“Classical music institutions like the Met don’t have to dig very deep in order to understand where things went wrong. Through decades of research, the National Sexual Violence Resource Center – which rose out of the feminist rape crisis movement of the 1970s – has identified five problematic norms that contribute to an environment in which sexual violence takes place. As a workplace and as an art form, classical music is at risk in four of them.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Why The Bad Sex In Fiction Award Is Just A Bad Idea
“Ultimately, the whole project gives the impression of being based on two simplistic and very flawed premises: 1) you can judge a sex scene ripped from context, and 2) a good sex scene evokes not amusement, disdain, or pity but rather arousal.”
Dances With Wheelchairs: Inside AXIS, The Company That Puts Disabled And Able-Bodied Dancers Side By Side
“Making the case for a serious art form for dancers who use wheelchairs meant a lot of advocacy. … ‘The first 10 years we spent just trying to convince people in the bigger dance world, the funding world, that what we were doing wasn’t ‘just therapy,” [said AXIS co-founder Judith Smith]. ‘We really wanted to be taken seriously as a dance company.’ … Today, AXIS’s work is fairly well known within the field of contemporary dance. It is less visible, however, to the general public for many reasons.”
Why The Getty Center’s Art Was Safest Inside The Getty, No Matter How Close The Fires Got
“Visitors come to the Getty Center in Los Angeles to see Vincent van Gogh’s irises and other great works. What they don’t see is the reason that these masterpieces could stay put while thousands in Southern California had to evacuate as multiple fires raged in recent days, one of which came within thousands of feet of the museum. The Getty’s architect, Richard Meier, built fire resistance into the billion-dollar complex.”
‘Game Of Thrones’ Tourists Are Devouring Dubrovnik
“Since 2011, when the show first premiered on HBO, tourism in Dubrovnik has seen an increase of 9 to 12 percent annually” – with numbers up to 10,000 or more a day, over 1 million a year in a town of 43,000 people. “While the show’s notoriety is good news for Dubrovnik’s economy, 80 percent of which relies on tourism, UNESCO has warned that Old Town Dubrovnik, a World Heritage Site, cannot accommodate this crush of newcomers. Some residents have had enough, too.”
Bruce Brown, Documentary Filmmaker Who Directed ‘Endless Summer’, Dead At 80
“Hailed as ‘the Bergman of the boards’ and ‘the Fellini of the foam,’ Mr. Brown brought next to no professional training but an abundance of passion to his art form, which he used to popularize surfing far beyond the coastlines of California.”
Enrico Castellani, 87, Leading Artist In European Post-War Avant-Garde
“[He] participated in the swirl of movements and self-proclaimed groups, some armed with manifestoes, that flourished on both sides of the Atlantic in the late 1950s and ’60s. … Many of these artists emphasized everyday materials and processes; most rejected the expression of subjectivity and emotion that prevailed in the gestural abstract painting and figurative sculpture that immediately followed World War II.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 12.12.17
More “Mundi” Conundrums: Exactly Who Paid the Leonardo’s Princely Price (and why)?
In my Friday post about those said to have “acquired” the $450.3-million Leonardo da Vinci, I suggested that the convoluted Salvator Mundi story was still developing and hard to predict. Sure enough, … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2017-12-12
Janine Jansen at Carnegie Hall without veneer – or microphones breathing down her neck
What price freedom? Carnegie Hall’s Perspectives series allows its selected artist-curators to have something close to carte blanche over multiple concerts in numerous different forums. This year, the glamorous Dutch violinist Janine Jansen is one of those artists, … read more
AJBlog: Condemned to Music Published 2017-12-11
Why Aren’t Hollywood Films More Diverse? Blame The Overseas Market
“Is it possible that the lack of nonwhite and female lead characters in Hollywood films is driven, in part, by economic concerns from movie studios? Our analysis of more than 800 films sampled between 2005 and 2012 suggests the answer is ‘yes’.”
Before Edward Lear Was A Limerick Genius, He Was A Teenage Parrot-Painting Prodigy
“When he was young, Lear was employed as an ornithological illustrator, and he spent years learning to draw birds, favoring live models in an era when most worked from taxidermy. Before he turned 20, he’d published Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots, a critical success, and the first monograph produced in England to focus on a single family of birds.”