Banes’ writing “paired a vivid and inquisitive approach with a lack of agenda and a belief that dance was a crucial part of cultural history.” – The New York Times
Author: ArtsJournal2
The Future Of Art: Human Scale
It doesn’t seem clear what will happen until there’s a vaccine, but perhaps – “Museums will reopen, and galleries can stop pretending their online viewing rooms are actual shows. Exhibitions may be fewer, run longer, borrow less from abroad. Collections will be swapped, tours will be wider, perhaps there will be more slow-looking shows like the Courtauld’s Manetin 2004, which concentrated so deeply on one pair of paintings.” – The Observer (UK)
Gathering And Honoring – And Playing – The Music Of The Death Camps
Francesco and Grazia Lotoro have spent their lives collecting and cataloguing “symphonies, operas, scores and songs that were composed and performed under conditions so horrible one imagines that music would have lost its ability to encourage and to soothe.” Their project now: To raise money for a “citadel” that is “known formally as the Istituto di Letteratura Musicale Concentrazionaria [and] is to include a museum, a library and a theater, at a cost of roughly $45 million.” – The New York Times
As Juniper Serra Statue Goes Down, Activists Want The Site To Tell A More Truthful History
For one thing, it’s really time to change the name of “Father Serra Park” in Los Angeles. But taking down the statues to the architect of the mission system, which brutalized thousands of Native adults and children, is a first step. And “organizers of the action (a loose group of unnamed artists and activists) say they see the toppling as a beginning, not an end.” – Los Angeles Times
The First Black British Author To Reach Number One On The Bestseller Lists Says It’s All Too Bittersweet
Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race was a sensation when she first published it, but it took a lot of police brutality for her book to top the lists. She notes, “To know there was a surge of people searching out anti-racism books after seeing what was essentially a film of somebody being murdered, I can’t uncouple those two things.” – The Observer (UK)
Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Author Of The Shadow Of The Wind, 55
Zafón, who had been dealing with colon cancer for two years, wrote The Shadow of the Wind after a visit to a book warehouse in Los Angeles. It became the second-best-selling Spanish book of all time … second only to Don Quixote. – The New York Times
The Music Of The Revolutions
Music that unites protestors is not new, and it wasn’t new in the 1960s either. “Music at protests reminds dissenters of their humanity, even when the powers-that-be attempt to strip away their personhood. It gives strength. It takes the mind away from a place of fear and pain, and focuses the body to resist. And at times, the music is the only way the message can be shared.” – OPB (Portland)
A Nigerian Scholar Calls For A Halt To The Sale Of Sacred Igbo Art
Chika Okeke-Agulu, professor of art history at Princeton, says that the sale of the two alusi would “perpetuate the violence” of the 1960s civil war, when the sculptures were “removed” from the Igbo areas of Nigeria that tried to create the state of Biafra. – The Guardian (UK)
It Took Richard Pryor To Change How Comedy Sees The Police
Comedy culture before Pryor, that is, white comedy culture, depicted copys “as clownish bullies, and their violence, divorced from any racial context, played as a kind of shtick. When they swung their clubs, you never really felt the blow.” Then Pryor came along. – The New York Times
Some California Museums Are, Cautiously, Reopening
But the smaller museums may not be interested in risking everything. The Underground Museum, “in L.A.’s Arlington Heights neighborhood, sounded a voice of caution about a pandemic that has hit Black and Latino populations disproportionately hard: ‘We are prioritizing the care of our community over calls to restart our economy. … Please stay safe, and if you can, stay home.'” – Los Angeles Times