Author: ArtsJournal2

The Last Tourist In Assisi

Contemplating Giotto as the virus closes in, the author says, “Assisi is a city where religious pilgrims come to pray, study, and convene. Before the virus, nuns, priests, monks, and friers careened about on their cell phones, jostling maps, enjoying their time in this holy place, robes and wimples aflutter. They are all gone.” – Hyperallergic

Balcony Tenor Maurizio Marchini Took Time Off When He Saw Army Trucks Taking Away Bodies

After the Italian shutdown, Marchini immediately “went viral” (but in a good, pre-Covid-19 way) when he performed from his balcony on March 13. He didn’t even know it because, he says, “I’m not a social guy.” Then things got grim, and he took time off out of respect to the families. Now he’s back on his balcony singing arias. – Vice

Grammy Winner Miho Hazama Explains How To Combine Classical Training And Contemporary Jazz

Hazama, in this podcast: “My main study back in Japan was to be a film composer. But at the time, computer was taking over the entire industry. My thing was to write for acoustic musicians, not for the computer. … And I kind of lost my dream in the middle of my college life in Japan. So that’s the only reason why I got really into jazz composition. And then I wanted to meet jazz composers who are alive. That excited me so much because I couldn’t obviously meet Ravel or Prokofiev or Stravinsky in person.” – Slate

What Winning The Women’s Prize Does For An Author’s Career

Zadie Smith, Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie, Marilynne Robinson, Tayari Jones, and many more winners of what used to be the Orange Prize explain what it does. Ann Patchett: “Even now, I’ll be dusting in the living room and I’ll pick up that little statue and think about what a happy moment that was. My father is dead now, as are the elderly English cousins. I think about how happy they were that night. I had begged them not to come because I thought they’d be sad when I lost, but then I won and they were there. It was beautiful.” – The Guardian (UK)

The Backstage Creatives Trying To Keep Hollywood Going

Shooting may not resume until at least August for most productions – or it may be far later – but while most everyone in cast, crew, and production teams are out of work, some are frantically trying to figure out everything from socially distanced musicians creating a score for finished films to walking with a face mask and taking phone call after phone call. – The New York Times

The Art Of The Pandemic Poster

Before Twitter, before 24-hour cable news, before instantaneous visual information flooding our lives, there was the poster. “Produced and displayed on a massive scale, these posters used a variety of cultural, political, and psychological strategies to steer public behavior with eye-catching and sometimes shocking visuals.” (The message? Very much the same.) – The Atlantic

New Barbara Hepworth Letters Rewrite The Idea Of The Great Artist As A Bad Mother

Hepworth has, for decades, been thought of as a cold and uncaring parent who sent her triplets away when they were four months old so she could get some work done. Surprise: The letters tell a quite different story about postpartum depression and abandonment by the babies’ father (and an idealistic view of the “nursery college” where she sent the babies for just over nine months). – The Observer (UK)

Peter Beard, Photographer And Artist, Has Died At 82

Margalit Fox: “Beard, a New York photographer, artist and naturalist to whom the word ‘wild’ was roundly applied, both for his death-defying photographs of African wildlife and for his own much-publicized days — decades, really — as an amorous, bibulous, pharmaceutically inclined man about town, was found dead in the woods on Sunday, almost three weeks after he disappeared from his home in Montauk on the East End of Long Island.” – The New York Times

Please, Please, Give Us This Eighth Narnia Book

Now is truly a time when the world could use an update to the beloved C.S. Lewis series. But only 75 copies of the sequel, written by a Narnia lover and scholar, exist. “It may never be conventionally published because Lewis’ work remains under copyright through 2034, and his estate has expressed no interest in authorizing it.” – Slate