Author: Matthew Westphal

When This Famous Orchestra Moved Its HQ Into A Housing Project, Good Things Started Happening

“Eight years ago, one of Europe’s best-known orchestras” – the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen – “moved their rehearsal rooms to a secondary school on this housing estate and pupils from Tenever found themselves sharing their corridors and lunch tables with professional musicians. Since then the school’s results have improved, its drop-out rates have fallen to less than 1% and the atmosphere in the wider neighbourhood has been ‘transformed’, according to Joachim Barloschky, a local official.”

British Theatre Has Gone Election-Mad

“It’s a paradox. In TV studios and on Twitter, British politics seem trapped in a spin cycle of claim and counter-claim, carefully massaged soundbites and kitchen-sink (or kitchen-counting) drama for an audience largely looking the other way. But on stage – particularly in the hands of young, experimental theatre-makers – the workings of democracy have rarely seemed so charged with possibility.”

Former Jasper Johns Aid Gets 18 Months In Prison For Art Theft

James Meyer “worked as an assistant to Johns for 25 years, and stole the works over the course of a six-year period, from 2006 to 2012. He admitted to stealing 22 works from Johns, all of which were unfinished pieces that the artist had not authorized for sale. Meyer sold them for a total of $6.5 million, and pocketed half of the proceeds.” (And now that he’s being sentences, he’s very, very sorry.)

How Well Are Museums Moving Into The Digital Future? Here Are 41 Good Examples

“The best recent innovations have been gathered in a new report, Next Practices in Digital and Technology, that the Association of Art Museum Directors is set to release on Friday. The report describes 41 museum projects that use digital technology to engage visitors, make collections more accessible and understandable or improve museum operations like ticketing and collections management.”

Why Sappho Is One Of The Most Important Figures In All Of Literary History

“With a single poem, which says that her beloved Anactoria is more valuable than the splendor of any cavalry, infantry, or fleet, she created a tradition of ‘love-not-war’ lyrics whose future stretches from Propertius to Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Bruce Springsteen. As the definitive ur-voice of lyric ecstasy, she is so consequential that poets of every generation, from Catullus to Sylvia Plath and Anne Carson, have used her to define their aesthetic manifestos: among the ancients, only Homer can claim an instrumental role in literary history equivalent to Sappho’s.”