Author: Matthew Westphal

Classical Music Needs To Drop ‘Elitist’ Trappings To Survive, A Third Of Poll Respondents Say

“One in three [British] adults responding to an online poll highlighted ‘aloofness’ as a challenge for the artform, and a similar percentage said they thought major classical events only ever happened in [London]. 40% of respondents said concerts need to be performed in more everyday places – such as parks and clubs – for classical music to remain relevant.”

Five Versions Of Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ United For First Time – Virtually

“Six of those now-famous paintings survive, five in public collections … Alas for aficionados, those five publicly held Sunflowers are scattered over three continents and have never been seen together. But Thursday morning, their isolation ended, so to speak, when a ‘virtual exhibition’ reunited the Arles Sunflowers on Facebook in a single cyber-gallery – dubbed Sunflowers 360 – creating the illusion that they are hanging in a single space.”

Russian Censors Clear Controversial Film About Last Tsar

Matilda a sumptuous production about the young Nicholas II’s affair with a half-Polish ballerina, has sparked more protests in Russia than any other film since the fall of the USSR. Conservative Orthodox Christians, appalled at the depiction of an illicit (but well-documented) relationship involving a monarch they consider a holy martyr, have been demanding that the film be banned.

Choreographer Pam Tanowitz Wins $50,000 Cage Cunningham Fellowship

“The prize – which comes with $50,000, access to the [Baryshnikov Arts Center’s] John Cage and Merce Cunningham Studio for eight weeks and administrative support to create a new work – goes to an artist who reflects the innovative spirits of Cage and Cunningham, life partners and collaborators who were titans of 20th-century music and dance.”

Why ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ Still Leaves Us (Ahem) Reeling

“Albert Finney sobbed like an animal, Harold Pinter ramped up the terror and John Hurt even resembled Beckett himself.” Why do actors and viewers keep coming back to the play – even, as Michael Billington writes, “someone like myself, who is not a fully paid-up member of the Beckett club”? Well, Billington says, “it is partly because of its perfect alliance of form and content.”

The Rise And Fall Of The Louise Blouin Art Media Empire – Former Top Editor Of Artinfo Tells The Tale

Ben Davis: “How many people out there still care about the implosion of the Blouin organization as we know it and its hail-mary mutation into an e-commerce hub? Not that many, it seems. And no one has done more than Louise Blouin herself when it comes to transforming her once formidable enterprise into a punch line. To measure the magnitude of her fall from grace, maybe it’s worth going back 10 years. Then, Louise Blouin – at the time, still Louise Blouin MacBain – was the toast of the art world, a fearsome new contender whose media ambitions were set to shake things up.”

Who Gets To Make Art Out Of Black Pain? Two Very Different New Movies Show Why It Matters

Dana Stevens: “Both Detroit and Whose Streets? move from a large-scale panoramic view of an urban community in crisis toward a more intimate portrait of a few of the individuals involved. But Whose Streets? is the more effective and emotionally powerful of the two, perhaps because it constructs its world from the ground up, not from the top down. This is another way of framing a fact that’s difficult to talk about (especially for a white critic) but important to note: The filmmaking team behind Whose Streets? is black, and the one behind Detroit is white. The question – a very live one at this moment in history – of whose story is whose to tell is raised in a stark fashion by the release of these two movies in successive weeks at a moment when the civil rights of people of color (including nonwhite immigrants) are as imperiled as they’ve been since the days of those Detroit riots.”