Author: Matthew Westphal

Canada’s Music Industry Wants $160 Million Worth Of Tariffs Charged On Every Smartphone In The Country

“One hundred and sixty million dollars over four years — it would be a shot in the arm for the Canadian music industry, to be sure. According to information obtained under the Access to Information Act, that’s what the industry is asking the federal government to pony up to compensate artists for what is known as private copying.”

What It’s Like To Auction Off A $157 Million Modigliani

“Helena [Newman] is the chairman of Sotheby’s Europe and co-head of Impressionist & Modern Art Worldwide and also happens to be the auctioneer who recently sold the firm’s most expensive painting to date: a 1917 Modigliani that went for $157.2 million. Helena tells us how she finds and sells some of the most expensive art in the world and what it takes to command a room full of people bidding millions of dollars on masterpieces.” (podcast)

Improvisation – How Exactly Do Jazz Musicians, Freestyle Rappers, And Improv Comedians Pull It Off?

“In this presentation we explore the science of improvisation, with rapper GoldLink, jazz pianist Jason Moran, and comedy duo Andy Bustillos and Alex Song of Upright Citizens Brigade. We’ll get inside the artists’ heads to see how their quick creative process allows them to step into the spotlight — without knowing what’s coming next.” (multimedia feature)

How Vice Media’s Shane Smith BSed His Way Into A Media Empire (That He’s Now Stuck With)

Over 25 years, “Vice had grown from a free magazine to a company with 3,000 employees spread across a cable network, more than a dozen websites, two shows on HBO, an ad agency, a film studio, a record label, and a bar in London. Vice had become the tenth-highest-valued private company in America” – largely thanks to co-founder Shane Smith’s gift – using persuasion, exaggeration, and sometimes outright deception – for convincing investors to hand over millions of dollars. Turns out, though, that Smith had expected to cash out well before now. Reeves Wiedeman reports how it went down.

How Did Propaganda Get Such A Bad Name? (Blame George Orwell)

“The posters and films produced in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 40s have become totemic representations of the genre, and as such the idea of ‘propaganda’ is now synonymous with aggressive, bold representations of utopian ideals, spouting malicious untruths against enemies, or manipulating and controlling their compliant populations. Such a simplistic conception undermines the often complex, creative and thoughtful productions of propagandists whose work in that crucible of political agitation still appears fresh and thought-provoking today.”

What Is Enlightenment? Artforum Tackles The Question

“Conceived variously as an epoch, an idea, and an attitude, even a ‘sick’ word, as one contributor puts it in our pages, Enlightenment continues to inspire and rankle. … Artforum invited a group of writers, scholars, and activists — Adrian Piper, Michelle M. Wright, Charles W. Mills, J. M. Bernstein, Boaventura De Sousa Santos, MTL Collective and Jasbir K. Puar, and Sarah Nicole Prickett — to return to Johann Friedrich Zöllner’s question, famously answered by Kant in 1784 and then again by Foucault immediately before his death from AIDS in 1984.”

In Praise Of The Mighty Dinkus

“Three months ago, I was a normal person. Now all I think about 24-7 is the dinkus. Did you know that dinkuses is an anagram of unkissed? I did. For the uninitiated, the dinkus is a line of three asterisks (* * *) used as a section break in a text.” Daisy Alioto offers some reasons to love it.

Rembrandt Van Rijn: Upstart, Star, Snob, Pauper, Mystery

“He left no diaries. No memoirs. No letters besides the occasional plea for patronage. His most substantial contemporary biography, no more than a few paragraphs in all, reveals little beyond the human capacity for understatement. … The entirety of his known painterly philosophy amounts to six words: to produce ‘die meeste ende die natureelste beweechlickheyt‘ — or ‘the greatest and most natural movement’ — a phrase whose precise meaning remains hotly contested to this day. In the annals of art history, there are those whose stories remain shrouded by the passage of time. And then there is Rembrandt.”

A Young ABT Dancer Leaps From The Corps Into The Role Of Romeo

“On Wednesday afternoon, Aran Bell, at just 19, makes an important debut: as Romeo in Kenneth MacMillan’s production of Romeo and Juliet. At Ballet Theater, such a leap for a relatively unknown dancer is rare. Dancers wait — and sometimes really wait — for a featured variation in a full-length ballet. But a lead like Romeo? It’s as if Ballet Theater plucked a page from the casting manual of New York City Ballet, which often throws young dancers into principal parts.”