Month: May 2012

Thirty Years Of Looking At Cindy Sherman

“Sherman’s photographs evoke an idea of art as a mediated illusion, a grotesque and haunting chimera composed of different parts and pieces, of high-art and popular culture, of fantasies and uncertainties that are embedded and embodied in an array of visual cues that we encounter each day. These ideas have become our language about art and images since the late 1980s.”

A World Of Painting And Text

Artist Mira Schor: “The rectangle is a dynamic visual space, it is a dynamic compositional space, it is architectural, you have room to put something in and then something else in. … Each painting is a short story, and the paintings together suggest a narrative though not necessarily an obvious one, but at the same time, the rectangle is an interesting abstract object.”

Authors Who Produce A Book A Year? Slackers, Say Audiences – And Publishers

Mystery and thriller writers used to produce a book a year – but that’s not enough in the e-book age. “‘It used to be that once a year was a big deal,’ said Lisa Scottoline, a best-selling author of thrillers. ‘You could saturate the market. But today the culture is a great big hungry maw, and you have to feed it.'”

Angelica Garnett, 93, Bloomsbury Survivor and Chronicler

“Published in 1985, her memoir, Deceived With Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood, describes the luminous orbit around Ms. Garnett’s mother, the painter Vanessa Bell, a sister of Virginia Woolf. It was a self-reflexive, self-congratulatory milieu in which art was all, sex was the coin of the realm and the only real transgression was the unpardonable sin of being ordinary.”

O’Keeffe Museum Curator Leaves Abruptly

“Barbara Buhler Lynes has been recognized as the world’s premier authority on Georgia O’Keeffe, about whom she co-authored the Georgia O’Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonne (1999), and wrote the critical work, O’Keeffe: Stieglitz and the Critics, 1916-1929 (1989), which examined ways that O’Keeffe changed her painting after early critics insisted on reading depictions of female anatomy into her representations.”

Good News! As Dementia Sets In We Don’t Forget How To Dance

“People with dementia are constantly being told they can’t do this, they’re doing that wrong, but when they’re dancing they can suddenly move with much more confidence, they know the steps, the music triggers something in them. They might not remember the names of their spouses or children any more, but they haven’t forgotten how to dance.”

After Mass Layoffs, Australian Nat’l University’s Head Of Music Disappears

“The Australian National University’s School of Music head Professor Adrian Walter has taken an indefinite leave of absence from his job following escalating tensions … Last week all 32 permanent academics and staff at the School of Music were told their positions were being spilled as part of a dramatic restructure – with ten positions to be axed” and professors told to reapply for the remaining jobs.