Minimum wages in the cultural sector: the case of Borderlands Books
AJBlog: For What It’s Worth Published 2015-02-03
The living dead
AJBlog: Performance Monkey Published 2015-02-03
Andrew Patner
AJBlog: Life’s A Pitch Published 2015-02-03
Useful questions (1)
AJBlog: Sandow Published 2015-02-03
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Author: Matthew Westphal
They’ve Found Michelangelo’s Only Surviving Metal Sculptures
“Two handsome, virile naked men riding triumphantly on ferocious panthers … Academics in Cambridge will suggest that [this] pair of mysterious metre-high sculptures known as the Rothschild Bronzes are by the master himself, made just after he completed David and as he was about to embark on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.”
So Just What Features Led Scholars To Attribute These Bronzes To Michelangelo?
A look at the evidence – sculptural, thematic, biographical, cultural, pictorial, and graphic.
America’s Existential Crisis, As Illustrated By Super Bowl Ads
“[It’s] the kind of existential crisis that only God’s iPhone, Marshawn Lynch’s Skittles, and a car with an erection can heal. America is hangry [sic]. America can’t sleep. America is very, very worried about getting old and irrelevant and physically stuck on the couch shouting at a football game while other, younger countries are going to super-cool Pac Man parties and flipping tires over for no discernible reason and seducing elderly wives in leopard-print camisoles.”
Cult Fame And Its Discontents: Alex Ross On Henryk Górecki
“No classical composer in recent memory, not even the inescapable Philip Glass, has had a commercial success to rival that of the late Polish master,” whose Third Symphony, in a 1992 recording on the Nonesuch label, sold more than a million copies and has been sampled numerous times in pop songs and film scores. “Yet he was skeptical of the frame in which his work was being received. His friends and associates report that he disliked modern pop culture, and, to a great extent, modernity itself.”
Pianist Aldo Ciccolini Dead At 89
“A passionate champion of French composers, he recorded more than 50 albums, mostly of French repertoire, and along the way championed many underrepresented French composers, especially Erik Satie.”
A Brief History Of Loving To Read
“For a long time, people didn’t love literature. They read with their heads, not their hearts (or at least they thought they did), and they were unnerved by the idea of readers becoming emotionally attached to books and writers. It was only over time, Lynch writes – over the century roughly between 1750 and 1850 – that reading became a ‘private and passional’ activity, as opposed to a ‘rational, civic-minded’ one.”
Technicolor At 100 – It Changed Visual Storytelling Forever
“There’s some irony in the fact that colorizing film – ostensibly to make it look more like the real world – may have cemented the medium’s dreamy, escapist quality. The three-color process, in particular, created films punctuated by colors so electric they were surreal.”
David Hallberg As Bridge Between American And Russian Ballet
“If dance, for two countries with a fractious history and a tense present, is a mutually comprehensible language, then Hallberg is something of a poet laureate. Who better to represent the state of American art? Who better to turn rivalry into collaboration?”
Anton Chekhov Wrote The Best Work Of Journalism Of The 19th Century
Akhil Sharma on Sakhalin Island, an account of life in prison camps in that isolated spot off Siberia’s Pacific coast: “The fact that so few people know of the book, and that among Western critics (not necessarily Russian ones) it is considered a minor masterpiece instead of a major one … has something to do with how journalism is rarely considered literature. But it has even more to do with the lies that Chekhov told to get access to the prison colony.”