escape the question of what matters and why: the way we’re living is itself our implicit answer to that question. A large part of a philosophical training is to make those implicit answers explicit, and then to examine them rigorously. – AeonSource: Issues Fri, 06 Dec 2019 20:35 How The Canadian Government’s Increased Commitment To Culture Is Succeeding As many countries have continued to cut funding for the arts, Canada’s government has gone the other way and embraced culture and the idea of getting it seen around the world. Had the Liberal party lost in Canada’s October elections, a different attitude may have been taken by the country’s politicians. Instead a great deal […]Source: Ideas Fri, 06 Dec 2019 20:23 How Your Work Is Changing Under Governance Of Algorithms The hidden moments of reclaimed freedom that make any job bearable are being discovered and wiped out by bosses everywhere: That trick you used to use to slow down the machine won’t work anymore; or that window of 23 minutes when you knew your boss couldn’t watch you is vanishing. Whatever little piece of humanity […]Source: People Fri, 06 Dec 2019 19:28 New Book: Albert Camus Was Killed By The KGB Camus had sided publicly with the Hungarian uprising since autumn 1956, and was highly critical of Soviet actions. He also publicly praised and supported the Russian author Boris Pasternak, who was seen as anti-Soviet. – The GuardianSource: Issues Fri, 06 Dec 2019 18:29 Who’s Giving: Small And Medium Donators Are Disappearing Big donors have grown and small/medium-size donors have gone away. Empirically, this does not seem to have hurt total giving much in the recent past. However, what happens in the long run? Will bigger and bigger donors continue to bail out philanthropy? Will the elimination of the tax deduction for most former tax itemizers continue […]Source: Theatre Fri, 06 Dec 2019 18:02 How Did Tony Kushner Try To Fix His Problematic First Play? By Writing Himself Into It “For the revival of his first professionally produced play, A Bright Room Called Day, open now at New York’s Public Theater, Kushner has in classic Kushnerian style wildly rewritten the script … In so doing, he’s created an impossible play that circles two impossible problems — how the left could have responded to the rise […]Source: Theatre Fri, 06 Dec 2019 17:26 Broadway Musicals In Paris? Yes! For English-speaking creative teams, there are obvious benefits to opening in Paris. The market is far less crowded than in New York or London, and star casting isn’t much of a factor, since most musical theater performers are unknown to the French audience. – The New York TimesSource: People Fri, 06 Dec 2019 17:04 Adam Peiperl, Known For Kinetic Light Sculptures, Dead At 84 “From [his chemistry] studies came an idea that he could translate science into art by using polarized light to bring rainbow colors out of transparent plastic shapes. In the late 1960s he used this process to create kinetic, or moving, sculptures. … Over the next 50 years, Mr. Peiperl’s kinetic art would be displayed at […]Source: Issues Fri, 06 Dec 2019 16:31 Arts Funding Forum: Concern About The Future Of the more than 500 cultural professionals they surveyed, 78% said they were either “somewhat concerned” or “very concerned” about about philanthropic trends. A similar percentage said that the giving strategies for the next generation differed substantially from those of their predecessors. – The Art NewspaperSource: Words Fri, 06 Dec 2019 16:01 Great Britain Has Lost 773 Libraries In Last Decade “The closure of almost a fifth of the UK’s libraries over the last 10 years comes against a backdrop of a 29.6% decline in spend … since the Conservative government implemented austerity in 2010.” The number of paid librarians and other staffers has fallen by more than one-third in the same period. – The GuardianSource: Dance Fri, 06 Dec 2019 15:35 Donald Byrd’s ‘Harlem Nutcracker’ Sold Out Theaters, But It Bankrupted His Company. After Almost 20 Years, He’s Reviving It “It took five years of active persuading, plus nearly two decades of water under the proverbial bridge, before choreographer Donald Byrd finally agreed to resurrect The Harlem Nutcracker. Instantly loved after its 1996 New York premiere, his Nutcracker was financially doomed by 2001 — and left some scars on its way out.” But this year, […]Source: Music Fri, 06 Dec 2019 15:03 San Francisco Opera Names Its First Female Music Director “Eun Sun Kim, the South Korean conductor who made a powerful San Francisco Opera debut in June leading Dvořák’s Rusalka, has been named the company’s next music director. She will be just the fourth person to occupy the position in the company’s nearly 100-year history, and the only Asian woman to hold an artistic leadership […]Source: Media Fri, 06 Dec 2019 14:32 ‘Radiolab’ Co-Host Robert Krulwich To Retire The 72-year-old public radio and network television veteran has been alongside creator Jad Abumrad at the center of the popular podcast/radio series for 15 years. “No end date has been announced, with Krulwich hinting to one episode being finalized for ‘next week’ and an eventual super-sized episode about ‘a world population puzzle’ as his remaining […]Source: Music Fri, 06 Dec 2019 14:04 Tenor Vittorio Grigolo Fired By Both The Met And Covent Garden “[The 42-year-old] was dismissed Thursday by two of the world’s most prestigious houses: the Royal Opera in London and New York’s Metropolitan Opera. His firing comes after an investigation by the Royal Opera, which determined that he had demonstrated ‘inappropriate and aggressive behavior‘ during an RO tour of Japan in September.” – NPRSource: Music Fri, 06 Dec 2019 13:31 For The First Time In Living Memory, The Met Extends An Opera’s Run “[Porgy and Bess], which opened the season in September, was scheduled to return on Jan. 8 for seven performances, through Feb. 1. On Thursday, the Met announced it would add three more, on Feb. 4, 12 and 15. Big repertory companies, which plan their crowded schedules years in advance, rarely have the flexibility to add […]Source: