Matthew Westphal – Page 1732 – ArtsJournal Wayback

Aeschylus Addresses Europe’s Boat-People Crisis

As desperate refugees fleeing African and Middle Eastern war zones drown in the Mediterranean and flood Italy, Greece, and Malta, a director uses Syracuse’s ancient Greek amphitheater to stage The Suppliants, about a much earlier group of Egyptians seeking asylum.

Suddenly, Ai Weiwei’s Art Is All Over Beijing – Is His Pariah Status Over?

Since his notorious 2011 arrest, China’s most internationally famous artist couldn’t show his work at home and couldn’t travel abroad. Galkleries and the press weren’t even supposed to mention his name. Now he has four solo shows going in the capital. Is the government rehabilitating him?

Rare Book Theft Is A Big Problem, And Booksellers Are Complicit

“Spectacular recent heists from European libraries have exposed something rotten at the heart of the international rare book trade. … What has stunned the book world is not just the scale of the thefts, but how easily the stolen goods were fenced and resold.”

Why Even Julie Taymor (Who Filmed It) Says ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ Is Unfilmable

“Taymor’s film reveals more of the spectacle than any one spectator at the theater could have seen. Nonetheless a filmed version of a stage production cannot quite capture the sense of being there, even if the wizards currently developing the science of virtual reality no doubt are conceiving ways to eliminate the distinction.”

Wendy Whelan And Alessandra Ferri Explain How They Keep Dancing Well Into Middle Age

Whelan (48): “Contemporary dance is a completely different way of thinking and moving. I’m already smitten by it.” Ferri (52): “It took courage to dive back in … [But] it didn’t feel like a job this time. The passion was so pure it gave me the strength to work through the physical difficulties and the pain.”

Delaware Art Museum’s Deaccession Gambit Didn’t Pay Off So Well

The plan was to sell four works – including a Calder, a Wyeth, and a Winslow Homer – for $30 million or so, using the money to retire the debt from a 2005 expansion and add $10 million to the endowment. But that isn’t quite how it worked out.

Argentine Writer Faces Prosecution For Doing Borgesian Things To A Borges Story

“Pablo Katchadjian decided in 2009 to remix one of Borges’s most renowned short stories, ‘The Aleph’, keeping the original text but adding a considerable amount of his own writing. The result was the short experimental book called El Aleph engordado (The Fattened Aleph) … Katchadjian has now been formally charged with the un-literary sounding crime of ‘intellectual property fraud’. If found guilty he risks spending up to six years in prison.”

Four Ways Women Get A Raw Deal In Hollywood: A Female Producer Explains

Mynette Louie: “I spoke to some of those filmmakers to get a better sense of the forms of discrimination they typically face; these four examples were the ones most commonly cited.”

Watching Male Strippers With Sociologists

“And, as it turns out, there’s been lots of [sociological study] done on male strippers who dance for women. With the opening of Magic Mike XXL yesterday, we thought this would be a good time to review the research.”

Author: Matthew Westphal