Sebastian Smee: “I ask this knowing it is the wrong question. It is wrong not just because huge numbers of people think Renoir is, in fact, great, as well as adorable, joyous and life-affirming. But also because, for many of the rest of us, Renoir is not ‘less than great.’ He is awful. Hideous. Beyond the pale.” – Washington Post
Blog
What Happens To Modern Dance Companies — And What Happens To Modern Dance Itself — When The Founders Are Gone?
Joan Acocella: “A lot of modern-dance companies are talking about ‘legacy’ and trying to come up with ways to perpetuate it. Why? Well, the art form is more than a century old. Many modern-dance companies are now big institutions, prestigious features of our cultural landscape. If they disband, a ton of people will lose their jobs. More important, there will no longer be anyone to perform the dances properly, in the style passed down through generations of dancers. The work will cease to exist. It would be as if, when Rembrandt died, all his canvases were taken out into the back yard and burned.” – The New Yorker
What Is America’s Culture?
Encouraging distinctly American artistic habits stands a chance of making art more accessible without making it unserious or “middlebrow.” The arts are so irrelevant to most Americans’ lives in no small part because they have diverted so sharply from that tradition. Without reconnecting to the “soil” of the life experience of most Americans, the art world exists with and for the Hamptons. – National Affairs
Septime Webre Is Starting To Do For Hong Kong Ballet What He Did For Washington Ballet
In the two years he’s been artistic director of Hong Kong Ballet (where he arrived one year after leaving the same job in DC), Webre has added to the company’s repertoire, brought in high-profile guest artists, and seen subscriptions more than double. – Pointe Magazine
Has Magic Been Displaced By Science? Not At All
Far from having evaporated, ‘folkloric disenchantment’ is still common today in the writings of self-described magicians, shamans and witches. But we also find its analogue in academic disciplines. In this academic version of the myth, nostalgia for vanished magic has been replaced by the idea that a scientific worldview has stepped in to replace more primitive folk-belief systems. – Aeon
Oregon Bach Festival’s Executive Director Out, Two Years After Firing Of Artistic Director Matthew Halls
A Friday afternoon announcement said that Janelle McCoy would be leaving after this year’s festival (which begins Friday) and that her job is being eliminated due to budget cuts. In 2017, she was behind the dismissal of Halls, ostensibly for a racist remark made to a singer who insisted that the remark wasn’t racist and he wasn’t offended (except by the firing). – Eugene Weekly
Who Gets Duped By Fake Online Images
The main factors that determined whether a person could correctly perceive each image as a fake were their level of experience with the internet and digital photography. – The Conversation
Soprano Measha Brueggergosman Comes Through Emergency Double-Bypass Surgery
“[She] wrote a Facebook post late Friday … ‘Just 30 teensy hours after a five-hour open-heart surgery (10 years after my OTHER open-heart surgery to repair a dissected aorta), I am tube- and oxygen-free and have even walked around the nurse’s station three times!'” – CBC
David Esterly, Self-Taught Master Wood Carver, Dead At 75
He’d completed a doctorate in literature at Cambridge and wasn’t sure what to do with himself next when, on a visit to London, he saw the 17th-century woodcarvings by Grinling Gibbons in St. James’s Church, Piccadilly. He was so amazed by them that he taught himself the craft, and he got so good that he was eventually commissioned to recreate some of Gibbons’s own work, lost in the 1986 fire at Hampton Court Palace. – The New York Times
How The Mueller Report Was Turned Into A Play And Live-Streamed By A Superstar Cast
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Robert Schenkkan (The Kentucky Cycle) adapted the special counsel’s notoriously careful report into a drama titled The Investigation: A Search for the Truth in Ten Acts — each act covering an act of possible obstruction of justice detailed in the report. And on Monday, a cast featuring Annette Bening, Kevin Kline, Michael Shannon, Alfre Woodard, Jason Alexander, and many others read and streamed the play live; John Lithgow played Donald Trump. – Los Angeles Times