“The Vienna State Opera scored a new profit record this season, raking in over 31.3 million euros, with average attendance at over 98 percent, the venerable house announced Tuesday.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Film Censorship Increasing In Once-Liberal Lebanon
“With a new government dominated by allies of Hezbollah, long a proxy of Syria, censorship has been on the rise. Four new films have been banned this year – a record for the … censorship bureau … Intellectually and artistically, Beirut has long been freer than other places in the Middle East; some now fear that that is under threat as never before.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau At 300: An Appreciation
“He was a philosopher who helped shape the destiny of nations, which is more than can be said for Pythagoras or AC Grayling. He was also a political visionary of stunning originality … Much of what one might call the modern sensibility was this thinker’s creation. It is in Rousseau’s writing above all that history begins to turn from upper-class honour to middle-class humanitarianism.”
Rousseau And The Arts: A Vexed Relationship
He was “the one and only Enlightenment thinker who ferociously attacked the very value of art (and science as well) … [His] fundamental idea [was] that art, instead of ennobling us, and offering paths to better and more meaningful lives, mostly makes for miserable modern creatures instead of free and happy ones.” Yet artist and academic Laurie Fendrich finds that “Rousseau’s brilliant railings … offer a road back to discovering the awe lurking in art.”
Is This Really The Best Way To Motivate Ballet Dancers?
Ballet West artistic director Adam Sklute, on the CW reality TV series Breaking Pointe: “The best recipe for creating a hardworking and well-functioning dancer and artist is if all the dancers know that they are special, but also that they are expendable.” Dancer Kimberly Peterson begs to differ.
UK Government Announces An App For Donating To The Arts
“Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt has launched plans for an independent funding platform that will allow people to give money to arts organisations using their mobile phones. … The aim of the initiative is to help the cultural sector raise new funds through mass casual giving.”
BBC’s New Director General A Promising Choice
When George Entwistle was editor of the flagship BBC television program Newsnight, colleagues applauded him for “re-establishing [the show’s] reputation as a ‘significant place for political debate’. … Entwistle, it is said, had ‘a huge amount of energy, oodles of enthusiasm and was very hands-on’.”
British Comedian Eric Sykes Dead At 89
“Although he first came to fame as a writer for radio,” Sykes – who was fascinated by silence (and, cruel irony, ultimately went deaf) – fulfilled his ambition by writing and directing several films that were virtually wordless.” This in addition to being Britain’s most admired postwar comedy writer and having a brilliant career acting on stage and television – most notably in a long partnership with Hattie Jacques.
Meet One Of The Great Veterans Of Modern Iranian Fiction
“After being arrested in 1974 by the Savak, the shah’s secret police, the Iranian writer Mahmoud Dowlatabadi asked his interrogators just what crime he had committed. ‘None,’ he recalled them responding, ‘but everyone we arrest seems to have copies of your novels, so that makes you provocative to revolutionaries.'”
150 Years Of The Search For The Great American Novel
“Since its inception, the GAN has been a remarkably enduring concept, staying stubbornly put in critical and popular discourse alike despite numerous – some, almost successful – murder attempts. But though the GAN as such seems here to stay, the way we think about it has evolved significantly from its original conception to the present day. And that evolution is as inevitable as it is profound.”