“Money taints everything, why not writing too? Once its value is determined by the marketplace rather than the writer or the reader, our relationship to literature becomes estranged. From bloated celebrity advances to rejected masterpieces, the market is more than just a poor arbiter of lasting quality: it tends to obscure that quality behind purely economic motivations. Good writing, we’re told time and time again, is born from love, not avarice. But this romantic picture of the writer, toiling without regard to money, is itself a fiction—one whose roots stretch back several millennia, and whose effects we’re still dealing with today.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
What Works? US Symphony Orchestras Are Programming Live Music Movie Nights
“The allure of this programming from an orchestra’s perspective is easy to see. In their never-ending quest to bring in new audiences — particularly patrons for whom the standard classical repertoire is less familiar terrain than it was to their parents and grandparents — the San Francisco Symphony and similar organizations have found a product that exerts a different sort of allure from that of a Brahms or Mahler symphony.”
Architect Of The US Capitol Orders Painting Removed
“Critics of the painting said the officers were depicted as pigs, which sparked outrage among Republican lawmakers and some police groups. Supporters said it was an example of free expression that deserved to be displayed. The dispute led to a bizarre back-and-forth as GOP lawmakers unilaterally ripped the painting from the wall and returned it to Clay’s office, only to have Clay and his allies rehang it alongside other paintings selected in the competition.”
How I Learned Systematically To Adore Classical Music
“I stood like a tourist at the foot of Everest. The tower of music loomed forebodingly before me. I began with baby steps, playing piano records in the background as I went about the day, letting the tunes seep in by osmosis, not getting too close in case I scared myself off. Over the next few weeks the slow-drip method started to take and the music began to fall into place. Melodies untangled. Their logic unfurled. Basically, I listened, and listened again, until the music made sense.”
The Eiffel Tower To Get A €300 Million Refurbishment Over 15 Years
“The landmark, which receives more paying tourists—around seven million a year—than any other monument in the world, was built as the centerpiece of the 1889 Universal Exposition. The planned refurbishment is intended to bolster the French capital’s bids to host another World’s Fair in 2025 and, before that, the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic games, according to a statement from the mayor’s office.”
Six Female Artists At The Top Of The Auction Charts
Auction prices are a terrible way of judging the value of an artist. But they do tell you something about the demand for their work. Male artists command higher prices generally, but these six women are rising in the auction market.
Jennifer Holliday Pulls Out Of Inaugural Concert
In an open letter, provided exclusively to TheWrap, the “Dreamgirls” star apologized to the LGBT community, saying she was “uneducated on the issues that affect every American at this crucial time in history and for causing such dismay and heartbreak to my fans.”
The 24-Year-Old Choreographer Who Puts Branding At The Center Of His Art
Sometimes it seems like the arts retreat further and further into their own arts bubbles. That is – the arts play to particular arts audiences, continually reinforcing those audiences but finding it more and more difficult to reach general audiences. So how to break out beyond dance audiences if you’re a dancer?
Twenty-four-year-old dancer/choreographer Jacob Jonas has an idea, reports the Los Angeles Times. He’s a former skateboarder, and his work borrows from range of traditions and forms. He’s also got a different idea about an artist’s role in art:
Jonas is as much a businessman as he is an artist, and he’s proud to tell you so. He laments the fact that universities teach students how to make art but not what to do with it.
“Artists fail when they aren’t able to make their art a brand,” says the choreographer and dancer, who is lean in an almost feline way, with thick muscles that propel him into lithe motion at the slightest provocation. “We want to be at the intersection of dance and fashion — of dance and advertising. How do we get dance to a wider audience?”
With a wider audience, Jonas reasons, comes the kind of financial support that dance needs to sustain itself and rise to the level of music, television and film when it comes to commercial visibility.
Dance is probably one of the most undervalued art forms in society “in terms of how it’s set up as a profit model,” he says.
Jonas believes that the traditional “pure” art of dance has become disconnected from the larger culture. To reconnect, he has imagined his work as an intersection of other things which are already familiar to the audiences he wants to reach. His vision of “branding” is to sit his work in the paths of those who aren’t already dance audiences and let them define the context.
Today’s AJBlog Highlight 01.13.17
Art Errors: Steve Cohen Evades Not Only the Feds, But Also the New Yorker’s Fact-Checkers When I read the art-related passages in the New Yorker‘s Total Return: When the feds went after a hedge-fund legend (aka Steve Cohen, the mega-collector ), all I could think of was: Where are the … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2017-01-13
Kennicott: Controversy Over Loan Of Painting For Trump Inaugural Is A Test
“The St. Louis museum isn’t backing off its commitment to send the painting to Washington, and the effort to stop it is a small pre-election skirmish in what will be a long, fraught and likely disorganized boycott of the Trump administration by artists, scholars, and citizens who align themselves with the arts and humanities sector. The petition, and the flurry of attention it raised, is important as a moment of what might be called the “stress testing” of this country’s cultural institutions. As Trump opponents look to the next four years, they want to know how much cultural and moral capital is stored in the institutions they love. Will museums and universities and arts centers be up to the challenge of confrontation, resistance and truth-telling?”