“You’d have to have your head in the sand, or perhaps somewhere else, to not anticipate that there would be criticism of this in Toronto in 2016, amid the #OscarsSoWhite controversy and right after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s speech on diversity ‘as a source of strength’ at Davos.”
Author: ArtsJournal2
We Need A Funding System For Artists That Puts Food On The Table And Also Supports Dreaming
“So many artists whose potential is unlimited, and who have already worked on visible, prestige (and in some cases commercial) projects, are still barely scraping by. This is not a new thing, although of course the current funding situation tightens the screws. It reflects the fact that a great deal of the increased funding that went into theatre over the last 20 years found its way into buildings and administrative posts, leaving artists to apparently exist on thin air.”
A Greek Play Cancelled Due To Protests Gets One Final Performance
“On Thursday, the theater’s artistic director canceled the last four performances of the play, saying in a statement that it had caused ‘more pain than room for thought’ and had led to ‘threats,’ without disclosing further details.”
A Poet’s Renaissance, And Everyone’s Sunday Night Secrets
Eileen Myles: “In 1977, I probably would have been out getting trashed the night before and so the wake-up would be filled with so much dread. I wake up and I don’t feel in a state of existential dread. I wake up with a sense of wonder. I don’t dread the future. I like it. Because this is it. But I still hit the coffee hard.”
A New Test For Film, Named (By A New York Times Critic) For The Director Of ‘Selma’
“The long-established Bechdel test, first proposed by the US cartoonist Alison Bechdel in a 1985 comic strip, requires two women to talk to each other about something other than a man to prove its egalitarian values. Dargis said her ‘DuVernay test’ would merely require ‘African Americans and other minorities [to] have fully realised lives rather than serve as scenery in white stories.'”
A Snapshot Of The New York Phil’s New Music Director In Rehearsal
“Mr. van Zweden, 55, is more a maestro of the old school. He is sometimes polite, and sometimes quite blunt, but always very direct in seeking what he wants — the demanding teacher who, instead of giving a B-plus to a passable but unexceptional paper, will send it back riddled with cross-outs, order a rewrite and make it sparkle.”
An Artist Sketches Other Artists Into The Canon
“‘What Rebecca’s doing in a very beautiful, subtle way is saying: Look, here’s all these artists who are working right now in Los Angeles,’ says Grant. ‘Do you know them? They want to meet you. They want their work to be known in the public realm and considered on equal footing with male peers.'”
Yes, We Are All Critics, And That’s Just Fine (Says A Professional Critic)
“The making of art — popular or fine, abstruse or accessible, sacred or profane — is one of the glories of our species. We are uniquely endowed with the capacity to fashion representations of the world and our experience in it, to tell stories and draw pictures, to organize sound into music and movement into dance. Just as miraculously, we have the ability, even the obligation, to judge what we have made.”
Ballet Dancers’ Brains Change As They Practice, Scans Prove
“‘We found that in the learning process, our brain function makes an inverted ‘U’ learning pattern from a slow pace at the start, accelerating to a peak at the midpoint, before returning to the original pace, once we have mastered the task,’ says DeSouza.”
Brutalism Is Back, Or So Its Cheerleaders Say
“The brutalist style harks back to an idealistic postwar world where even Conservative governments built council houses; an epoch when carving out a collective future, rather than endlessly showing off on Facebook, was the esprit du temps. Brutalist buildings might look like they want to slap you in the face, but they’re solid and dependable – the opposite of so many of today’s splutters on the skyline, which look like they’ll fall over if you mumble ‘Fee-fi-fo-fum’ near to them.”