Author: Matthew Westphal

The Little Rituals People Use To Ward Off Bad Luck Aren’t Just Arbitrary

Elizabeth Landau: “Otherwise reasonable people enact all kinds of rituals to promote good luck or cast off the bad, especially in situations of uncertainty. Three different Facebook friends of mine say they touch the outsides of the airplanes they are boarding before takeoff. Chimney sweeps are considered good luck in Germany, and another former colleague of mine would try to touch them when she was a girl growing up there.” What’s behind this is something called “embodied cognition.”

All The Events At Hamburg’s New Concert Hall – Yes, *All* Of Them – Are Selling Out

The director of the Elbphilharmonie says that tickets to performances by resident ensembles, touring orchestras like the New York Philharmonic and Chicago Symphony, chamber music, new music and jazz alike are all bought up within hours. He’s even selling “blind date” tickets to concerts by artists to be named later – and people are buying those, too.

‘Its Shell Holds An Unexpected World Inside’: An Art Critic Visits Hamburg’s New Elbphilharmonie

“The architects trick visitors into the daunting [eight-story] climb by changing the subject with a fun house of surprising events. The entrance leads past a decorative digital wall to a long ride on an escalator through a tunnel spotted with mirrored discs. Visitors land at a wide terrace, … [and] another escalator leads to an outdoor piazza … [which] marks the start of a modern version of the Spanish Steps in Rome.”

‘Keeping God Out Of The Gallery’: Does The Contemporary Art World Discriminate Against Overtly Religious Work?

Says one Christian artist, “One major Washington [D.C.] dealer said to me, ‘Ed, I’ve liked your work for years, but I don’t want to mark my gallery with your subject matter.'” Says another, whose work treats Judaic themes, “I’ve been told by dealers all the time, ‘I don’t want that crap in my gallery.'” And the reason may not be outright prejudice so much as a particular, now-standard ideal of what new art is and isn’t supposed to be.

Should Simon And Schuster Be Publishing Alt-Right Hatemonger Milo Yiannopoulos’s Book? (A Debate)

Ben Mathis-Lilley: “His project of mainstreaming white nationalism is one that Simon & Schuster should be embarrassed to lend its reputation to.”
Amanda Katz: “The book was acquired by S&S’s conservative imprint Threshold Editions, which has published plenty of other authors and books that lefty readers might find offensive to their values. Yiannopoulos has a big audience. Why shouldn’t they put out his book?”

Quite A Few Conservative Imprints Declined To Publish Milo Yiannopoulos – For Solid Business Reasons

They passed on the book not out of any outrage at Milo’s flamethrowing (these are the people that publish Ann Coulter), but because they decided skipping the book was a good business decision. Katy Waldman got several of them to explain why.

Sacramento Ballet Board Dumps Artistic Directors After 30 Years

“The Sacramento Ballet board of directors has announced the company’s 2017-18 season will be the last for co-artistic directors Ron Cunningham and Carinne Binda. … It will be their 30th season with the organization.” While Cunningham and Binda aren’t fighting the decision, they’re stating publicly that the board made it and they aren’t ready to go.

Can An Orchestra Bridge A State’s Political Divides? The Louisville Orchestra’s Music Director Means To Try

Teddy Abrams: “I thought, ‘wait a minute, instead of focusing on how to get a larger share of the state budget – which by the way is next to nothing; I think we get $30,000 from the state – maybe we should focus on getting an orchestra to serve the entire state and start using culture to break down some of these divides.’ Because this just can’t go on. It’s ridiculous: Here are people living right next to each other who can’t have a meaningful dialogue, and who assume nothing will ever change.”