Mark Shenton: “As welcome as all this activity is, it is also slightly worrying that the deluge of productions arriving simultaneously could dissipate the audience. Yes, musical aficionados will want to see them all; but a wider public may not have the funds or inclination to do so. It will also be an added challenge for producers to establish their shows in such a crowded marketplace.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Why Is Music Pleasurable? (No Really…)
“Perhaps then, pleasure and music are connected in some way further removed from both the obvious sonorous tickle that music affords or the formal demands that music places on the listener. Perhaps we haven’t gone far enough when we suppose that pleasure in music derives from the recognition within it of a passionate utterance, or an imitation of nature, or an intense game of challenging listening to be played. Perhaps we’ve been asking too many questions about what in music is pleasurable, and too few about how pleasure is a phenomenon with musical qualities.”
DC’s African American Museum Opens Admission WIthout Reservations
Visitors began lining up before 8 a.m. on the last day of the holiday weekend, which was the first of the museum’s September Walk-up Weekdays. Several hundred were waiting when the doors to the Smithsonian’s newest venue opened at 10 a.m.
So You Think Immortality Would Be Grand, Do You?
The moral philosopher Samuel Scheffler at New York University has suggested that the real problem with a fantasy of immortality is that it doesn’t make sense as a coherent desire. Scheffler points out that human life is intimately structured by the fact that it has a fixed (even if usually unknown) time limit. We all start with a birth, then pass through many stages of life, before definitely ending in death.
DC’s National Book Fair Smashes Attendance Records
The festival, sponsored by the Library of Congress since 2001, drew at least 200,000 readers to the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in downtown D.C. They listened to talks and interviews with more than 100 authors, including Amy Tan, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Dave Eggers, Meg Wolitzer and Roxane Gay. Packed rooms were the order of the day for almost all the presentations.
How We Separated Art From The Middle Classes
For all its sundry failings and inexcusable prejudices, conventional art history provided a fundamental framework for assessing quality. Grouping works according to such commonalities as place of origin, period and circumstances of execution, artistic intent, function and medium facilitated comparative judgments. In the last decades, academia largely rejected this sort of connoisseurship, because it was too often tied to “great man” narratives. Over the same period, professional art criticism was effectively obliterated by a journalistic obsession (both in the surviving print media and online) with glamour, scandal and money. While the art world was never entirely free from market forces, those forces are now essentially left alone to determine value.
Why Are We Shaming Actors For How Much They Earn?
We can’t help making presumptions about their bank accounts, as if acting is less a career than a ticket to dreamland. Perhaps it’s time to stop differentiating what kind of work we think is “real”—whether it’s acting, bagging groceries, writing (hi!), governing a state, or tilling the fields—and start valuing hard work in whatever form it comes.
Can The Toronto International Film Festival Adapt To How The Movies Are Changing?
TIFF was conceived as North America’s audience-friendly answer to the black-tie formality and Olympian competition of the Cannes film festival. By now, it has upstaged Cannes as the launching pad for sending movies into Oscar orbit. North American producers have become wary of risking their fortunes on the French Riviera.
Is Programming Better When Artists Curate?
Performing arts institutions are recognizing they need vision to make it in an increasingly tough market. And artists have vision. But just going out and hiring artists is no replacement for the kind of institutional mission that makes vision work. And putting artists in these positions without thinking through their role in the larger organization risks undermining all their efforts and, in some cases, ghettoizing contemporary music still further as something that lies outside the organization’s main mission.
Arts Council England Reports Major Drop In London Arts Attendance
The figures include a dramatic decline of 17m (28%) in attendance and visits at London’s NPOs, which was marginally offset by modest increases in some other parts of the country.