“The intangible exchange of energy between moving and witnessing bodies in real time is what makes the art form so impactful. It’s a beautiful and grandiose idea that I imagine resonates with many dance artists, but, in creating Translations, that belief was truly put to the test. If you take the visual away from dance, what is left? What are we performing when we aren’t being watched? What do we miss and what is revealed?” – Dance International
Author: Douglas McLennan
Kennedy Center’s New “Reach” Is Great Counterpoint To The Original Building
Justin Davidson: “The Kennedy Center’s new complex is not just more fluid, usable, and versatile than we had any right to expect — it is also the rare project that improved on its way from concept and digital renderings to final construction.” – New York Magazine
MCA Denver Gets New Director
Nora Burnett Abrams, 41, will step in to replace Adam Lerner, the director and chief animator who stepped down this June after leading the museum since 2009. The Denver museum saw its attendance grow by 200 percent over the last five years, under his leadership, and has become a gathering place for the city’s teenagers. – The New York Times
Technology’s Impact On Friendships
The very language of friendship, for instance, is changing right before our eyes. Facebook has convinced us that “friend” can be a verb, often deployed in the imperative mood (“Friend me on…”). Apps have elevated the number of friends above the quality of friendship, displaying the tallies for onlookers to admire, one’s (envious) friends especially. As more than one observer has noted, “Friends used to be counted on; now they are counted up.” – Hedgehog Review
Silicon Valley: What If We’re Not Making The World A Better Place?
For a long time, the prevailing posture of the Silicon Valley élite was smugness bordering on hubris. Now the emotional repertoire is expanding to include shame—or, at least, the appearance of shame. – The New Yorker
The Anthropologists Who Thought They Could End Racism, Sexism
Franz Boas concluded that “there is not one human culture but many, and he started referring to ‘cultures,’ in the plural. He was engaged in ethnography, and he believed that the job of the ethnographer was to disappear, in effect, into the culture of the people being studied, to understand from the inside what it means to be male or female, to give or receive a gift, to bury one’s dead.” – The New Yorker
UK Museum Attendance Up Six Percent After A Couple Down Years
Attendance dropped by 1% in both 2017 and 2016, and by 0.5% in 2015. But new figures from the national tourism agency show a decisive turnaround, with attendance across 444 museums and art galleries growing by 6% on the previous year. – Arts Professional
Umberto Eco’s Outsized Influence On Popular Culture
Few of the newspaper obituarists seemed to know quite what he had done. He had been involved in something that had changed the way texts are interpreted; but it was not really clear why that was so Earth-shattering. – Times Literary Supplement
Why Was This UK Museum Using Facial Recognition On Its Visitors?
A spokeswoman for National Museums Liverpool defended its use of the enhanced surveillance technology as an additional security measure for the exhibition, titled “China’s First Emperor and the Terracotta Warriors,” which ran from February to the end of October last year. The technology was used on the advice of the local police and not at the request of the Chinese lenders, artnet News understands. – artnet
The Symbiotic Dance Between Jazz And Film
Since the advent of sound, movies treated jazz as a marker of modernity and youth, a soundtrack to a fledgling America further distancing itself from Europe and charting a path through its second century. – Los Angeles Review of Books