Christiane Crawford belongs to the first generation that grew up on hip-hop and saw its progression from urban freestyle to suburban entertainment, and she is offering successive generations an outlet she never had. Last summer, Crawford and DJ Jessie Singer developed Body, a semi-monthly event merging urban, social, and performance dance into a kind of live update on the TV dance show “Soul Train.” – Dance Magazine
Blog
ARTLISTING
Publication of a list of 350 artworks in Britain with questionable provenance during Nazi years, had British museum organization on the defensive Tuesday. “in Britain some museum directors after the war had not been ‘fastidious’ about checking whether paintings they bought or were given might have had a Nazi connection. But the organization believes many of the gaps in history are innocent but cannot yet be explained because papers have been lost, owners have died or dealers and auction houses are unwilling to release documents.” – The Telegraph (UK)
- List “far less sensational” than headlines suggest. – The Telegraph (UK)
- Proving ownership difficult. – The Telegraph (UK)
- “No factual evidence that any of the works had been stolen by the Nazis” – New York Times
ME TOO
Three weeks after rival Christie’s lowers its sales commissions, Sotheby’s follows suit. Did you talk to each other about the new fees, guys? Nah…. “We did this in light of the competitive environment we’re in,” said William F. Ruprecht, Sotheby’s new president and chief executive. – New York Times
THE ART OF POLITICS
Artists’ reaction to Austrian politics is problematic. “It is generally accepted in Western societies that the arts are a democratic safety valve, articulating ideals around which public sentiment can refocus. Artistic freedom has become as sacrosanct, in principle, as freedom of the press. All agree that it is abhorrent for politicians to interfere with the arts. At what point, however, does it become unacceptable for the arts to meddle in politics?” – The Telegraph (UK)
PROTECT THIS
“There is an inherent conflict between intellectual property rights and freedom of speech, a tension between your right to control a story you’ve written and my right to use it as raw material for my own work. Thanks to two trends, that tension is turning rapidly into a collision.” – Reason
NOT QUITE YET
Every American composer seems to be writing opera these days. But despite some high-profile conservative efforts (“Gatsby,” “A View from The Bridge”) American opera hasn’t yet come into its own. Don’t despair though – “Prior to World War II, it was widely felt that British work was dead beyond hope of revival; the last opera by an English-born composer to enter the standard repertoire had been Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, composed in 1689.” Then in 1945, Benjamin Britten wrote “Peter Grimes” and a new era in British opera commenced. – Commentary
SECOND CHANCES
Peter Oundjian was a solid member of the Tokyo String Quartet until hand problems forced him out. Now he’s reinvented himself as a conductor. – Ottawa Citizen
THOROUGHLY THOREAU
In the years following the publication of his proto-ecological gospel “Walden,” Henry David Thoreau began a series of essays that looked much more like a biologist’s field notebooks – filled with taxonomical lists and seasonal charts on flowerings and seed dispersal – than a philosophical treatise. New scholarship shows Thoreau’s genius is ever-present in the notebooks, which reflect the “great American prose stylist’s tart wit, flinty clarity, and aphoristic bite.” – The Atlantic
THE FUTURE OF THE PAST
Exhibitions of ancient art are sexy – a few beautiful objects organized around a theme and artfully displayed. “It is one thing to make the perfectly accurate point that all we have are a few remarkable artifacts coming out of what is largely a historical void. It is another to begin to fill in that void with a story which sounds so familiar, and hence so beguiling, to modern ears. There is no challenge to the imagination here, just a confirmation of things which we feel we must already know.” – Al-Ahram Weekly (Egypt)
LORD OF THE RIP-OFF
“Somehow in the post-World War era of popular literature, Generic Fantasy became the be-all and end-all escape device. It was so easy to write. No bothering with grounding your book in reality, with all its annoying demands. Just assume that everything in your book takes place in a “Secondary World”, and you can write anything you want. – *spark-online