Museums and galleries – especially those representing a canonical European art tradition – burst with images of women disrobed and displayed for the delectation of men. Of course, there is nothing new about recognising the extent to which the spectacularisation of the female body has been part of a structure of oppression of women by men. – The Guardian
Blog
Theatre Made By Ex-Inmates To Show Outsiders That Prison Is Not Like ‘Orange Is The New Black’
Matt Trueman meets the women of the company Clean Break and playwright Luke Barnes, who talk about their scripts and the work they produce both inside and outside prisons. – The Guardian
Wendy Whelan And Jonathan Stafford Are New York City Ballet’s New Leaders
“Jonathan Stafford, 38, who has been running the company for more than a year on an interim basis, will become the new artistic director of City Ballet as well as its affiliated academy, the School of American Ballet. Wendy Whelan, 51, a star ballerina who danced with the company for 30 years, will become City Ballet’s associate artistic director. The two said they intended to work as partners.” – The New York Times
André Previn, 89
“[He] was a musical polymath who began composing for Hollywood at 16 and won a quartet of Oscars, and had additional careers as a jazz piano phenomenon and major symphonic conductor. All the while, he … was considered something of a playboy as he leapt with swaggering allure between Hollywood and the directorship of some of the world’s leading orchestras, often using his celebrity and skillfulness as a raconteur to bring wider attention to classical music.” – The Washington Post
Why It’s Good Business For Arts Organizations To Be Socially Conscious (And Act On It)
“I’m not suggesting for a moment that corporate virtue-signaling is driven by anything more than pure, uncut capitalism, or that a chasm doesn’t separate legitimate IRL activism from retail “activism.” But the point is that sincerity isn’t required for money to change hands. On average, people with the most surplus cash increasingly want to support a progressive agenda—or at least pay for a tenuous claim to it—and the for-profit world is adjusting itself accordingly. So why wouldn’t the nonprofit world benefit by doing the same?” – Artnet
Translating The Hebrew Bible As The Poetry It Is
Few English-speakers are aware that much of ancient Jewish scripture is written in sophisticated verse, full of wordplay and soundplay. Translators have concentrated on the meaning of the words, sacrificing what Robert Alter calls the “music” of the original text. He has done a new translation that concentrates on that “music,” and here he explains how he did it — and why it matters. – Aeon
Kathleen Turner (Yes, That Kathleen Taylor) And What She Learned Making Her Opera Debut
Once she understood the training that goes into distinguishing such voices, she began to fully appreciate the difference in acting styles from what the audience might expect in a non-musical. Opera’s bend towards high drama can only be conveyed through vocal ability, which deprioritizes Turner’s acting preference of a more natural technique. – The Observer
Ira Gitlin, One Of America’s Greatest Jazz Writers, Dead At 90
“[His] criticism appeared regularly in publications like DownBeat and JazzTimes. He wrote two books about bebop, the challenging form of modern jazz that emerged in the 1940s. And, along with Leonard Feather and Nat Hentoff, he was among the most prodigious writers of liner notes, annotating more than 700 albums. In 2017 he was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts.” – The New York Times
Why Rebels And Non-Conformists Tend To Look The Same – A Study
This is the hipster effect—the counterintuitive phenomenon in which people who oppose mainstream culture all end up looking the same. Similar effects occur among investors and in other areas of the social sciences. How does this kind of synchronization occur? Is it inevitable in modern society, and are there ways for people to be genuinely different from the masses? – MIT Technology Review
Why Readers And Viewers Love Stories About Real-Life Scams
People seem to devour articles, books, and documentaries about the likes of the Fyre Festival and Theranos; Bernie Madoff and Enron are household names. “Reminding ourselves that sometimes liars do get caught and sometimes thieves are punished makes it easier to believe it could happen again. What we like about stories about scammers, I think, is born of the place where envy meets outrage: It’s incredibly unfair, and definitely evil, but also, why didn’t I think of that?” – The Cut