“The PSO announced Monday that it has canceled concerts scheduled between now through Oct. 27 in response to the strike.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Pittsburgh And Philly Have Their Issues, But Here’s One Pennsylvania Orchestra Where Things Are Different
“For starters, the musicians have a no-strike clause in their contract. Also, the Allentown Symphony Orchestra is seeing its audience grow and revenues increase. The musicians will vote next week on a three-year contract that gives them a raise. … Allentown Symphony Conductor Diane Wittry described it this way Monday: ‘We’re an orchestra that’s in a growth phase.'”
It’s World Ballet Day, With 20 Straight Hours Of Real-Time Video On Facebook Live
On Tuesday, October 4, “the Australian Ballet, The Bolshoi Ballet of Russia, The Royal Ballet, The National Ballet of Canada and The San Francisco Ballet will broadcast for four hours each.”
Bhangra On The Beach – Livening Up The Gray North Atlantic And Lighting Up The Web
Hasmeet Singh of the Halifax-based group Maritime Bhangra: “It was one of those things we usually do, right? We just go anywhere and start dancing and make a small clip out of it and just post it. … We were like, ‘Okay, this will get like 1,000 or 1,500 views.’ And it looks like it’s going to go 300,000 in a few moments.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 10.03.16
Maastricht, AKA Tefaf, Comes to New York
Tefaf – most often discussed by its location as in “are you going to Maastricht this year?” – is to my mind the most interesting and best art fair in the world. The participating dealers, usually numbering about 270, presents art from antiquity to the present. It’s huge. … read more
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2016-10-03
Happy 80th to Steve Reich
A few years back I spent an hour or so with Steve Reich before a concert of his work. Here is the story I wrote about the pioneering minimalist, who marks his 80th birthday today. … read more
AJBlog: CultureCrash Published 2016-10-03
Reviewing as First Draft of History
Last week Michiko Kakutani reviewed the first of two volumes of the latest Hitler biography for the New York Times. I’ve got Ian Kershaw’s double-decker biography, which is huge and ought suffice, but … read more
AJBlog: Quick Study Published 2016-10-03
August Wilson’s “Ma Rainey” at the Taper
Last night I caught Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom — one of the historically earliest of August Wilson’s cycle of plays about black life in the 20th century — at the Mark Taper Forum. This production … read more
AJBlog: CultureCrash Published 2016-10-03
Monday Recommendation: Bria Skonberg
Bria Skonberg, Bria (Okeh) In her first album for a major label, Bria Skonberg achieves consistency that in the past she sometimes obscured in forced vocal mannerisms. Her trumpet work, based in traditional jazz and … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2016-10-03
[ssba_hide]
The Artist Who Appears Nude In Front Of Famous Nude Paintings Explains Why She Does It
Deborah de Robertis: “Traditionally the body of the model is objectified to serve the message of the artist. My work suggests the opposite – the viewer is subjugated by the gaze of the model. … When I inhabit the role of the models – whether it’s Olympia or Barbie – it’s not about reproducing them but reconceiving them. When I invite myself into an exhibition, this exhibition becomes mine.”
Is It Possible To Read A Book ‘The Wrong Way’?
Adam Kirsch: “The more you think about it, the less obvious it is that any use of a book can be ruled out in advance.”
Anna Holmes: “If we’re interested in figuring out what’s wrong about reading, we might be better off determining what’s right and working backward from there.”
The Trouble With Travel Snapshots
“On the one hand, we have been encouraged to believe that we are no longer the sum of our products (as we were when we were still an industrial economy) but the sum of our experiences. On the other, we lack the ritual structures that once served to organize, integrate and preserve the stream of these experiences, so they inevitably feel both scattershot and evanescent. We worry that photographs or journal entries keep us at a remove from life, but we also worry that without an inventory of these documents … we’ll disintegrate. Furthermore, that inventory has to fulfill two slightly different functions: It must define us as at once part of a tribe (‘people who go to Paris’) and independent of it (‘people who go to Paris and don’t photograph the Eiffel Tower’).”
Why Akram Khan Made ‘Giselle’ Into A Ballet About Migrant Workers
“As [dramaturg Ruth Little] and Khan explored their own ideas about Giselle, they realised that the ballet’s apparently formulaic simplicity was actually its strength … Most fruitful to them was exploring the underlying issue of power – the gulf of money and class that separates the aristocrats from the peasants in the ballet, and that dooms Albrecht and Giselle’s love to tragedy.”
Seeing Cultural Appropriation And Clueless Privilege In Action, And Calling It Out
African-American artist Damon Davis on the work of Kelley Walker: “I sat in the audience listening to this man meander on and on to the crowd, interjecting the occasional art term like ‘form’ or ‘color,’ but never once giving the slightest explanation for why he used over-sexualized images of Black women and traumatic images of Black men being brutalized by police and dogs. … Now, what if I took pictures from the Holocaust and smeared cream cheese on them and threw them in a frame, and then told you it was a critique of capitalism and an exercise in color and the form of the contemporary modernist landscape?”