Blog

Adolescent Behavior

“It has to be more than a coincidence that literary fiction is being flooded with books about adolescents. It’s been building for a while, from Michael Chabon’s Kavalier and Clay and Craig Thompson’s Blankets to last year’s Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld. But this year it seems to be out of control, with another book about another awkward pre-teen crossing my doorway every day or so.”

SF’s New Community Of Dance

ODC/Dance opens up a big new home in San Francisco. “Despite plaudits from dance world luminaries such as Bill T. Jones, the building has yet to attract the same media buzz as the Baryshnikov Arts Center in Manhattan, or the Mark Morris Dance Center in Brooklyn — even though the ODC complex is larger and more expensive than both of those projects. ‘The community idea is not glam, and we’re a culture that likes the star approach. Ultimately, substance can be attractive too, but it’s not sound bites’.”

Welsh Arts Support Reorganization Defended

Welsh arts minister Alun Pugh defends his decision to take the country’s six major cultural organisations under government control and not to reappoint Arts Council Wales’ chairman. “The reality is I want to see public money invested in the arts reaching all communities. There is a need to reform for the future in order to ensure that we continue as a nation to develop excellent arts, with access for all.”

Scots To Redo Arts Support

New plans for a major overhaul of Scottish arts support is expected to be announced this week. “The minister is expected to announce her intention to impose a statutory duty on local authorities to provide arts and culture. This would take the form of a “cultural right” for every individual in the country to have arts provided in their area. It is not clear how this would work but it does raise the interesting possibility of a council being taken to court by an individual who felt the local authority was not providing enough culture. One way in which the scheme could work practically would be with the use of “culture vouchers” for schoolchildren.”

Reordering The Brain (Relax – It Happens All The Time)

For centuries, scientists held that the brain was a fixed entity, that it was hard-wired for each individual function, and incapable of reorganizing after injury. In the last half-century, however, new technology and cutting-edge experiments have exploded that dogma, revealing not only that the brain does in fact reorganize and adapt, it does so all the time. ‘A large part of our brains is devoted to vision-some estimate more than half. A question we are asking is what happens to that part of the brain when there is no input from the eyes’?”

Is Appreciation Of Art Built Into Our DNA?

“The existence of a universal aesthetic psychology has been suggested, not only experimentally, but by the fact that the arts travel outside their local contexts so easily. Displays of virtuosity make audiences’ hair stand on end, regardless of their specific cultural context. It’s no surprise this is a universal aspect of human nature: over thousands of generations, hunter-gatherer bands that exercised dexterity, and encouraged it by admiring it, would have survived better than their less skilful cousins against predators and the rigours of a hostile environment.”

D’Arcy Sues NPR, MoMA

Former NPR freelancer David D’Arcy has filed a $5 million suit against NPR and the Museum of Modern Art, claiming that he was “slandered for his report on a Nazi-looted painting once displayed at the museum. D’Arcy says MoMA retaliated against him for the piece — which questioned the museum’s role in a Jewish family’s fight to reclaim Egon Schiele’s ‘Portrait of Wally’ — by allegedly lying to NPR and saying he got his facts wrong.”