Judging fiction is easier said than done. Cyril Connolly, formerly of the Observer, once wrote that “the great difficulty in reviewing new novels is to maintain a double standard – one to judge novels as fiction and the other as literature. Luckily, very few novels pretend to be literature, but when they do it is necessary to slate them by one rule and praise them by another.” In recent memory, several Booker panels have given masterclasses in the fine art of making a sow’s ear out of a silk purse.
Author: Douglas McLennan
Hillary Hahn’s Search For Creativity Outside The Box Of Violin-Playing
“Working with composers, I was realizing that there was a whole part of the musical creative process that I didn’t have firsthand experience with. So I started kind of entering that realm, from different directions, just to understand a little bit more of how a composer gets to the final point of the piece that they write.”
This Election Has Seen A Surge In Political Art
Activist street artists have been especially busy creating some of the presidential campaign’s most provocative political statements. Their bold approach inherits a long tradition.
Many Fear That Handwriting Is A Disappearing Art. But There Are Myths About Writing That Should Be Cleared Up
The first is that handwriting has always been a treasured mode of self-expression. Not so, according to Socrates, whom Plato quotes as saying that men’s acquisition of writing “will implant forgetfulness in their souls” and that writing’s value pales in comparison to the living art of conversation: “If you ask a piece of writing a question, it remains silent.”
William Bowen, 83, Former President Of Princeton U And The Mellon Foundation
“Before leaving Mellon in 2006, Dr. Bowen was instrumental in creating global electronic archives of scholarly journals and artistic images, including JSTOR, ARTstor and also Ithaka, which provides digital services to academia.”
This Weekend’s Top AJBlog Posts 10.23.16
What We Learned About Audiences This Week: An Uber For Classical Music? Threats To Our Attention Spans This Week: Live classical music on demand, in your living room!… Is being always connected killing our ability to follow complex art?… The Smithsonian Wants your money to preserve Wizard of Oz ruby slippers… … read more
AJBlog: AJ Arts Audience Published 2016-10-23
What We Learned About Audiences This Week: An Uber For Classical Music? Threats To Our Attention Spans
This Week: Live classical music on demand, in your living room!… Is being always connected killing our ability to follow complex art?… The Smithsonian Wants your money to preserve Wizard of Oz ruby slippers… Researchers say it’s probably alright to let babies play with screens… Alvin Ailey company engages audiences in its second home in a charged way.
This Week’s Top AJ Stories: A Huge Drop In Dance Audiences, MFA Programs
This Week: Why has dance attendance fallen off a cliff in New York?… Applications for MFA programs are down and things are looking bleak… Has our ad-supported business model for content killed quality?… There’s a big surge in art that addresses political issues… Bob Dylan, and what he means.
A Precipitous Drop In Dance Attendance In NYC
“A 20% decrease in the number of paid attendees at live performances emerged in the study, to be released Friday by the advocacy group Dance/NYC. The study looked at 172 dance organizations over a six-year period. The audience decline appears to have been led by drops at the largest organizations, those with budgets of more than $5 million.”
Tom Stoppard’s First New Play In a Decade
The profound question being debated here — is consciousness no more than brain tissue and, if so, is altruism merely the product of evolutionary biology? — has brought Stoppard into public colloquies with scientists and philosophers investigating this quintessential 21st century conundrum.