Don’t Shoot the Player Piano
AJBlog: PostClassic Published 2015-06-25
Hailing Harold Holzer: Retirement Bash Today for Metropolitan Museum’s Public Affairs VP
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2015-06-25
Greg Reitan: Recording Where He Lives
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2015-06-25
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Author: Matthew Westphal
Docents Gone Wild
“More arts-loving baby boomers – educated, experienced and recently retired – are hustling to become museum tour guides. … [Yet] behind closed doors some museum staffers are growing impatient with docents flouting their supervisors, misstating facts, touching the art, and other infractions.”
What Should We Do With The US’s Many Confederate Monuments?
“Memorials are how we recount and publicly value our history (although how we tell that history is often distorted by political correctness and who can afford to build them). Dismantling all of these Confederate monuments and simply pretending nothing ever happened – continues to happen 1 would serve no one.”
Does Too Much Porn Really Numb Us To Sexual Pleasure?
“In many ways, pornography is no different to a scary movie or a bungee jump. We just view it differently because it happens to involve sex. … [One researcher] likened pornography addiction – the notion that, like a drug, the more you watch, the more, and higher doses, you crave – to the emperor who has no clothes: everyone says it’s there, but there is no actual evidence to support it.”
Book Publishers Are Finally Starting To Invest In Real Fact-Checking
“By tradition and by default, books aren’t verified to anything near the standard of a magazine piece. Publishers don’t even consider verification their business. … In fact, the practice of checking books is fairly common, though it’s also expensive. This fall, for the first time, one publisher is even promising to pay for it. Which is a pretty radical departure.”
What We’ve Learned From 30 Years Of NYC’s Percent For Art Program
More particularly, what we’ve learned from the (relatively few) serious dust-ups over particular projects: “each example reveals the hazards of placing confidence in the outstanding reputation of an artist, and in the notion that all it takes for the public to accept assertions by the avant-garde is time and patience. … It is as if one of public art’s undervalued and poorly recognized functions is to test the idea that no matter how negatively people perceive a work of art at first, they will in due course acquiesce.”
So What Exactly Was Dada, Anyway? (Hey, What Wasn’t Dada?)
“The metaphor-stretcher might say Dada was The Velvet Underground of its time; in its short life, few experienced Dada – yet it changed everything.”
Another Architectural Treasure Destroyed By ISIS
“While the destruction of medieval sites has received far less media attention than attacks on better known ancient sites such as Nimrud or Hatra, the loss of Iraq’s medieval sites is perhaps even more tragic due to the relative lack of scholarly documentation.”
What It Takes To Put On A Concert Of Female Singers In Iran
“[The producer’s] goal is worthwhile and her cadres of singers and musicians, winningly charismatic, which makes the seemingly insurmountable obstacles she faces in producing just one performance all the more dismaying. Sara needs government approval to stage her event, but the central premise of the performance – female soloists – is illegal.”
Dancing The Refugee Experience
“Would you know the moment when you must flee your homeland? Where do you think is the safest place to go? What do you do once you find it isn’t a welcoming haven? How do you navigate the roadblocks of immigration, citizenship, language?” How do you navigate all of these issues in an artform that, by nature, rarely uses words?