Matthew Westphal – Page 1451 – ArtsJournal Wayback

The Problem With Peak TV (For Some Of Us)

“The shift from network TV’s relatively flat, manageable terrain to our current Wild West is exciting for some viewers (fuck commercials!) and bewildering for others – wait, so I’m supposed to make my own TV-watching schedule now? … That’s what scares me the most about the state of TV – it’s no longer a useful marker of time.”

Qatari Royal Family And Gagosian Client Settle Lawsuit Over That Picasso Bust Of Marie-Thérèse

“A settlement was reached in an international legal drama over Picasso’s plaster Bust of a Woman pitting two of the world’s biggest art buyers against each other, New York billionaire Leon Black versus a member of Qatar’s royal family. But who now owns the 1931 sculpture, depicting the artist’s then-mistress and muse, Marie-Therese Walter, remains a secret.”

Acid-Damaged Renaissance Painting Restored After 10 Years Of Work

“The Adoration of the Shepherds by 16th-century Italian artist Sebastiano del Piombo was removed from a wooden panel with acid in the 1700s and then painted over. Conservators at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum worked to repair the damage.”

Revived New York City Opera Gets Busy With Its First Full Season

The re-founded company’s plans for 2016-17 look more like what its team had been promising than did this year’s hastily assembled season. There will be only one warhorse, paired with a less-familiar title; the return of a star director (Harold Prince) to a landmark production from the ’80s; the long-delayed New York premiere of a well-known 21st-century opera; and two chamber works, one a Spanish Baroque rarity and the other a “CNN opera”. The new City Opera has even announced its first commission.

Ohio Orchestra To Fold After 75 Years

“Middletown Symphony Orchestra’s 75th anniversary next year will also mark its grand finale. Steve Ifcic, the symphony’s board chairman, said the board ‘has unanimously made the decision to close the curtain on the orchestra and end our musical programs in May of 2017 at the end of the 2016/2017 concert season.'”

Trying To Understand The Angry Identity Politics At Oberlin (And Lots Of Other Colleges)

“A school like Oberlin, which prides itself on being the first to have regularly admitted women and black students, explicitly values diversity. But it’s also supposed to lift students out of their circumstances, diminishing difference. … They move their lives to rural Ohio and perform their identities, whatever that might mean. They bear out the school’s vision. In exchange, they’re groomed for old-school entry into the liberal upper middle class. An irony surrounds the whole endeavor, and a lot of students seemed to see it.”

Yes, Students, The English Lit Canon Is Sexist, Racist, Colonialist, Heteronormative, Etc. – You Have To Read It Anyway

“The canon is what it is, and anyone who wishes to understand how it continues to flow forward needs to learn to swim around in it. There is a clear line to Terrance Hayes (and Frank and Claire Underwood, and Lyon Dynasty) from Shakespeare. There is a direct path to Adrienne Rich (and Katniss Everdeen, and Lyra Belacqua) from Milton. (Rich basically says as much in Diving into the Wreck.) These guys are the heavies, the chord progressions upon which the rest of us continue to improvise, and we’d be somewhere else entirely without them.”

The 19-Year-Old Choreographer So Talented That The Royal Ballet Created A Position For Her

“At 11 [Charlotte Edmonds] joined the Royal Ballet School and started choreographing straight away. She is dyslexic and found academic work challenging but she thinks her condition may have helped her choreography. ‘I have to strategise ways to remember things, a lot of visualisation, and that comes in really handy in the studio,’ she says.”

Menil Collection In Houston Selects Met Curator As Its Next Director

Houston native Rebecca Rabinow, currently curator-in-charge of the [Met Museum’s] new Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, takes up her new position in July.

Author: Matthew Westphal