According to research by Music Week, it took an average of 5.34 people to write last year’s Top 100 biggest singles. That’s up from 4.84 in 2017, and 4.53 the year before. So what’s going on? – BBC
Blog
How Peter Schjeldahl Illuminates The Art World
“What separates Schjeldahl is the tangible sense in nearly every piece in this book — say 85 of the 100 — that something existential is at stake as he writes. The same sensation is present in Barthes and Sontag, his closest analogues to my mind, writers who, whatever their subject at a given moment, are desperately attempting to make something lucid out of this indecipherable life they’ve received without asking for it.” – The New York Times
Autofiction? What’s That?
It is perhaps this apparent contradiction, between “fiction” and “facts strictly real”, which can seem baffling. Is autofiction fiction, or non-fiction? Autobiography, or novel? There is no easy space for the genre to settle, and the area it occupies remains uncertain. It has always troubled some readers, and it requires if not a new, then a reconsidered, critical response. – Times Literary Supplement
How The New Orleans Jazz Market Survived A Scandal And Rose Again
“Most organizations probably would have went under and failed,” the drummer Adonis Rose, a charter member of the orchestra who took over as artistic director after the scandal broke, said in an interview last month. “Thankfully, we did not.” – The New York Times
Want To Know What Is Art? Start By Asking What Art Isn’t
“What’s the difference between something that’s not art because it’s not good enough, and something that’s not art because it’s the wrong sort of thing? Let’s start there.” – 3 Quarks Daily
Why, Amidst All The Musical Comedies, It’s Important Every So Often To Have A Musical Tragedy
Rachel Chavkin, director of Hadestown: “This gets now into very old Greek theater, but the idea of catharsis and working through something together and the tragedy as a crucible that the audience travels through as a community and mourns together. … I think there something is so medicinal in that purgation. That’s how the Greeks used that word, catharsis, both spiritually and physically — which of course wasn’t separate for them — as medicinal.” – Slate
A Dialogue: ‘All That Would Ever After Not Be Said’
Norman Ogue Mustill (1931-2013), longtime friend and collaborator, was a little-known master collagist. – Jan Herman
Are The Liberal Arts Worth It? The Rich Seem To Think So
What, then, can we make of the anomaly that the elite liberals arts education so coveted today by the rich or those seeking to get rich consists largely of diatribes against the rich? – Washington Post
Does Classical Ballet Qualify As Camp? (A Lot Of People Seem To Think So)
“Ballet might have been considered camp from the start in its original French context,” allows Madison Mainwaring. (But then, so could most things at Louis XIV’s Versailles.) “If there is a camp essence in [today’s] Romantic style of ballet, with its jeweled costumes and feathered headdresses, it is related to the worship of a style that is no longer of its time.” – The New York Times
The (Fabulous) Making Of Randy Rainbow
Think of him as a modern-day Gilbert and Sullivan, or the millennial version of the piano-playing Mark Russell or Tom Lehrer — the key difference being that his get-it-out-fast production marathons and savvy use of social media bring his commentary to the public quickly, directly and with no filter. – Washington Post