Described by founder Elsa Longhauser as a kunsthalle, the ICA LA is a small, non-collecting museum, whose origins lie in the now defunct Santa Monica Museum of Art (SMMoA). After a lengthy rent dispute with its landlord, the SMMoA closed in 2015, and Longhauser, the museum’s executive director, took time to regroup before rebranding the museum as the ICA LA. “We’re not really changing the model,” Longhauser told Hyperallergic at a press preview yesterday, “we’ve just expanded. Moving from Santa Monica to Downtown gave us the opportunity to rethink, revise, and contemplate what we want to do.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Artist Creates Image Of Giant Boy Peering Over US Wall With Mexico (And Crowds Gather)
“The boy, hair swept to the side and focus drawn by an unseen object, peeks with evident interest from the Mexican side over the slats of the wall at Tecate, Calif., as if looking over the railing of his crib.”
Art Conservators Set Up Hotline For Harvey, Irma Art Rescue
“An unlikely group of experts—art conservators—have banded together to do what they can, manning a 24-hour hotline that offers practical methods to treat water-damaged art. A small army of volunteers is also on standby to survey the damage in person after the skies clear.”
Another Proms Summer For The Books (and A Celebration For Classical Music)
“The 2017 Proms welcomed nearly 300,000 concert-goers through the doors of the Royal Albert Hall, with one in five purchasing standing tickets which are sold on the day for £6. More than 35,500 tickets were bought by people attending the Proms for the first time and 10,000 under-18s attended concerts across the season.”
Does Theatre Need Its Own Rotten Tomatoes?
“The bottom line is that, in theatre, as in movies and restaurants, aggregation is just a new way of looking at opinions. Yes, it’s all reductive – even the opinions can be as well, in relation to work they assess – but instead of getting aggravated with these sites, theatre producers should just focus on creating great work, as I believe most do, instead of trying to kill the messenger, as their Hollywood brethren wish they could.”
What Explains Hollywood’s Summer Swoon? Structural Decline! (Sound Familiar?)
“To explain the bad news, movie executives are trying out fresh excuses (blame … Rotten Tomatoes?), while journalists are rehashing familiar criticisms (people are bored with sequels!). Both of these explanations are wrong. The subtler truth is that the domestic movie market is in a slow, decades-long structural decline.”
What Amazon’s Wish List For A New HQ City Tells Us Much About The Future Of Cities
Amazon’s selection criteria, as described in the company’s request for proposal, sets out a compelling list of the attributes cities must have if they aspire to be a serious part of the America’s growing digital economy.
Canada’s Complicated Reconciliation With Its Past
“I wonder if English Canada has the strength to face the truth in the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report: that the evil inflicted on the indigenous populations of this country was not done by our worst people but by our best. The colonists believed that hope for the indigenous population meant stripping them of their language and culture and imbuing them with a spirit of thrift—they were trying to prepare them for the future, for progress. And the only future and the only progress that they could imagine was the one presented to them as an inevitable fact by Britain and America.”
Report: School UK Arts Education In Peril
Research by Norwich University of the Arts (NUA) suggests the exclusion of the arts from the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) schools’ performance measure is leading to lower pupil attainment, less funding and teacher recruitment challenges.
Why Science Won’t Ever Squash Religion
Not only has secularism failed to continue its steady global march but countries as varied as Iran, India, Israel, Algeria and Turkey have either had their secular governments replaced by religious ones, or have seen the rise of influential religious nationalist movements. Secularisation, as predicted by the social sciences, has failed.