Christopher Knight: “A certain homogenized sameness pervades the new program, which is about as boring as having the same Campbell’s soup every day for lunch. Yes, … the ghost of the late, great Pop artist, dead now for a quarter-century, hovers in the background – and sometimes steps into the foreground – of almost every exhibition conceived by Deitch in the last 18 months.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Booker Prize Longlist Snubs Some Perennial Candidates
“Man Booker prize judges focused on ‘novels not novelists’ and ‘texts not reputations’ today, to come up with a longlist that overlooks some of the biggest names in contemporary fiction, including Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan and Martin Amis.” (Don’t worry, Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies is there.)
Everybody Loves Chuck Close
“As he once put it to me, ‘For the last 14 years, I’ve not gone a day where I go outside and don’t have someone tell me how much they like what I do. I’m really very, very lucky.’ Never mind that Chuck Close is a partial quadriplegic and largely confined to a wheelchair.”
The Nocebo Effect (Yes, It Exists)
The phenomenon, basically the inverse of the placebo effect, is when “inert substances or mere suggestions of substances actually bring about negative effects in a patient or research participant” – say, when taking a sugar pill makes a person feel nauseated because he was told it would.
Egypt’s New TV Channel For Women, Entirely Veiled
“A satellite channel run and hosted by fully-veiled presenters aims to break down the barriers for women in niqab who until the revolution that brought Islamists to power were shunned by Egypt’s lucrative television industry.”
Evgeny Nikitin, Who Left Bayreuth Over Old Tattoos, Still On Met Opera Roster
“The [baritone] who quit the Bayreuth opera festival when it emerged he once had at least one Nazi-related symbol tattooed on his body remains scheduled to sing a new production of Wagner’s Parsifal at the Metropolitan Opera next season.”
The Battle For Nietzsche
When the philosopher died in 1900, his mind and body long ravaged by syphilis, two strong individuals struggled over how to preserve his legacy: the urbane and charming diplomat Count Harry Kessler, and Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth, with whom he had had a deep and vexed relationship.
Decoding The Ancient Rock Paintings Of Texas
Several caves and rock shelters in the Lower Pecos have 4000-year-old murals. Most scholars had assumed that the meaning of the paintings was unrecoverable, but archaeologist Carolyn Boyd says she’s “discovered a symbolic code that reveals narratives in the paintings, which she believes can be read, almost like an ancient language.”
Human Brains Perceive Men As Wholes And Women As Parts
“Women are more likely to be picked apart by the brain and seen as parts rather than a whole, according to research published online June 29 in the European Journal of Social Psychology. Men, on the other hand, are processed as a whole rather than the sum of their parts.” (Men and women both do it, too.)
New Reality Show To Create Dance Company From Scratch In A Month
Producer Nigel Lythgoe (American Idol, So You Think You Can Dance) has developed a series for the cable network Ovation – titled A Chance to Dance – in which choreographers Michael Nunn and Bill Trevitt (the UK’s Ballet Boyz) will audition and train a company for a performance in 28 days.