The idea of an “Ideas Festival” is so broad that it could mean almost anything and thus, to most people, means absolutely nothing. Will they be celebrating new ideas? Old ideas? Is the festival strictly academic? Policy-oriented? Does it strive to make “ideas” culturally relevant? Will there be award statuettes shaped like light bulbs? And so on.
Month: October 2015
Bruce Coppock Retires From Leading St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Successors Appointed
Coppock, 64, led the orchestra from 1999 to 2008 and retired after being diagnosed with bile duct cancer. He survived the rare and usually fatal condition and returned to the SPCO in 2013, as the orchestra was emerging from a bitter contract dispute that led to a 191-day lockout of the musicians.
Lucerne Festival 2016 To Feature 11 Female Conductors
“Emmanuelle Haïm will conduct the Vienna Philharmonic, which, more than any other top orchestra, has been criticized for its slow pace of adding women to its ranks. Marin Alsop will make her debut in Lucerne conducting the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra, and Barbara Hannigan will conduct the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. Susanna Mälkki will conduct a new work by Olga Neuwirth, the festival’s composer in residence.”
This Week In Misguided Schools Censoring Books: ‘Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close’
“Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel … was suddenly pulled from the honors English curriculum at Illinois’s Mattoon High School because of ‘several passages that were ‘extremely’ vulgar detailing sexual acts’.”
Ai Weiwei’s True Medium Isn’t Legos, It’s Twitter And Instagram
“On Twitter, he puckishly retweets affirmations and condemnations alike, apparently more interested in sustaining debate than in simply winning the day. At such moments he seems less like a source of controversy than its stage manager.”
At Last, We May Be Close To Deciphering The Writing Of The Ancient Indus Valley
That civilization’s main cities “boasted street planning and house drainage worthy of the twentieth century. They hosted the world’s first known toilets, along with complex stone weights, elaborately drilled gemstone necklaces and exquisitely carved seal stones featuring one of the world’s stubbornly undeciphered scripts. … Now – as a result of increased collaboration between archaeologists, linguists and experts in the digital humanities – it looks possible that the Indus script may yield some of its secrets.”
Handwritten Draft Of King James Bible Discovered
“The King James Bible may well be the greatest work of literature ever written by committee – and now we know a bit more about the collaboration that produced it.”
Stop Expecting Artists To Work For Free – Or Worse, For ‘Exposure’
“The debate over working for free goes back a while now. But there are still people who haven’t heard the argument and think that ‘exposure’ of creative work is reason enough for people to give away their labors.”
Using Arts Education To Create Good Citizens And Thinkers: Remembering Black Mountain College
“Democracy is about making choices, and people need to take ownership of their choices. We don’t want to vote the way someone else tells us to. We want to vote based on beliefs we have chosen for ourselves. Making art is making choices. Art-making is practice democracy. Rice did not think of art-making as therapy or self-expression. He thought of it as mental training.”
What If You Made A Great Movie And Nobody Came? Why ‘Steve Jobs’ Bombed
“Danny Boyle and Aaron Sorkin’s exhilarating biopic-but-not-a-biopic of the late Apple co-founder sank like a stone in its first week of wide release after promising numbers in major markets and mostly rapturous reviews (ours included). What happened? The Internet, being the Internet, has some theories.”