Author: Matthew Westphal

Interrogating The U.S. Constitution On A Theater Stage

In What the Constitution Means to Me, playwright and performer Heidi Schreck gives the speech she used to give as a high school debater, only to interrupt herself and speak as the adult Schreck about how the U.S. has failed to live up to the ideals in the Constitution and where the document itself falls short. She then ends the performance by debating a current high school debate champion about whether we should keep the Constitution or tear it up and start over. In a Q&A with Slate‘s Sam Adams, Schreck talks about how and why she does it.

An Oral History of Vibe Magazine

“Conceived as a hip-hop magazine by two unlikely parents — the most powerful black record producer in the world, Quincy Jones, at the behest of the most powerful media executive in the world, Steve Ross … [Vibe had] a creed that championed hip-hop but thought broad and wide about the genre’s connections to the past and the future, and its implications for just about every other art and science. … What follows is a selective oral history of the magazine, from its birth and ascent, through its 21st-century transformation into a digital cultural bellwether.”

Jane Fortune, Who Rescued The Works Of Renaissance Florence’s Female Artists, Dead At 76

“She founded a nonprofit foundation called Advancing Women Artists to find and salvage art created by women between the 16th and 20th centuries. Her resurrection of these works, many of them Renaissance treasures lost to history and secreted in Tuscan churches and attics for centuries, earned her, in the Italian press, the nickname ‘Indiana Jane.'”

How Did Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker End Up Becoming A Broadway Choreographer?

“Though [she] won’t say much about her plans for [next year’s revival of] West Side Story just yet, she did admit that it’s not a project she would have ever thought she’d be doing. But her rewarding experience directing the large-scale Così fan tutte at the Paris Opéra last year — another project she never thought she’d do — plus the chance to work with Ivo van Hove and explore a key work in the history of musical theater convinced her to say yes when van Hove asked her to choreograph.”

A Jack Kerouac Bot? AI Program Produces Novel About Its Own Cross-Country Road Trip

Ross Goodwin rigged up a black Cadillac with a camera, a GPS unit, a microphone, a laptop, and a receipt printer, and he and friends drove it from Brooklyn to New Orleans. Data from the instruments was fed into AI software on the laptop that Goodwin had trained on hundreds of books, and over the four-day trip that software produced prose on the tiny printer. The assembled result, a book titled 1 the Road, “is a hallucinatory, oddly illuminating account of a bot’s life on the interstate; The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test meets Google Street View, narrated by Siri.”

‘Art Might Not Have The Privilege Of Being Art For Art’s Sake Anymore. It Has To Be Art For Justice’s Sake.”

“The real-world and social-media combat we’ve been in for the past two years over what kind of country this is — who gets to live in it and bemoan (or endorse!) how it’s being run — have now shown up in our beefs over culture, not so much over the actual works themselves but over the laws governing that culture and the discussion around it, which artists can make what art, who can speak. We’re talking less about whether a work is good art but simply whether it’s good — good for us, good for the culture, good for the world.” Wesley Morris is sympathetic to the impulse, but the result troubles him.

After 35 Years, Nicholas McGegan To Step Down As Director Of Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra

McGegan came to the Bay Area-based ensemble in 1985 and built it into the largest and most-recorded period-instrument band in the U.S. He becomes music director laureate at the end of the 2019-20 season: “I feel like I’m giving up being a parent to become a grandparent. I can still take everyone out for ice cream without having to pay the school bills.”

Donor Recalls Loan Of 700 Artworks To Museum That Censored Mapplethorpe Show

Last month an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s works in Porto, Portugal opened with 20 planned pieces removed from view, and the museum’s director, alleging censorship, resigned in protest. In response to the situation, collector Luiz Augusto Teixeira de Freitas has moved to terminate his loan of some 700 objects to the institution, the Serralves Foundation.

Brazil’s National Museum Begins Long Process Of Recovery With Outdoor Exhibition

“Less than a month after a fire consumed the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro on 2 September, efforts are underway to revive the institution. The museum recently installed tents outside of the charred building to hold a temporary outdoor exhibition of pieces from its collection that were stored in other facilities in Brazil, totalling around 1.5 million objects.”