As Hannah Black, a British artist who’s one of the leaders of the protest against Dana Schutz’s Open Casket, puts it, “It’s not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun.” (Black thinks Open Casket should be destroyed.)
Author: Matthew Westphal
Colin Dexter, Author Who Created Inspector Morse, Dead At 86
“Dexter, who has died aged 86, claimed that he was no writer, but could revise his ‘bad starts’ into something that worked. The formula was certainly a success for some dozen Morse novels and many original scripts for television, the medium that delivered the doings of the idiosyncratic Morse to an audience across 50 countries.”
Malaysian Censors Back Down On ‘Gay Moment’ In ‘Beauty And The Beast’
The Film Censorship Board of Malaysia had declared that four minutes of what they deemed sensitive material must be cut before they approved release of the movie: in response, Disney withdrew the film from the country. Now the Board has relented, though they’re giving this fairy tale a 13-and-over age rating. (Well, that’s better than Russia did.)
NYC’s Commissioner Of Cultural Affairs On How The NEA, NEH, Etc. Affect The City
Tom Finkelpearl: “New Yorkers and our elected officials clearly see the value of investment in culture. On an individual level, people point to the transformative experiences that can bring joy and enlightenment while building empathy. … For more data-driven policy makers, there is a strong economic argument for cultural investment. It’s true: culture drives regional and international tourism, which creates jobs.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 03.21.17
The NEA (and Other Things)
The NEA, along with the NEH, the IMLS, the CPB, etc., etc., is very important for both symbolic and practical reasons. … The other thing that concerns me is that, in general, attacks on public funding of the arts are not about money or the arts. … read more
AJBlog: Engaging Matters Published 2017-03-21
I am still feeling the same glow
This Arts Advocacy Day, the stakes are much higher. As we work to make the case for the arts, we wonder, is our data keeping pace? … read more
AJBlog: Field Notes Published 2017-03-21
Making What You Will of Malvolia
Paul Levy on Simon Godwin’s production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, starring Tamsin Greig as Malvolia, at the National Theatre of Great Britain. … read more
AJBlog: Plain English Published 2017-03-21
What’s In A Name? Plenty, If The Name Is Cuneiform
Cuneiform is an independent label recording music that is out of the mainstream. … The history of the label’s name goes back 5,500 years or more. Curious about how it was chosen, I dropped a line to Joyce, the label’s director of publicity and information, and asked, “Are you archeologists?” … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2017-03-21
Religious Belief And Analytical Thinking Don’t Necessarily Cancel Each Other Out
“In 2012, several media headlines touted the narrative of what seemed like a groundbreaking study, which claimed that techniques used to make people think analytically can make them less religious. Half a decade on, however, the study’s findings are being brought into question with multiple papers that suggest its underlying methods were flawed – and, what’s more, the authors agree.”
‘Mellow Yellow’ – Remember When Hippies Smoked Banana Peelings To (Try To) Get High?
Eric Grundhauser tells the story of what may have been the weirdest drug hoax of the 20th century.
At This Point, Tech Start-Ups Are Basically Conceptual Art
Damien Hirst turned himself into a high-value business (with Charles Saatchi as his venture-capitalist backer), argues Ian Bogost, and collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps play with form and procedure every bit as much as a work by, say, Yoko Ono. These days there are young tech companies whose ideas seem more conceptual art than practical idea.
Henry VIII’s Last Wife Turned One Of Thomas Tallis’s Best Pieces Into Wartime Propaganda
Musicologist and conductor David Skinner writes about how the discovery of fragments of music manuscript behind some plasterwork at an Oxford College led him to a text written by Queen Katherine Parr for the nation to, as it were, pray the king into battle.
The Worries About Violent Video Games Are Basically A Moral Panic
“For a while, the only time you’d ever see a psychologist comment publicly about video games was in the context of blaming violent ones for all manner of societal ills – most famously, for school shootings.” Now a pair of psychologists is arguing that such blame is – well, not quite as ridiculous as “reefer madness,” but …