Author: Matthew Westphal

Top Posts From AJBlogs 01.25.18

AAMD’s Midwinter Agenda: Auction-House Presentation, but No Deaccession Deliberation?
In yesterday’s post, I predicted there would be “a lot of thinking about the unabated deaccession crisis at the midwinter meeting of the Association of Art Museum Directors, which begins next Monday in San Antonio” …
… or maybe not. … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2018-01-25

Dinner at Eighty
“She was a Nazi.” That’s what Edythe said about the wife of one of her two brothers. Until that moment, I never knew my mom had brothers. I must have been 8 or 9, and she pulled out … read more
AJBlog: Out There Published 2018-01-25>

 

Opera About Tabasco Sauce (From 1894!) Revived In New Orleans

Tabasco: a Burlesque Opera, composed by George Whitefield Chadwick, was the most popular American opera of the late 19th century: it toured to almost 50 cities before Chadwick pulled it because he wasn’t getting royalties. Now New Orleans Opera is reviving this tale of the original Louisiana hot sauce for the city’s 300th anniversary and the company’s 75th.

‘Duplitecture’ – How The Chinese Are Using And Adapting Their Towns That Replicate European Cities

Bianca Bosker: “I’ve spent the past decade tracing China’s ‘duplitecture’ – the replica White Houses, Versailles Palaces, and even foreign cities, from Venice to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, that have multiplied through the country – and from the start of my research, planners and architecture critics have assured me the movement was on its last legs.” Turns out, ten years on, that just isn’t so.

Enjoying The Fleeting Nature Of Theater, In The Wake Of Cancer

Playwright Dan O’Brien: “When you or a loved one are gravely ill you can’t help but feel that now is undeniably, inescapably now. … When one is gravely ill, anything can happen, and sometimes does. In a play, anything can and always does happen. Must do. Every moment a potential calamity. We’ve all seen an actor go up on her lines. Disaster. Beautiful. You can hear a pin drop.”

‘Dazzle’ Paint In The U.S. Navy – The Crazy Designs On World War I Warships

“‘Strong, distracting lines would mask the bow, stern, and sections that might be used to estimate the range, speed, or course of the ship. Submarines only had a few moments at periscope depth to fire their torpedo before they risked being seen. The aim was to make the estimation of where the ship would be so difficult that the torpedo would not be fired, or would be fired and miss.’

Theatre Is Hardly Even Theatre Without The Audience: Lyn Gardner

“A movie is unchanged by an audience’s presence and will continue to run in an empty auditorium. But the theatre requires a human presence in the auditorium, because it is only fully alive when it meets its audience. It is only in that moment that it bursts fully into life. … Without our presence, our engagement and our creativity the theatre dies, however talented the actors and however hard they work on stage.”

Former Trocks Dancer Talks About His Allegations Of Discrimination And Harassment By Company

“When it came to the show, we were encouraged to be who we were. But in ballet class, it was a different story. We weren’t allowed to express or present ourselves as we wanted; we couldn’t wear our hair in buns. Even what you wore to the airport was monitored.” Chase Johnsey talks with journalist Candice Thompson about why he left Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo after 14 years.

The Lost Genius Of African-American Literature

“A half century before the poet Claudia Rankine used her MacArthur ‘genius’ grant to establish an institute partly dedicated to the study of whiteness, [William Melvin] Kelley turned his considerable intellect and imagination to the question of what it is like to be white in this country, and what it is like, for all Americans, to live under the conditions of white supremacy – not just the dramatic cross-burning, neo-Nazi manifestations of it common to his time and our own but also the everyday forms endemic to our national culture.”