Words refer to objects, and they don’t actually live in our brains – only experience does, and we use words to convey our experiences. Or so is the claim. For instance: “What is an angel but a juggling of past experience: beautiful body, plus wings, as in a dream? What is dark matter if not a piece needed to complete a puzzle, a theory, made up of endless complex objects in the world? Sometimes, the imaginary object is a reshuffling of real objects and thus it is real in its own way; sometimes, it is nothing.”
Author: ArtsJournal2
There Was, Last Week In Manhattan, And Briefly, A Four-Story Mural Of A Penis
The piece, by artist Carolina Falkholdt, had been commissioned, but it didn’t last long. “The painting appeared on the wall of a building on Broome Street, between Forsyth and Eldridge Streets, on Christmas Eve. By Wednesday afternoon, it was being painted over, and by Thursday it had completely disappeared.” (Read much more about the mural’s background and planned focus in this Hyperallergic piece.)
Stephen Albert, Executive Director Of Chicago’s Court Theatre, Has Died At 66
Albert had a long history of working in theatre, including, before Court Theatre, as “the longtime managing director at Hartford Stage in Connecticut, an assignment that followed similar leadership posts at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and the Alley Theatre in Houston. At Court, he presided over a robust period of growth, coupled with the cultivation of a much closer alliance with the University of Chicago, on whose campus the long-independent theater is housed.”
An Architecture Critic Takes On The Border Wall
The L.A. Times’ Christopher Knight worked hard to convince the Border Patrol that he should be able to see the wall prototypes – and that an architecture critic’s experience and expertise were relevant. But once he got there, he says, “my critical instincts seemed divided against themselves. The slabs in front of me seemed at once the most and least architectural objects I’d ever seen. They were banal and startling, full and empty of meaning. Here were the techniques of Land Art, medieval construction, marketing and promotion, architectural exhibition and the new nativism rolled uncomfortably if somehow inevitably into one.”
If Digital Life Is Getting You Down, Get To A Live Theatre Show, Fast
Playwright Ayad Akhtar: “I am not hopeful about where we are as a nation — as a species (if I can be so presumptuous). I’m not hopeful, because I am increasingly of the mind that even my hope is being monetized. That which is most enduring, most noble, most human about me — my urge for something brighter, more vivid, more loving, more alive — all of this is being used against me.”
The Year-End List Means A Lot More In 2017, And Is More Radical, Than It Ever Was Before
Year-end lists go against this year’s tide: “For many Americans, 2017 has amounted to a permanent kind of jet lag: bodily schedules misaligned with social ones. There is so much happening, always. There is so much to know, unceasingly. There is so much that won’t be known. Which is also to say that there is so much that won’t be paid attention to. If one of the functions of the American media is to give order to the world’s messiness, to help people make determinations about what—and who—deserves their attention and care, 2017 was the year in which that ordering function lost some of its stability.”
Time Is Running Out (At Midnight) For The 10 Million Dollar Reward For Hints On The Gardner Museum Heist
There’s still a little time, and even after the new year, there’s still a pretty big reward: “The stolen paintings are valued at more than $500 million, and the museum has long offered a reward for information that will lead authorities to recover all of the paintings in good condition. The reward was $5 million until May, when it was temporarily doubled. But that $10 million reward – and like Cinderella’s coach – reverts to a $5 million pumpkin on January 1.”
Can Anything, Or Anyone, Save Bookstores?
A bookstore is many things that Amazon’s Kindle store is not: “‘a miniature city,’ a centre of resistance and a battlefield where commercial value and authorial prestige are contested every day. It’s ‘a condensed version of the world,’ and a ritual space for ‘a community of believers.'” Does anyone believe in the bookstore anymore?
What’s Theatre Like In Right-Wing Hungary After A Cultural Crackdown?
Frankly, it’s a bit more boring – and less dangerous in an overt sense, though it’s certainly dangerous for some of the theatre-makers. “Independent-minded leaders of scores of theatres and other cultural organizations across the nation have been replaced by apparatchiks—including at the emblematic National Theatre, where popular actor-director Robert Alfoldi was sacked in 2013 after being outed as gay and decried for ‘treason’ and ‘inciting and discrediting Hungarians.'”
An Artist Lost His Life’s Work In California’s Thomas Fire
The artist John Wullbrandt and his partner had spent 15 years planning for fire at their California ranch near Carpinteria. When it came, they saved their house and their animals. But his studio? No. “It was burned into oblivion. Wullbrandt knew the studio and shipping containers had wood floors, but he was certain there was metal beneath them. That was not the case. The fire blew underneath and ignited everything inside, turning decades worth of paintings into ash.”