Culture minister Ed Vaizey told a conference of arts professionals that the new plan would include everything from “archaeology to architecture and the built environment, archives, craft, dance, design, digital arts, drama and theatre, film and cinemas, galleries, heritage, libraries, literature, live performance, museums, poetry and the visual arts.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Elgar Manuscript Found In Local Government Storage Closet
“An Edward Elgar manuscript dating back nearly 90 years has been discovered in a council building in Leicestershire. Staff found the musical score while clearing out a storage room at Charnwood Borough Council’s headquarters in Loughborough.”
Dancer-Choreographer Zina Bethune Killed In Road Accident
“Bethune, 66, a former New York City Ballet soloist and the founder of a Los Angeles multimedia dance and theatrical company, was struck by two vehicles and killed shortly after midnight Sunday after she apparently stopped to help an injured animal along Forest Lawn Drive in L.A.”
The Only Problem With ‘Chick Lit’ Is The Name
“The only thing that ‘these books’ really have in common is that they’re written primarily by women and about relationships. Apart from that, they encompass as wide a range as any other genre. [Sophie] Kinsella and Jennifer Weiner, say, have no more in common than do Alan Hollinghurst and Jonathan Franzen.”
Why Do So Many Ticket-Discounting Schemes Discriminate Against Grown-Ups With Day Jobs?
“[If] you work 9 to 5, and aren’t under 26 or over 60, it’s much harder to find affordable ways of seeing a show – even more so when it comes to commercial theatre.”
More Than 400 Stolen Expressionist Artworks Turn Up In Warehouse
“Karel Appel, a leading expressionist, died at 85 in 2006. He never recovered from the loss of a lifetime’s worth of drawings, sketches, notebooks and other works believed to be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.” A logistics company found the trove while cleaning out a recently warehouse.
Just Can’t Appreciate Abstract Art? Try Watching The Shining First
“A newly published study finds people are more likely to be moved and intrigued by abstract paintings if they have just experienced a good scare. This suggests the allure of art may be ‘a byproduct of one’s tendency to be alarmed by such environmental features as novelty, ambiguity, and the fantastic,’ argues lead author Kendall Eskine.”
What Makes Germans Laugh? (Yes, There Is Something)
There’s an old English music hall sketch, “Dinner for One”, that was ubiquitous there in the 1920s and ’30s, was recorded for German television in 1962, and somehow caught on in the ’70s, airing every New Year’s Eve and becoming the most popular program in German history. Philip Oltermann explores what the sketch’s popularity explains about the German sense of humor.
How Nietzsche Turned Me Christian
Giles Fraser: “As a good communist, atheism had always been my unexamined default position. And because Nietzsche was so passionate an atheist, I had my defences down to his unusually intense religiosity and elliptical desire for salvation. Which, I suppose, is how the question of God crept under my intellectual radar.”
Joffrey Ballet Returns To Cutting-Edge Choreography
Says artistic director Ashley Wheater, “The Joffrey has a phenomenal history, and in my time” – he danced with the company in the 1980s – “there was an incredibly eclectic repertoire. We did Ashton and Fokine but also Mark Morris, Twyla Tharp, William Forsythe. But in the last 20 years the company did very little new work.” Wheater has just changed that.