“Sculpt [is] a $1.5m feature film by the 38-year-old French artist Loris Gréaud. It will be shown at LACMA’s Bing Theater, an auditorium that normally seats 600 people, but with an almighty caveat: Gréaud has requested that all of the seats be removed except for one, which will sit in the centre of the space, forlorn and exposed.” (Rampling, by the way, plays Grumpy Bear.)
Author: Matthew Westphal
A Video Game For When You’ve Had It With ‘SimCity’: A Dystopian Business Simulator
“In The Founder, there is one goal, and that’s to grow your startup and please those investors until there’s nothing left to give. Along the way, you appease preferably low-payed [sic] employees with perks like office kegs and butter coffee, join the lucrative industries of biotech or defense, and run your competition into the ground with sponsored music festivals and ’causewashing campaigns.'”
What’s Saving Malaysia’s Traditional Puppet Theater From Islamists? ‘Star Wars’
When it came to power in one Malaysian state back in 1990, the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party banned the wayang kulit altogether because so much of its subject matter came from ancient Hindu epics. So a pair of enterprising young men turned to a different mythological epic.
How Mark Rylance Shaped His Most Famous Shakespearean Role (The Corset Helped)
“When you live with a woman for more than a decade – as Mark Rylance did, on and off, with a certain countess famed for her beauty and her severity – you come to know her well.”
Minnesota Ballet Salvages What It Can After Lightning Strike
“The good news is that $60,000 worth of Minnesota Ballet costumes haven’t been damaged as much as expected. The bad news is that the ballet remains out of a practice studio for the time being and needs a place to more closely examine its hundreds of costumes that were trapped under rubble for three weeks after Duluth’s July 21 windstorm.”
Edinburgh And Adelaide Festivals Plan Not-Quite-Merger
“Edinburgh is to team up with one of its main overseas cultural rivals to commission major productions, help develop up-and-coming artists and even share staff in future.”
PEN America Creates New $50,000 Award For Foreign Authors
“The PEN/Nabokov award, supported by the Vladimir Nabokov Literary Foundation, replaces another award with the same name but a different remit. It will go to a writer born or residing outside the US, either writing in or translated into English to honor ‘an outstanding body of work over a sustained career’. “
Sculptor To Place 55 Enormous Horses In Front Of Colosseum In Rome (It’s All About Refugees)
“Fifty-five monumental statues of horses are to be placed in front of the Colosseum and at Trajan’s Market in Rome next month. The works, by the Mexican artist Gustavo Aceves, are made from a variety of materials including bronze, marble, wood, iron and granite. The horses are shown in fragments; some of them are standing in boats, others are positioned on top of classical columns.”
De-Queering, And Re-Queering, Sappho
There’s a centuries-long (millennia-long, really) tradition or scholars and writers trying to remove the small-l lesbianism from the great poetess of Lesbos. Lesbian classicist Ella Haselswerdt looks at those attempts and takes them apart, if not down.
Athletes At The Ancient Olympics Didn’t Get Medals, They Got Victory Odes
“Forget medals, Wheaties boxes, interviews on Good Morning America, or corporate sponsorships: The ancient Greeks celebrated their Olympic champions with poetry.”