“When Mr. Rickles developed his stand-up act in the 1950s, his humor was considered shocking, with a raw, abrasive, deeply personal edge. If he wasn’t the first “insult comic,” he was by far the most successful and most widely imitated, becoming a fixture on television and in nightclubs for decades.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Colorado Ballet Notches A Record Season At The Box Office
“Seven years ago, the Colorado Ballet appeared to be at a financial death’s door, but Saturday’s bustle and a 2017 season finishing with record attendance and box-office receipts show the company is very much alive.”
Can The Arts Bring People Together In Areas Of Conflict?
“There is currently a rise in interest in the work of artists in areas of conflict. This work runs the risk of ascribing too much power to art, whereby it is seen as a potential panacea to the ills of the world.”
The MoMA Curator Who Lives In An Apartment With Almost Nothing In It
Klaus Biesenbach lives in an all-white, 550-square-foot high-rise apartment that contains little more than a table, a bed, a couch and two or three chairs. His favorite feature is the view from his window, which he photographs every day and posts to Instagram for his #window23 project. “It’s a calming place because there aren’t many distractions,” he said. “That’s what makes the window so important. How can you compete with the world?”
Joffrey Ballet Archives Go To Lincoln Center
Film and documents “are among the highlights from the Joffrey’s archive, which has been donated to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’s Jerome Robbins Dance Division. The gift coincided with the company’s return to New York for the first time last week since it moved to Chicago in the mid-1990s.”
Short-Attention-Span Music?
“Online streaming services offer countless choices, so there’s no reason to stick with a song that doesn’t grab you right off the bat. And many people don’t: Research from 2014 found Spotify subscribers skip about one-third of sampled songs after a mere 20 seconds. But perhaps more interesting is the notion that this new reality is changing the way music is written and recorded.”
Six Years After Revolution, Egypt Resumes Big Museum Projects
As culture officials wait for a tourism revival, the revolution has had the positive side-effect of inspiring local interest in Egyptian heritage. The number of Egyptian visitors to the Islamic museum has “risen exponentially” since the reopening, prompting GEM to rethink its projected audiences.
Exit Interview: Brent Assink On Leaving The San Francisco Symphony
The absolute number of total attendance at the symphony has dropped about 10 percent during Assink’s tenure. In effect, more individuals are coming, but less often. The good news is that the average age is dropping. What’s also changed are donor profiles and giving patterns, particularly in the last two years. The amount per donor has increased slightly and there is a new culture among donors, which is increasingly tied to Silicon Valley — as Assink put it, “with everything that that means.”
UK Museums Have Been Devastated By Funding Cuts In Recent Years
“Data published by the Department for Communities and Local Government suggests local authority spending on museums fell by 31% in 2016. The MA report estimates there have been at least 64 museum closure since 2010 – 15 of which occurred in 2016. In addition, there have been staff cuts in a quarter of local authority museums, 55% of national museums, and just under 60% of independent former local authority museums.”
How We Describe Buildings – Emotion Over Ideas?
“Architects tend to imitate the language of their clients and critics because they themselves are visual, visceral people for whom the thing itself and not a description of it is the dominant motivator. It has always been like that: the architects of the gothic revival spoke passionately in terms of morality and truth because that was the terminology the church-builders who employed them wanted to hear.”