Author: ArtsJournal2

A Conductor Stops The Opera Twice When Audience Cellphones Ring

Carlo Rozzi, conducting the Welsh National Opera in Cardiff on February 22, stopped Verdi’s Les Vêpres Sicilienes twice – and he wasn’t afraid to go directly to the audience about why. Said a member of the audience, “He got a warm round of applause after he stopped and ticked off the audience member. Both incidents were right at the beginning of the show and all was well after that.” – BBC

Irish Literature Was Born When The Country Didn’t Even Belong To Itself

Indeed, Ireland didn’t even get its own national poet or fiction laureate until 1998 and 2015, respectively. “Laureateships, like prizes and bursaries, recognise a coherent tradition built over time and reinforce a robust faith in the value of Irish literature as a category. Irish literature is now a term with clear meanings and resonances, institutionalised as an aspect of Irish life. … But the apparent certainty with which we now use the term should not blind us to its long birth across centuries of conflict and change.” – The Irish Times

Art Literally Made Of Bones (And Other Human Remains)

The British got a lot wrong as the empire spread, and one facet of colonial mistakes was how to look at Tibetan religious and art objects made of skulls or thighbones. “To British colonial officials and missionaries in the 19th and early 20th centuries, such items were morbid examples of devil worship. To Tibetans they were objects used to celebrate life.” – The Guardian (UK)

Berlin Film Festival’s Gender Parity Scorecard Is Mostly Good, But Not All Good

The good: Leadership. “Its festival directorships were shared equally between men and women, and … its executive board was similarly balanced.”
The less good: Director numbers. “The majority of films shown at the competition were still made by male directors. At this year’s festival, 37.9% of films were directed by women, and six of the 18 films in competition were directed by women, which is down from seven last year.” – The Guardian (UK)

Johni Cerny, Chief Genealogist Who Helped Oprah, Bernie, And Others Find Their Roots On TV, Has Died At 76

Cerny, said Henry Louis Gates Jr., was “the proverbial dean of American genealogical research, … [whose work was] transforming raw data into narratives and metaphors about diversity and our common humanity.” Gates, the Harvard prof who hosts and produces Finding Your Roots on PBS, began working with Cerny in 2006, and their work on personal (and social) histories flowered from there. – The New York Times

France Can’t See What’s Erotic About Two Women Falling For Each Other

This is the weirdest possible sentence to write, but director Céline Sciamma says that Portrait of a Lady on Fire isn’t considered erotic in, of all places, France. What? WHAT? Quoi?? Sciamma: “It’s a very bourgeois industry. There’s resistance to radicalism, and also less youth in charge. ‘A film can be feminist?’ They don’t know this concept. They don’t read the book. They don’t even know about the fact that ‘male gaze’ exists. You can tell it’s a country where there’s a lot of sexism, and a strong culture of patriarchy.” – The Guardian (UK)

Vine Started The Short Video Craze, And Then Died – But It May Be Back

Vine was introduced in 2012, bought by Twitter, and killed in 2016. But in its time, it “turned everyday people into stars on other platforms and beyond. Its musical whims warped the music industry. It cultivated memes that might have been dismissed as inside jokes if not for their tendency to flourish outside the app.” Can the app make a comeback in 2020, where TikTok rules the internet? – The New York Times