The Lincoln Center Festival is gone, though a few of its programs got added elsewhere. But the whole Mostly Mozart brand has lost some of its allure. “Mostly Mozart has some thinking to do,” says NYT critic Anthony Tommasini.
Author: ArtsJournal2
Can Bystander Video Create A More Just Society? [VIDEO]
Here’s the theory: “We live, at the moment, in a country where basic rights are really being violated. … There’s a real need to understand how video can help people prove what happened.” (But videographers and photographers need to defend their rights to film and take photos, too.)
Why Do Writers Love Writing About Long, Hot Summers?
Think about Call Me By Your Name or Sag Harbor, for instance. “At its most basic, this means a release from the usual constraints, although at the same time summer provides a usefully closed system.”
Amazon Removes A Few Racist Items, But Many Remain
Wow: “After criticism from advocacy groups and Minnesota Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison about the availability of Nazi-themed toys and baby onesies with pictures of burning crosses on Amazon’s website, the company said this week that it had removed several items and banned sellers who had violated its policies.” OK, but “a search by NPR of Amazon’s website yielded many results of racist paraphernalia, especially books by white supremacists.”
The Met And Two Of Its Largest Unions Reached A Quiet Deal
The Met is still reeling from the accusations against James Levine, so the quiet deals could be very good for the opera company. “If the deal is ratified, it will remove the threat of a work stoppage as the company prepares for its first season with the conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin as its music director.”
Authorities Bulldoze Ai Weiwei’s Studio In Beijing With No Warning
His team raced today to save as many sculptures and other artworks as possible as excavators clawed holes in the walls. “They came and started knocking down the windows today without telling us beforehand. There’s still so much stuff inside.”
An Actress Accuses French Director Luc Besson Of Rape, But France Hasn’t Quite Joined The Me Too Movement
France, you have a problem. “Eeveral forces have kept #MeToo and its French counterpart, #BalanceTonPorc, or ‘Expose Your Pig,’ from having the same impact in France that it has had in the United States. In France, if an accused man is not convicted of a crime, it is relatively easy for him to sue his accuser for defamation. … Other reasons are cultural.”
Bayreuth’s First American Director Gives A Wagner Opera A Feminist – And Maybe Sort Of Happy – Ending
Or was it more ambiguous? Director and MacArthur genius grant recipient Yuval Sharon: “All of these various ideas resonate with each other, or clash with each other, or sometimes don’t get told all the way to the end. … I love things that aren’t closed, because then the audience has such power and freedom to discover things for themselves.”
Oh, So This Is How Netflix Makes Its Decisions (Or Some Of Them, Or So We Think)
The streaming platform uses “taste communities” – “broadly defined groups of subscribers who gravitate toward the same shows … Viewers in the same taste community may live on different continents, but they enjoy the same kinds of TV shows and movies” – to figure out how to drive new programming.
Watching Musical Theatre From The Orchestra Pit Can Be Illuminating
Take the touring company of An American in Paris: “In between big song-and-dance numbers like ‘Fidgety Feet,’ ‘But Not for Me’ and ‘I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise,’ the musicians checked their phones, perused a paperback or prepped their instruments until their next cue to play. As the show moved toward its finale, I appreciated that if I was going to spend the evening perched in proximity to a piano, I couldn’t ask for anything more than for the pianist to be playing Gershwin.”