“The young don’t read newspapers, but absorb tons of information about celebrities. The definition of “celebrity” is so elastic that some nitwit on a reality-TV show for six hours is very famous indeed. Nobody is sure what is acceptable behaviour and what will get you shunned by civilized society.”
Month: May 2012
Dancers Want Action On Dealing With Eating Disorders
The director of the Royal Ballet has said that any dance company director who claims never to have worked with an anorexic performer is “lying”.
How Prizes Are Ruining Poetry
“The sheer number of poets now plying their craft inevitably ensures moderation and safety. The national (or even transnational) demand for a certain kind of prize-winning, “well-crafted” poem–a poem that the New Yorker would see fit to print and that would help its author get one of the “good jobs” advertised by the Association of Writers & Writing Programs–has produced an extraordinary uniformity.”
NY University Needs To Grow. But This?
“Nothing about this plan speaks to the way the university will nurture the city just as the city nurtures it. There’s no physical expression of the future of education, which is in flux thanks to online learning and collaborative research that is dissolving ossified departmental boundaries.”
Orchestras Working On Innovation
“Even the largest ensembles are looking to innovate, whether it’s preconcert happy hours, performances in unorthodox spots like grungy warehouses or collaborations with rap, jazz and blues singers.”
The Scream Sells For $120M At Auction
“Sotheby’s New York sold Edvard Munch’s 1895 The Scream for $119.9 million on Wednesday night, setting a record for the most expensive artwork sold at auction. The top spot was previously held by Picasso’s 1932 Nude, Green, Leave and Bust – a painting of his much-younger lover Marie-Thérèse Walter that sold at Christie’s in 2010 for $106.5 million.”
Dancer’s Heart Stops Onstage; Doctor In Audience Saves His Life
“It almost sounds like the old joke: Is there a doctor in the house? But when a 22-year-old dancer collapsed at a recent performance [at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in Manhattan], the answer was gravely serious.”
Is This The Hormone At The Heart Of Morality?
Paul J. Zak: “Research that I have done over the past decade suggests that a chemical messenger called oxytocin accounts for why some people give freely of themselves and others are coldhearted louts, why some people cheat and steal and others you can trust with your life, why some husbands are more faithful than others, and why women tend to be nicer and more generous than men.”
How A Five-Year-Old Foreign Film (A Cartoon, No Less) Sparked A Free-Speech Fight In Tunisia
“On Thursday, Tunisian courts will hand down a verdict in the public prosecution of Nabil Karoui, chief of popular Tunisian broadcaster Nessma TV, for airing [Marjane Satrapi’s film Persepolis]. The verdict will say a lot about the future of freedom of expression in the very country whose citizens kicked off the Arab Spring a year and a half ago.”
Asher Fisch Named Chief Conductor Of West Australian Symphony
The Jerusalem-born, Berlin-trained maestro, widely experienced in opera as well as symphonic repertoire, says of the Perth-based band, “They are a wonderful orchestra, they play anything you put on their stands in a very professional way, and it’s an orchestra I can really shape and give a playing style and a profile.”