In March this year, the Pook & Pook auction house in Downingtown, Pennsylvania, offered 156 lots of around 430 objects that had belonged to Barnes and his wife Laura. The lots included furniture, clocks, textiles and porcelain objects, and hammered at $98,000 in total. – The Art Newspaper
Author: Douglas McLennan
Sarasota Symphony Regroups, Says It Will Consider New Home Outside City Limits
City officials are especially sensitive to the possibility of losing the Sarasota Orchestra after the recent relocation of two other cultural institutions outside of the city. Sarasota Herald-Tribune
iTunes, In Memoriam
Now that Apple is moving beyond iTunes, it’s worth remembering how revolutionary iTunes was. Before the iTunes Music Store, your best bet to find music online was through a file-sharing site like Napster. Your only legal options were either niche storefronts, or label-specific ones, none of them user-friendly. iTunes brought purchasing music online into the mainstream. – Wired
Music From The Brain’s Perspective
The first sound that results in the primary auditory cortex is a standard pitch. Other regions of the auditory cortex add more complex elements like timbre and specific sound quality. To add to the complexity, prior research has revealed that multiple areas of the brain become activated by listening to music — many of them not specific to music processing, such as emotional processing. Rhythmic processing on its own involves multiple overlapping structures of the brain. – Ludwig Van
Is Dancing An Essential Evolutionary Process That’s Hardwired Into Us?
“What if humans are the primates whose capacity to dance (shared by some birds and mammals) was the signature strategy enabling the evolution of a distinctively large and interconnected brain, empathic heart and ecological adaptability? And what if dancing plays this role for humans not just in prehistoric times, but continuing into the present?” – Aeon
How (Why) James Corden Brought Musical Theatre To Late Night TV (And Made It Work)
“We were going round the table and he just went, “I wonder if there’s a world in which you say L.A. doesn’t really have a theater community, but you’ve made it your mission to bring one, and you’re going to perform them on a crosswalk.” – New York Magazine
How A Dutch Museum Discovered The Monet It Thought It Had Was A Different Monet Underneath
Ruth Hoppe, the modern art conservator for the museum, noticed that the painting had been retouched to cover up tiny holes in it. On closer inspection, she found that there were shards of glass wedged into the canvas. Ms. Hoppe decided to do a more extensive investigation. She X-rayed the work, and discovered something extraordinary: Underneath the “Wisteria” was another painting — of water lilies. – The New York Times
Know This At Your Peril! How Knowledge Can Stand In The Way Of Truth
What more than true belief is required for knowledge? A natural thought is that your belief needs to be backed by good reasons. It can’t just be a guess that happens to turn out right. But this doesn’t seem enough either. – Aeon
The Celebrity Hologram – What Does This Say About How We Think About Fame?
It’s a given that celebrity image is built on smoke and mirrors. But we’re in a curious spot today, where the music industry is manoeuvering to convince audiences that the veneer of an artist’s presence is a compelling substitute to watching a flesh-and-blood performance. Enter the pop star hologram. – The Guardian
How Social Media Is Distorting The Value Hierarchy Of Higher Education
“The tools and rules of social media are increasingly swallowing up scholarly work, whether we join the new platforms or not. Where once discernment, hard-won expertise, and glacial, scrupulous scholarship read by only a small cabal of peers carried real weight, the research agenda is now driven by an economy of clicks, likes, follows, and retweets.” – Chronicle of Higher Education