Matthew Westphal – Page 833 – ArtsJournal Wayback

Michael Tree, Founding Violist Of Guarneri Quartet, Dead At 84

“‘Michael set a new standard for the viola,’ [violinist Arnold] Steinhardt, [Tree’s Guarneri colleague,] said. ‘Now orchestras are not filled with failed violinists playing the viola, but with sensational violists,’ performers whom Mr. Tree encouraged to treat the viola as an integral part of an ensemble, rather than a backing voice supporting a violin’s melody or cello’s ostinato.”

Discoverers Of Prehistoric Chauvet Cave Art Finally Win Some Intellectual Property Rights To Their Discovery

“The cave, which houses wall paintings dating back around 30,000 years, was discovered in 1994 by Jean-Marie Chauvet, Eliette Brunel-Deschamps and Christian Hillaire. … [The three] argued that they had been stripped of their own discovery and they claimed the rights to hundreds of photographs and videos taken at the time as well as to the Chauvet name. They also sought a role in the management of the replica site.” (The original, for its own protection, is closed to visitors.)

One North London Theatre School For Kids Taught Many Of Britain’s Best Working-Class Actors

For half a century, Anna Scher has been teaching young students and adults in Islington, once quite a rough neighborhood. “In that time, she has created numerous stars, given hope and purpose to kids who had none, started her own theatre, seen it taken away from her, had a traumatic breakdown and fought her way back to good health and standing. At 73, she is once again thriving.”

How A South American Capital Remade One Of Its Most Congested Streets Into A Pedestrian-Only Artwork

“It was all done in record time. In just 30 days, more than 120 people – led by 32-year-old Chilean visual artist Dasic Fernández – transformed one of the most congested and iconic streets in the center of [Santiago,] the Chilean capital. Today, Bandera Street, next to the government palace and the city’s main square, is a colorful promenade, thanks to an urban intervention that’s unprecedented in Latin America.”

Cultural Appropriation Is Like Pornography (‘I Know It When I See It’)

Alyssa Rosenberg, considering Isle of Dogs: “At this point, there’s a fairly clear consensus that white people shouldn’t be cast as characters who are meant to be of other races, and that defining nonwhite characters by obvious stereotypes and obvious stereotypes alone is both objectionable and proof of artistic laziness. There is less agreement about what makes a person sufficiently knowledgeable about and sensitive to the concerns of a community that’s not their own to put it into art, or about the line between appreciation and fetishization of another culture. (Not to mention the fact that members of a particular community may have wildly diverging opinions about these issues, raising thorny questions about who has standing to make these judgments.)

The Real Reason Negative Reviews Are Necessary

Bill Marx (in a pan of Jesse Green’s New York Times apologia for negative reviews): “Because they reflect an eternal truth: all the blurbs in the universe will not eradicate the fact that much in the arts is mediocre. Pans also provide the means for the reader to evaluate the critic: we learn as much about someone from why they dislike something then why they like something. And negative reviews prove that the critic takes the arts seriously enough to risk defining success and failure, to draw an aesthetic red line, to proclaim to the Parrotheads that the emperor has no clothes.”

Is The Next Nobel Prize Winner For Literature Tending Bar Deep In The Australian Outback?

“A strong case could be made for [Gerald] Murnane, who recently turned 79, as the greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of. … Yet his work has been praised by J.M. Coetzee and Shirley Hazzard, as well as young American writers like Ben Lerner and Joshua Cohen. Teju Cole has described Murnane as ‘a genius’ and a ‘worthy heir to Beckett.’ Last year, Ladbrokes placed his odds at winning the Nobel Prize for Literature at 50 to 1 – better than Cormac McCarthy, Salman Rushdie and Elena Ferrante.” Mark Binelli goes to visit the author in his tiny village five hours from Melbourne, where Murnane promised him “an interview unlike any you’ve done before.” (He was as good as his word.)

‘We Wanted To See If It Was Possible To Stage A Mind’ – Choreographer Crystal Pite On Her ‘Betroffenheit’

“We wanted … to figure out how to use the whole space of the stage to create an image of an injured mind. After that initial impulse, we tried to take a personal story of loss and trauma and make it universal, to zoom outwards and ask some big questions about what suffering is, what it means and how one survives something like that. … In German, the title means to be stopped or struck by something that leaves you in a kind of shock or speechlessness, an inability to respond or express anything in words. So that word became emblematic for us.”

Concerto For Cheesesteaks And Orchestra: Tod Machover’s New Score Captures The (Literal) Sounds Of Philadelphia

Philadelphia Voices is the eighth in a series of “crowd-sourced symphonies” – symphonic scores incorporating sounds recorded on the streets and submitted by residents – Machover has done for various cities from Detroit to Toronto to Perth. David Patrick Stearns met with the composer, both in Philadelphia and at his high-tech Boston-area studio, to talk about how Machover put together the piece, which will combine the sounds of the Philadelphia Orchestra and several choirs with such found sounds as Mummers at the New Year’s Day parade, birds at the Philadelphia Zoo, and (yes) sizzling cheesesteaks on the grill at Pat’s King of Steaks in South Philly.

Author: Matthew Westphal