“A soprano who joined the Met in 1966 as a member of its adult chorus, Ms. Doria took the helm of the children’s group in 1986. For the next 23 years, until she stepped down in 2009, she superintended her charges – who ranged in age from about 5 to the early teens – through weekly classes at the opera house, through stage rehearsals and, like an operatic Momma Rose, from the wings at every performance.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Crystal Pite Has An Interesting Theory About Why Ballet Choreography Is So Male-Dominated
“A young boy making the choice to study ballet as a kid is strong enough to push against the ridicule of his peers so he’s probably already a bit of a maverick … It’s natural for girls to be in the ballet world so they don’t have to resist anything – and they are prized for their ability to be obedient, to conform. So all the qualities that got the boy into ballet class in the first place are the same qualities you need to be a creator.”
Public Art At Rio Olympics Cut Because There’s No Money
“The arts programme ahead of the 2016 Rio Olympics has suffered another loss due to budget cuts … A public work by the Italian artist Giancarlo Neri is among the installations recently cancelled by the country’s new culture minister Marcelo Calero.”
Miami Beach’s Bass Museum Announces Plans For Reopening Following Expansion
“The museum’s historic Art Deco building has been under construction since 2013, when it first announced the $12 million expansion. … Without expanding the exterior of the building, Isozaki and Gauld’s redesign” – which opens December 1 – “will increase the size of the museum’s exhibition space by 50 percent, adding four new galleries.”
Conductor Myung Whun Chung Cleared Of Embezzlement Charges At Seoul Philharmonic
The charges, which many observers considered fabricated, arose from the stormy end of Chung’s tenure as music director and his conflicts with the orchestra’s notoriously combative former president, who was forced to resign at the end of 2014.
Why Are So Many American Authors Writing About Characters Outside America?
Charles McGrath suggests that it’s “a novelistic weariness with America and Americans, a sense that our native ground is not too thin, as Henry James would have it, but too played out.” Siddhartha Deb thinks perhaps they shouldn’t bother: “Can a novel set abroad be anything other than the Grand Tour novel or its successor, the imperial novel?”
Why Writers And Readers Alike Keep Getting Drawn To Nature
“We love reading about nature for the same reason naturalists love being ankle-deep in marshes: Nature provides enough order to soothe and enough entropy to surprise. It’s also why so many involve a person in the landscape; understanding our place in the world is as important as understanding the world itself.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 08.03.16
Are We Building Artistic Leadership?
Are the arts about selling tickets to shows or about art? Of course performances and exhibitions don’t happen if they don’t have money to be produced, but – as evidenced at an arts marketing conference where I recently spoke … read more
AJBlog: diacritical/Douglas McLennan Published 2016-08-03
A Big Splash for A Little Museum
Winona, MN, is home to just 27,500 people, but it has an art museum worthy of a much bigger city. The Minnesota Marine Art Museum – which is far more interesting than you may now be imagining … read more
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2016-08-03
The Met Breuer, Like Its Signature Show, Is “Unfinished” (with video)
I decided to revisit the Met Breuer today, to view belatedly its well attended, justly praised exhibition of photographer Diane Arbus‘ early works, in which her unsettling genius for detecting the bizarre in the commonplace … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2016-08-03
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A Clinically Depressed Egg Yolk Is One Of Japan’s Most Popular Cartoon Mascots
“Meet Gudetama, the anthropomorphic embodiment of severe depression. Gudetama … feels existence is almost unbearable. It shivers with sadness. It clings to a strip of bacon as a security blanket. Rather than engage in society, it jams its face into an eggshell and mutters the words, ‘Cold world. What can we do about it?'”
The Final Chapter In Billy Wilder’s Filmmaking Career (Did You Know It Lasted Into The 1980s?)
“In the last 20 years of his life, Wilder (who died in 2002) managed the unlikely feat of being both revered and ignored. … There came a point after his final two movies, Fedora (1978) and Buddy Buddy (1981), when Hollywood simply stopped financing his work. … He went every day to his office in Beverly Hills to work on projects that would never be made.”