“The National Arts Stabilization Fund, a consortium of private and corporate philanthropies … , grew out of her collaboration, beginning in the late 1950s, with a Ford vice president, W. McNeil Lowry, to create incentives for symphonies, ballet companies, theaters and other arts groups to liquidate their deficits and build working capital reserves. The model’s disciplined, businesslike approach inspired Congress to subsidize the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Top Posts From AJBlogs 04.10.18
Market Madness: Sotheby’s to Auction 13 Berkshire Museum Works this May
Notwithstanding its direct relevance to the Berkshire Museum’s mission (which includes both history and art) and the museum’s professed concern for the education of schoolchildren, a portrait of our first President is among its works to be sold at Sotheby’s American Art sale on May 23. … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2018-04-10
Denny Zeitlin’s Birthday
As you will momentarily see and hear, Zeitlin has retained the vigor and style that have helped keep him one of the most consistently interesting pianists of his generation. … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2018-04-10
Metropolitan Museum Of Art’s New Director Is –
“For the first time in 60 years, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has reached beyond its own doors for a new leader … Max Hollein, 48, currently the director and chief executive of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and a veteran of Germany’s oldest art foundation, will become its 10th director this summer.”
Lucinda Childs Used To Hate The Martha Graham Technique. Now She’s Making A Dance For Graham’s Company
Says Martha Graham Dance Company artistic director Janet Eilber of Childs, “She is one of the people who truly went in the other direction of Martha Graham, and part of what we do now is inviting vastly different perspectives on our legacy. We want their own separate, unique voices. We want the contrast. It brings context to the Graham classics.”
Gender Pay Gap In The Arts Less Bad Than In Other Industries: Study
“A quarter of the 40 major arts and culture organisations that had to report their gender pay gap details to [the UK] Government this week paid their female staff a higher average hourly rate than their male employees last year. Overall the major arts employers still pay men more than women – there is a median hourly pay gap of 4.4%, but this is lower than the average of 12% across all 10,000 reporting employers.”
It’s Time For Ballet To Embrace Feminism, Writes New York City Ballet Star
Ashley Bouder: “It’s as if the image of a man leading a woman into the wings is a metaphor for how the dance world is run. A male director leading the careers of dancers. A male choreographer laying down the pathway of steps to perform. Of course, there are women who have broken through this mold. But there it is in the phrase: ‘broken through.’ A simple place at the table would be sufficient. Instead, it’s like women are crashing the dinner party. … Too many times I’ve felt the proverbial pat on the head and heard a ‘Good for you, sweetie’ comment. A few times, I’ve actually gotten a real pat on the head.”
‘Design Thinking’ Is Narrow-Minded And Limiting
Natasha Jen of Pentagram: “Design thinking embodies our obsession with prescription. … We crave prescriptions and mythology in general – as a profession and as a society. … Prescriptions create a kind of prison, in terms of how we can think about things and how we work. But a very linear methodology-based way of working completely removes other possibilities.”
‘Design Thinking’, For All Its Problems, Has Serious Value
Khoi Vinh of Adobe: “Design thinking has a lot of downsides. It can be very superficial. It can be very misleading and the outcomes that it produces can be disappointing. It can lead to bad design. But it offers a useful lesson on how designers think about democratization of our craft.”
What’s It Like To Be A New York Times Book Critic? Terrifying
Parul Sehgal: “It’s constant panic, and guilt, and shame. Also pajamas. No, it’s a great gig, I’m not going to lie. … It’s monkish, but if you are into that sort of thing, it’s bliss. But with that, I think what propels me is also a feeling of responsibility. It’s also a feeling of working in a very strange genre, in that when you write a book review – and the book reviews we write at the Times are roughly 800 to 1,000 words – you’re serving a lot of masters.” (includes audio)
Is This Really The Right Time For A Spate Of Male-Authored, Male-Directed Musicals About Subservient Women To Come To Broadway?
Diep Tran: “There is one question that has been lingering both for me and many other women in and around the theatre: If we’re going to stage these retrograde works” – Pretty Woman, My Fair Lady, Carousel and Kiss Me, Kate are all on Broadway this season – “and ‘reinvent’ them for the 21st century, why are men the only ones being given the opportunity to do the rethinking – to give these old properties a ‘feminist twist’? Are male artists the only ones who get to define feminism in theatre in 2018?”