Having heard Luigi Brugnaro, Mayor of Venice, expound on Tintoretto’s “values” during yesterday’s livestream of the National Gallery of Art’s press preview for the Venetian artist’s first full-scale retrospective in America, I’m convinced that museums need to lay down some content guidelines (especially for non-museum professionals) to discourage pronouncements that are inappropriate for exhibition openings.” – Lee Rosenbaum
Author: Matthew Westphal
Why Trying To Protect The Natural World By Assigning It Human Rights Is A Bad Idea
“How can the law account for the value of complex, nonhuman entities such as rivers, lakes, forests and ecosystems? … Perhaps we should take the idea of ‘the human’ as a rights-bearer and extend it to the complex, nonhuman systems that we wish to protect, that we know are deserving of care and concern. Tempting as it is, this move must be resisted.” Human rights attorney Anna Grear explains why. – Aeon
Here’s What Happens When You Play Mozart, Hard Rock, Techno, And Hip-Hop To Ripening Swiss Cheese
Last fall, Swiss researchers exposed nine wheels of Emmentaler in an aging cellar to various types of music: classical (Mozart’s Magic Flute), rock (Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”), techno (Vril’s “UV”), hip-hop (A Tribe Called Quest’s “Jazz (We’ve Got)”) ambient music (Yello’s “Monolith”), and, as controls, steady high, medium and low tones and silence. All were on nonstop loops, with mini-transducers transmitting the sounds directly into the cheese wheels. After six months, the wheels were taken out and taste-tested — and here are the results. (So why was the classical music used Mozart instead of Mahler, Monteverdi, Stravinsky, or Steve Reich?) – Smithsonian Magazine
Against The Bad Sex In Fiction Awards
Catherine Brown: “At the risk of taking too-seriously an award of which the keynote is not seriousness, there are several problems involved in this that are worth considering. One is the implicit hypocrisy that the award has brought great publicity to its parent magazine because of the very fact – which the award ostensibly disparages – that sex sells.” – IAI News
Oregon Shakespeare Festival Names Bill Rauch’s Successor As Artistic Director
“Nataki Garrett, currently serving as acting artistic director for the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, will take the reins in August … The announcement ends a nearly yearlong search following Rauch’s February 2018 announcement that he would step down from the post — also this August — for his new artistic directing job at the Ronald O. Perelman Center for Performing Arts at the World Trade Center in New York City.” – The Mail Tribune (Medford, OR)
Was Shakespeare Really Queer? The Sonnets Are Pretty Clear
Sandra Newman looks at the 126 Shakespeare sonnets (out of a total of 154) addressed to the Fair Youth, at other sonnets and love poetry of the time and place, and at what Shakespeare’s contemporaries said and wrote about male-male sex and love (especially in the theatre). Then she applies Occam’s Razor. – Aeon
Dick Dale, ‘King Of The Surf Guitar’, Dead At 81
“In the space of a few short years, the Boston-born, Southern California transplant (born Richard Anthony Monsour) had merged the laid-back, sun-blasted lifestyle of the surf scene with a blistering rhythm of rockabilly and early rock-and-roll. As the mad scientist behind what was dubbed ‘surf rock,’ Dale was, in the words of a 1963 Life magazine profile, a ‘thumping teenage idol who is part evangelist, part Pied Piper and all success.'” – The Washington Post
Leadership At Top US Nonprofit Theatres Is Finally Becoming More Diverse
“Across the country, scores of artistic directors, most of them white men who have served as community tastemakers for years, are leaving their jobs via retirements, ousters, and an industrywide round of musical chairs. As their successors are appointed, a shift is underway: according to a national survey conducted by two Bay Area directors, women have been named to 41 percent of the 85 jobs filled since 2015, and people of color have been named to 26 percent.” – The New York Times
Lawyers For Guy Who Stole Terracotta Warrior’s Thumb Try Defense That’s — Let’s Call It Novel
At a holiday party in 2017 at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, an inebriated Michael Rohana allegedly broke off and pocketed the thumb of one of the 2,000-year-old Chinese terracotta warriors on display there at the time; FBI investigators found it in his home desk drawer a few weeks later. Now his public defenders are using some inventive arguments to get his charges reduced: that Rohana was too drunk to intend to steal the thumb, that the thumb wasn’t worth enough to qualify for the charges, that the Institute was, at the time of the incident, not a museum but “an after-hours nightclub.” – The Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ)
Thanks To Met Museum Admission Fees, New York City To Give $2.8 Million To Smaller Arts Groups
As part of the City’s agreement to let the Met charge non-New Yorkers a mandatory admission fee, the museum is to give the City a portion of the new revenues for grants to other organizations. Now the City’s Department of Cultural Affairs has announced that it will distribute $2.8 million of those revenues to 175 groups throughout the five boroughs. – ARTnews