“So much of our understanding of the arts in this country is bound up with the individual tastes of the listener or consumer. The primacy of classical music as an artful or superior genre has gradually diminished. Increasingly, classical musicians are not so much advocates for their art as apologists. This is not a trend I observe, however, in great art museums.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Economists Predicted Progress Would Lead To Lives Of Leisure. But Indigenous Tribes Had Figured That Out Long Ago
“Convinced that mankind had been on a journey of unrelenting progress since we emerged from the swamp, he believed the 15-hour week to be the culmination of hundreds of generations’ collective ingenuity and effort. Perhaps Keynes would have had a different view had he known that the 15-hour week was a reality for some of the handful of remaining tribes of autonomous hunter-gatherers, and that, in all probability, it was the norm for much of the history of modern Homo sapiens.”
Should Serious Dancers Really Go To College?
Although schools like Juilliard and Bennington College have made degrees acceptable for modern dancers for decades, the competitive ballet world (which often follows a philosophy of “the younger the better”) tends to discourage higher education.
Arundhati Roy Leads This Year’s Booker Man Longlist
On a longlist thronged with literary titans, whose combined trophy cabinet would include the Pulitzer, the Costa, the Baileys, the Folio, the Impac and the Goldsmiths prizes, Roy – the only author to have won the Booker before – is listed for her novel about an Indian transgender woman, which judges called a “rich and vital book”.
Indigenous Dance Festival That Focuses On Contemporary Indigenous Culture Across The World
The festival will highlight commonalities, as well as differences, across geographically or politically separated Indigenous cultures. National borders are of scant relevance to the peoples whose ancestors inhabited Turtle Island long before Europeans “discovered” North America. Santee Smith emphasizes that today’s Indigenous artists are highly individual. “We’re all rooted in our world views — societal, spiritual, philosophical — and share a belief that art and performance are an integral part our daily lives, but we’re far from being homogenous.”
How Opera America Helped Spark A New Era In American Opera
“New music is a culture that tends to romanticize risk, and I think we ought to push back on that romanticizing. For all its aesthetic innovation, new music remains a job for many people.” Perhaps the same could be said of new American opera. Debates over its future highlight a complex web of expectations concerning not only the importance of radical artistic vision but also the commercial realities and conventional operatic norms of larger institutions that cannot afford to fail in the same way that smaller organizations might.
China Blacks Out Foreign Movies And Sees Home-Grown Movies Top The Box Office
China’s government, intent on building a domestic film industry to rival Hollywood’s, typically bans imported releases during peak moviegoing periods, such as national holidays and summer vacations. The blackouts — officially called “domestic film protection periods” — have historically given a summer bump to local films.
American Theatre Enthusiastically Takes On The Made-For-Theatre Trump
“With almost as much gusto as the talkers on cable news channels, the theater world is chewing over the bombastic image and pronouncements of President Trump, albeit with even less concern about the appearance of neutrality. It’s fair to say that among the lively arts, the theater has staked a claim most quickly and aggressively as a conduit for critiques of an administration that the vast majority of artists look upon as a threat.”
The Most-Popular Playwright In America Is An Unexpected Name
Lauren Gunderson recently topped the annual list of American Theatre magazine’s ranking of the country’s most-produced playwrights. (She was second only to August Wilson, who is deceased. Shakespeare receives so many productions every year he is no longer included on the list). Her placement there was remarkable for a number of reasons. She’s one of only a handful of women to make the list, and at 35, she is relatively young to appear there. But Gunderson took the theater world by surprise primarily because she has never had a major production in New York.
Study: Art Hung Higher Than Eye Level Is Rated Higher Quality
Those who looked up at the work “rated the painting most positively, while participants who looked down gave the lowest aesthetic appraisals,” the researchers report. “Eye-level presentations received judgments in between.”