How have we gotten to the point where we somehow feel like we’ve seen it all before, even as movies desperately keep trying to show us things that we’ve never seen before? – New York Magazine
Author: Douglas McLennan
Does Becoming A More Expert Reader Increase Pleasure Of Reading?
Does one kind of literature afford a more refined pleasure than another kind? Can we compare the pleasure induced by Virginia Woolf with, say, that induced by Agatha Christie? Is “Casey at the Bat” potentially less (more) enjoyable than Keats’s “Ode to Autumn”? Is the pleasure of reading Henry James similar to that of reading George Eliot? At what point does a story’s eloquence or lack of it begin to affect people in the same way? – American Scholar
Making Art: Bacchanal Or Fierce Discipline?
The process of giving artistic birth is said to court a kind of violence that the maker must reckon with. Recent books have wondered about the tension between varieties of addiction and creativity, often by writers who themselves had been alcoholics, booze being a way to blunt or redirect the violence of making. – The New York Times
A Trillion Photos – How You Gonna Organize Your Personal History?
Kodak once touted 2000 as a landmark year, when the number of photos taken worldwide first eclipsed 80 billion. Fast forward to 2017, when just about everyone has a cellphone camera in their back pocket, and that figure jumped to a staggering 1.2 trillion digital photos. – The Atlantic
Can A Rapper Own A Dance Move Built Into A Video Game?
This case touches on more than potential damages or royalties for 2 Milly. It goes to how our brains process meaning. What is the smallest bit of information that tags a person? What fragment of our motor vocabulary — a walk, a hair flip — equals identity? What sliver of movement, what gesture of the hand, or even, what gesture plus time and circumstance? – Washington Post
Why Our Meritocracy Has Failed Us
“First, meritocracy segregates talent rather than dispersing it. By plucking the highest achievers from all over the country and encouraging them to cluster together in the same few cities, it robs localities of their potential leaders — so that instead of an Eastern establishment negotiating with overlapping groups of regional elites (or with working-class or ethnic leaders), you have a mass upper class segregated from demoralized peripheries.” – The New York Times
French Cultural Venues Close As Protest Riots Grow
The Arc de Triomphe on the Champs-Elysées was graffitied by rioters; TV footage showed its interior ransacked and a smashed statue of Marianne, symbol of the French republic. French President Emmanuel Macron visited the Arc de Triomphe on Sunday, after returning from a trip to Argentina the day before, in order to inspect the damage. – The Art Newspaper
The Nutcracker Industry: By The Numbers
Dance/USA’s most recent Annual Financial Survey (2017), shows that Nutcracker/holiday revenue now represents an average of 48 percent of the surveyed dance companies’ overall season revenues and a median of 55 percent. As a percentage of total revenues, it represents an average and median of 15 percent. – Dance/USA
This Year’s Classical Grammy Nominations
The Seattle Symphony leads all orchestras with three nominations — two for its present music director, Ludovic Morlot, in Aaron Jay Kernis’ traditionally shaped Violin Concerto with soloist James Ehnes (in the classical instrumental solo and contemporary composition categories), and one for its future music director, Thomas Dausgaard, in Nielsen’s Symphonies Nos. 3 and 4 (orchestral performance), a strong opening entry for a complete Nielsen cycle. There were no nominations for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which has recorded little lately. – Los Angeles Times
Barrie Kosky: “Opera Is A Dream”
“Opera is an incredibly sophisticated art form that’s developed over 500 years. So there’s no one audience. If you want to just sit there without knowing anything about it and watch the pretty pictures with music at the centre, you are allowed to, great. If you want to do two years of research and study the programme and the libretto, great. And if you want to compare it to the 20 other productions that you’ve seen in the last five years, that’s great too.” – Bachtrack