Author: Matthew Westphal

First-Ever Int’l Festival For Glass Art Debuts Next Month In Venice

Venice Glass Week will feature “more than 140 commercial and institutional exhibitions, talks and conferences, educational activities, open furnaces, film screenings and evening events. The aim is to show how traditional glassmaking techniques can be used to innovative effect in a contemporary context, while also educate visitors about Venice’s glassmaking history”

Starry Night, Maze, Flying Toasters – Remembers Screen Savers?

“Even when we chose them, personalized them, they were just there – artworks that we rarely thought of as art, partly because we never knew the names of the artists who had made them. The best examples of the genre underscored this sentiment by pushing back against the fact of conscious human design.” Jacob Brogan offers a history of screen savers and an explanation (for you young’uns) of why they were necessary and why we now so rarely see them.

The End Of Families Gathering Round The TV

It’s another thing to blame on the Internet: “New research from Ofcom [Britain’s equivalent of the FCC] has found that 45% of people now watch a programme or film alone every day while nine in 10 watch alone every week. The media watchdog says that a third of Britons say members of their household sit together in the same room watching different programmes on different devices.”

Paula Vogel’s ‘Indecent’ And The Challenges Of Liberalism

“In Indecent, Vogel has made a piece of art that’s about nothing more or less than Art’s survival in a world a lot like our own: a historical test case of the possibility of representing the reality of human multiplicity in a culture filled with competing singularities. What’s more, she’s done this by following the experiences of the group for whom the stakes surrounding that possibility have historically been highest, secular Jews.”

Why Is The U.S. So Bad At Teaching Students Foreign Languages?

“As an expert on language and literacy development in children, I’ve talked to many immigrant parents who expect their children to grow up bilingual, only to be surprised that they end up as monolingual English speakers. Meanwhile, foreign language learning opportunities for English speakers are limited. Why is the U.S. so bad at producing bilinguals?” Harvard education professor Catherine Snow suggests three reasons, and argues that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Why American Schoolkids Aren’t Learning How To Write Properly – And How To Fix That

“Three-quarters of both 12th and 8th graders lack proficiency in writing, according to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress. And 40 percent of those who took the ACT writing exam in the high school class of 2016 lacked the reading and writing skills necessary to successfully complete a college-level English composition class.” The Common Core and No Child Left Behind were supposed to address this, and it hasn’t worked. Dana Goldstein looks at the reasons why – and at the argument over the two ways to teach writing now in use.

Why I Want To Build An Art Museum For Las Vegas

Condo developer Uri Vaknin: “Already a world-renowned dining, entertainment and shopping capital, our city is now becoming a cultural hub. The openings of The Smith Center for the Performing Arts, The Mob Museum and the Neon Museum signals a clear move in that direction. Yet, I remain dumbfounded that Las Vegas lacks a world-class art museum.”