“I don’t believe that films that are given token qualifications, in a couple of theaters for less than a week, should qualify for Academy Award nominations,” he said. “Once you commit to a television format, you’re a TV movie. If it’s a good show, you deserve an Emmy. But not an Oscar.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
El Sistema Founder José Antonio Abreu, 79
Well into his 30s in 1975, he formed a small orchestra of a dozen young musicians that would become the seed for El Sistema, or the System. Four decades later, the government-financed program claims to currently put 1 million Venezuelan children in contact with classical music through a network of hundreds of youth choirs, orchestras and music centers spread across the country.
Do Reviews Matter? Sure, But It’s A Complicated Question In The Digital Age
Of course reviews matter. That’s easy and predictable enough for someone writing a review to say, but it can be proven. Reviews matter in two ways: as filters, and as shapers of opinion. In his 1991 book, U & I, Nicholson Baker describes “book reviews, not books” as “the principal engines of change in the history of thought”; because no one has time to read all the books they want to, reviews must sometimes stand in for the thing itself. The more contentious point, about influence, can be divided into two questions: do they influence and if so is that influence beneficial or malign?
When Does A Piece Of Art Violate A Subject’s Rights?
What is the line between art and commerce? It is an important question, given that art enjoys broader free speech protections than the latter. It’s unlikely a Nike TV spot can successfully claim to be art—but what about a painting with limited edition prints sold through a website? When does that line get crossed?
Scottish Arts Funding Mess Suggests Need To Reconsider How We Support The Arts
“The increase in the number of network bodies in the Creative Scotland portfolio signals an acceptance of a model of competitiveness inherited from the Thatcherite government. We quite liked pretending to be business people, but we didn’t anticipate that we would need to accept responsibility for the future of cultural delivery. It’s hard work running a successful non-profit organisation and it takes skill to get it right all the time. The priority of artistic quality can easily become lost in project managerialism.”
How I Fell In Love With Opera
“I was by no means always an opera fan, and it was the singing that got me in the end. My grandmother and parents had taken me to see a couple of productions when I was younger in the hope of firing some latent interest, but it didn’t really grab me. Then, one day in my 20s, I heard a CD of my wife’s of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. I had no story to go on, no costumes, no set, no visuals at all, just a series of the most extraordinary voices singing insanely beautiful music. Hooked, I was. So hooked that all these years later I practically begged Glyndebourne to let me help present this weekend’s inaugural Glyndebourne Opera Cup competition for young singers.”
Are University Degrees In Curating Useful?
“The result of BA courses in curating will be a bunch of 21 year olds who will be theoretically savvy, but have little idea why particular works of art have a particular resonance at a particular time. They will be around £30,000 poorer after paying tuition fees – probably more, given their living costs – and they will realistically have few immediate employment prospects in the field of curating. Still, they can probably always go on to teach on a curating course.”
Surgeons Removed A Chunk Of His Brain, But His Virtuoso Guitar Skills Remained
“Pat Martino had brain surgery in 1980 to remove a tangle of malformed veins and arteries. At the time he was one of the most celebrated guitarists in jazz. Yet few people knew that Martino suffered epileptic seizures, crushing headaches, and depression. Locked in psychiatric wards, he withstood debilitating electroshock therapy. It wasn’t until 2007 that Martino had an MRI and not until recently that neuroscientists published their analyses of the images. Galarza’s astonishment, like that of medical scientists and music fans, arises from the fact that Martino recovered from surgery with a significant portion of his brain and memory gone, but his guitar skills intact.”
Why Studying Dance Is As Important As Studying Math (Or Science)
“The low status of dance in schools is derived in part from the high status of conventional academic work, which associates intelligence mainly with verbal and mathematical reasoning. The studies collected by Nielsen and Burridge explore how a deeper understanding of dance challenges standard conceptions of intelligence and achievement and show the transformative power of movement for people of all ages and backgrounds. Dance can help restore joy and stability in troubled lives and ease the tensions in schools disrupted by violence and bullying.”
What’s Killing Venice? The Moral Failure Of Its Government, Says Curator
“He rightly identifies one of the reasons behind the decline as being economic liberalism, which has led to the opening up of the Italian cultural sphere to private enterprise. He sees that it has encouraged a naive selling-out to the profit motive —as with the huge advertisements that for years defiled Venice—but he could, perhaps, have added that this has happened because the reasons for the symbiosis between the public and private sectors that exists in the UK and USA have not been understood by successive Italian governments.”