“I felt like it was really time to move on. I could see myself doing the same thing for the next 20 years and I don’t want that. … Music has never been my only interest and it’s always bemused me a little bit that I ended up as a classical music critic.” – Perfect Sound Forever
Author: Matthew Westphal
How MBA Programs And Big Corporations Are Using The Arts To Train Executives
The business school at Oxford has students try to conduct a choir. Carnegie Mellon uses a book club and art installations. The Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts offers courses to business types. And what lessons get learned in all this? – The Economist
Actor René Auberjonois, Known For ‘M*A*S*H’, ‘Benson’, ‘Deep Space Nine’, And Robert Altman Films, Dead At 79
“Mr. Auberjonois worked constantly as a character actor through several periods and forms, from the dynamic theater of the 1960s to the cinema renaissance of the 1970s to the prime period of network television in the 1980s and ’90s — and each generation knew him for something different.” – The Washington Post
Teenager Who Threw Six-Year-Old From Tate Modern Balcony Pleads Guilty To Attempted Murder
“Jonty Bravery, who turned 18 in October, … told the police he had to prove a point ‘to every idiot’ who said he had no mental health problems … As well as having an autistic spectrum disorder, Bravery has an obsessive compulsive disorder and is likely to have a personality disorder.” – The Guardian
Saddam Hussein Tried To Reconstruct The Ancient City Of Babylon, And His Abandoned Buildings Are Still There
“In the 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam Hussein became obsessed with the Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar, who is notorious for waging bloody wars to seize large swaths of current-day Iran and Israel. Saddam saw himself as a modern reincarnation of Nebuchadnezzar, and to prove it, he spent millions building a massive reconstruction of Babylon. … Today, it seems to fall between picnic site and abandoned theme park.” – Atlas Obscura
Feminist Art Show In Kyrgyzstan Includes Nude Women, And Kyrgyz Conservatives Flip Out
“On December 3, one day after Mira Dzhangaracheva resigned her post as director of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Bishkek, a commission of officials from the Culture Ministry confiscated half a dozen exhibits. Organizers the maiden Feminnale of Contemporary Art in Bishkek placed signs reading ‘censored’ in their place.” – Eurasianet
How Did Tony Kushner Try To Fix His Problematic First Play? By Writing Himself Into It
“For the revival of his first professionally produced play, A Bright Room Called Day, open now at New York’s Public Theater, Kushner has in classic Kushnerian style wildly rewritten the script … In so doing, he’s created an impossible play that circles two impossible problems — how the left could have responded to the rise of Hitler, and how art can respond to our present moment — and offers no easy solutions.” – Slate
Adam Peiperl, Known For Kinetic Light Sculptures, Dead At 84
“From [his chemistry] studies came an idea that he could translate science into art by using polarized light to bring rainbow colors out of transparent plastic shapes. In the late 1960s he used this process to create kinetic, or moving, sculptures. … Over the next 50 years, Mr. Peiperl’s kinetic art would be displayed at the Hirshhorn, Kreeger and other galleries in Washington and at art spaces in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and in Europe.” – The Washington Post
Great Britain Has Lost 773 Libraries In Last Decade
“The closure of almost a fifth of the UK’s libraries over the last 10 years comes against a backdrop of a 29.6% decline in spend … since the Conservative government implemented austerity in 2010.” The number of paid librarians and other staffers has fallen by more than one-third in the same period. – The Guardian
Donald Byrd’s ‘Harlem Nutcracker’ Sold Out Theaters, But It Bankrupted His Company. After Almost 20 Years, He’s Reviving It
“It took five years of active persuading, plus nearly two decades of water under the proverbial bridge, before choreographer Donald Byrd finally agreed to resurrect The Harlem Nutcracker. Instantly loved after its 1996 New York premiere, his Nutcracker was financially doomed by 2001 — and left some scars on its way out.” But this year, firmly ensconced at Seattle’s Spectrum Dance Theater, Byrd is at last ready to return to it. – The Seattle Times