Author: Douglas McLennan

Is The Way To Disrupt The Art World Really To Disrupt The Art World?

“Even as one very visible portion of the art world becomes ever more soaked in money, artists like A.L. Steiner are picking up the ideas of first- and second-generation institutional critique and adapting them to the needs of the present. With what feels like increasing frequency, they are investigating, tweaking, and even striking out against the operation of museums, galleries, and the very market itself as an integral part of their larger practices.”

Jennifer Holliday: Were Death Threats Really Necessary When I Made A Mistake About Performing In The Inaugural?

“Holliday says it wasn’t until a Daily Beast article explicated why those in the LGBTQ community, a group that the singer credits with the success of her career, might find her decision to perform so devastating that she understood her responsibility to bow out.”

Theastre Gates On Re-Visioning The Art Of Art

“It is a time-honored role for artist as designator, to point at the stuff of the physical world and revision it as art, harkening back to the readymade. But Gates’s decision to ‘bump off from art’ and live ‘in the sphere of dirt, the dirty, the stuff that we think is in the ground’ was revelatory, leading to invitations to Davos and a TED Talk, where he talked about how he revived a neighborhood with imagination and hard graft.”

The Ideas We Aren’t Hearing – Africa? India?

“Non-European thought is often underrepresented in philosophy. The rich histories of India, China, the Islamic world, and Africa are often seen as footnotes and side ventures to the thinkers of Europe. While European thought is of great use, the influence of African ideas on Freud, the influence of Maoism on many French philosophers, and the refinement of Greek ideas by Islamic thinkers cannot be denied.”

Pretty Big Dance Company Gets More Than A Pretty Big Audience

As in 7 million YouTube views. “When people look at a full-figured girl, automatically they just think, they can’t do. But there are lot of plus-sized people that can really dance and move. I mean, you have to know your body as a dancer. You have to know how to transfer your weight. Of course, you know, being a woman of my aesthetic, I know my body. I know what I’m capable of doing. So you just have to be comfortable in your own skin.”

Simon Rattle, Beginning His London Symphony Post, Calls For A New Concert Hall

He threw his weight behind a £280 million (324 million euro, $347 million) project aimed at creating a “Centre for Music” equipped for the digital era. The plans involve building a new hall on the site of the Museum of London, which is relocating nearby, which would become the new home of the LSO.

Opera’s Newness Problem – The New Stuff Competes Head To Head With Masterpieces

“Opera lovers routinely avoid new works for just this reason: They’re not going to be on a par with the masterpieces that still make up the bulk of the operatic canon. Part of the problem is the delivery mechanism: New opera is less available than a new book and, generally, a lot more expensive. Wouldn’t it be great if new opera were presented like a film festival? Yes — and more and more festivals are trying it.”

Hollywood Politics? Sure, But The Stories That Get Made Have Everything To Do With The Box Office

Movies that show struggles against prejudice, poverty, ignorance, oppression and fear reflect liberal values only in the sense that “reality has a well-known liberal bias”, said Marty Kaplan, quoting Stephen Colbert. “If there were big money to be made telling stories celebrating home schooling, semi-automatic rifle ownership, the bullying of gays, white supremacism, misogyny or xenophobia, Hollywood would be racing to make them.”