“People may learn English or German or Chinese to get a job. But they also learn languages to experience travel, food, film, music and literature. … So to be motivated to learn Esperanto, you have to be motivated not by a living and breathing culture, but by an ideal of international harmony. That ideal has to compete with French food, Italian fashion, Brazilian music, Spanish nightlife, American rock’n’roll, Japanese film, and so on.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Warner Bros. Gets $450M Backing For New Films
“Warner Brothers and RatPac-Dune Entertainment said that they had agreed to a deal under which Warner will receive financial backing for as many as 75 films over four years or more.”
Germany’s Orchestras Go On Nationwide Strike
“Over 100 German state and local orchestras have gone on strike, protesting against the steady decrease in jobs for orchestral musicians around the country. It is the biggest organised protest for German classical music since the 1950s.”
Ai Weiwei Taught His Prison Guards About Conceptual Art
“So of course first they think I’m just lying. But they are fast learners. … They are all very smart, intelligent people. It’s only because their job limits them to a very limited position. … One day they came back in to interrogate me some more and they were very happy, as if they had made a great breakthrough in the case: ‘OK, we found out! You’re part of Dada.’ I said, ‘Ahh, yes, you’re a little closer.'”
Tate Modern Develops Performance Art YouTube Channel
“Tate Live, funded by BMW, … is a four-year experiment in live performance on YouTube. … The eight works already posted online (out of 20 planned for the series) suggest that the approach is not only bringing this work to a broader audience, but also is creating a new artistic form.”
Paris Uses Street Mimes To Get Bar Patrons To Keep The Noise Down
“Patrolling the city since March last year, this group of mute, sad-faced, black and white-clad mediators [on stilts] stalk the city’s busy bar strips on weekend nights, gently encouraging people to drink, smoke and chat at a lower volume.” And it actually seems to work.
Where Samuel Clemens Really Got The Name “Mark Twain”
It was not, as our schoolteachers once taught us, from a measure of the water’s depth on the Mississippi. It wasn’t from the riverboat captain that Clemens himself claimed to have taken it from. It wasn’t even from (as the story went) his bar tab at the Nevada saloon he used to frequent. The name came from someplace that, for Clemens at that time, was even more disreputable.
Christie’s Opens For Business In Mainland China With $25M Auction In Shanghai
“The most expensive item sold was a ruby necklace, which achieved $3.4 million. … Western art rarely appears in auction sales in Hong Kong and China, but the firm sold three such works” – Picasso’s Homme assis ($1.9 million), Calder’s Black 2-2-6 ($1.5 million) and Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes ($784,000).
Operating In China Won’t Be Easy For Christie’s
“Not only will the foreign auctioneers have to do battle with an offshoot of the mighty People’s Liberation Army” – the giant auction firm Poly International, owner by a Red Army-controlled conglomerate – “they will have to operate in a market that is distorted by a mix of under- and overregulation, lack of openness and outright crookedness.”
Could Ballerinas’ Brains Hold The Secret To Treating Vertigo?
“Years of training in ‘spotting’, the technique of quickly and repeatedly bringing your gaze to two specific points in front and behind you, certainly helps, but new research suggests that the brain’s ability to adapt plays a powerful role. And it could help better treat and diagnose people who suffer from chronic dizziness.”