The newly-formed Saudi Art Council is organizing shows in disused buildings and installing outdoor art in Jeddah and working on a new space in Medina.
Author: Matthew Westphal
After Almost 1,000 Years, The Bayeux Tapestry Is Completed
“The tapestry, chronicling the Norman conquest of England and that battle in 1066, is regarded as a marvel of medieval Europe. However, since it was ‘rediscovered’ by scholars in the 18th Century, its original final scene has been missing. … Now, a team of embroiderers on Alderney, a small island just off the coast of William’s native Normandy, have ‘finished’ the job.”
NYPD Goes To Battle Against Subway Dancers
“The New York Police Department is cracking down on the subway showmen who use the tight quarters of the nation’s busiest transit system as moving stages for impromptu – and illegal – pass-the-hat performances. More than 240 people have been arrested on misdemeanors related to acrobatics so far this year, compared with fewer than 40 at this time a year ago.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 07.01.14
Do Opera And Art Museums Mix? An Experiment
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts | Published 2014-07-02
Jeremy Denk Responds re The Classical Style
AJBlog: CultureCrash | Published 2014-07-01
The middlebrow minstrel
AJBlog: About Last Night | Published 2014-07-01
Do You Know the Way to Cy Près? What’s Wrong with Corcoran’s Court Petition
AJBlog: CultureGrrl | Published 2014-07-01
Back To Koons: More Food For Thought
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts | Published 2014-07-01
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This Isn’t A Fake, It’s A Real 16th-Century Medici Portrait That Was ‘Tarted Up’
“A painting that was ‘targeted for removal’ from the collection of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh won a last-minute reprieve after a technical examination determined that it was not a ‘modern fake’, but a 16th-century Florentine portrait that was significantly ‘tarted up’ in the 19th century.”
Bolshoi Ballet Director Back At Work Following Hospital Scare
“Artistic director Sergei Filin, 43, has recovered from an acute allergic reaction to an eye treatment that sent him to the hospital Friday … Filin, who was nearly blinded in a 2013 acid attack, wasted no time getting back to the theater for rehearsals.” Several Russian media reports over the weekend stated that he was in critical condition.
Allen Grossman, 82. ‘A Poet’s Poet And A Scholar’
“His poems, brainy and lyrical and often written in a voice that might be described as conversationally academic, are replete with referents, redolent of intellectual yearning and proudly high-minded … and though his work was always serious and often self-consciously grand, he also mixed lofty rhetoric with antic humor or sly wit and wrote with personal detail about people he knew.”
StoryCorps Launches New Project To Record LGBT Elders
Dave Isay: “We’ll make a comprehensive effort to find people who were alive in the pre-Stonewall era – in the ’50s and ’60s in small towns all across the country, creating a record of what life was like for them. I think it is going to be very difficult to hear. It’s difficult now; then, it was probably difficult beyond our imagination. You know, it was a spiritual holocaust.”
MAD Magazine, The Unlikeliest, Greatest Soldier In The Struggle Against Big Tobacco
“In the early to mid-nineteen-sixties, both before and after the Surgeon General issued his famous report on the dangers of tobacco, Mad took on the industry more than any ‘respectable’ magazine. Free from any dependency on advertising, Mad could be fearless, and it was. Its campaign of ridicule was unrelenting.”
‘I Think It Would Be Fine If Major Orchestras Closed’ (S*** Nico Muhly Says)
“In a lot of cases the halls are too big. I went to see a huge orchestra concert at Avery Fisher Hall, which is an excrescence in New York … and it’s like, let it close. That’s fine; it’ll be fine. They’ll find somewhere else.”