“Opera is an incredibly sophisticated art form that’s developed over 500 years. So there’s no one audience. If you want to just sit there without knowing anything about it and watch the pretty pictures with music at the centre, you are allowed to, great. If you want to do two years of research and study the programme and the libretto, great. And if you want to compare it to the 20 other productions that you’ve seen in the last five years, that’s great too.” – Bachtrack
Blog
Debt Bubble: Borrowing Against Art
Borrowing against art poses specific problems because of its portability, its heterogeneous nature and difficulty in establishing a reliable price. And yet, according to a report published last year by Deloitte and ArtTactic, in 2017 the global total of loans outstanding against art was eye-popping: between $17bn and $20bn. – The Art Newspaper
I’m Tired Of New Plays! I Want Something More
“In a word: I’m against the New Play. New Plays take many forms and have been around for years, but they seem especially prized lately. They’re plays with budget-friendly cast sizes, simpler stories with watery stakes, forward-slashes to indicate overlapping, a pretty strict adherence to the fourth wall, “ordinary” unaffected language, and an authorial injunction to either “play it fast” or “respect the beats”—or both. Further, all of the matter onstage is matter of the theatre (i.e. no video, film, poetry, live musical interlude, non-diagetic dance, opera, or lip-sync).” – Howlround
Victoria, BC Performing Arts Groups Scramble After Theatre’s Huge Rent Increases
The symphony has been told its rent, currently $1,850 per day, will go to $2,500 Sunday to Wednesday, $3,500 on Thursdays and $4,000 on Friday or Saturday. Those rates now apply to rehearsal days — currently $800 — too. – The Times-Colonist (Victoria, Canada)
The Oscars Have A Bigger Problem Than Kevin Hart
We’re living in a time of perpetual, distracting, cheap cliffhangers provided by a ratings-conscious president. America’s relationship to many of its long-standing institutions, from the U.S. government to the Olympics, the Super Bowl, the Emmys and the Grammys — it’s all eroding. And maybe inevitable. – Chicago Tribune
Amanda Swimmer, Beloved Cherokee Potter And Elder, Dead At 97
After jumping the fence and running away from the boarding school she and other Cherokee were forced to attend, she spent her life dedicated to preserving both the Cherokee language (she was one of its last fluent speakers) and its traditional methods of making pottery. — New York Times
The Real Story Behind Elizabeth I’s Chalk-White Makeup
“Her shockingly white face is a deeply woven part of the historical image of this singular queen, and it’s worth unpacking in greater detail.” So that is what Slate history maven Rebecca Onion does. — Slate
Must Visit? National Geographic Puts Dundee’s New Waterfront And Museum On Its Worldwide List
Dundonians are said to have developed “a new kind of swagger” thanks to the opening of its V&A museum, which is hailed as “the crown jewel” of its £1 billion waterfront regeneration. The city was rated number 15 in National Geographic’s 2019 “Cool List,” which it says are the destinations set to “hit the headlines” next year. Other locations to make the top 19 included Oslo, Guyana, Bhutan, Corsica, Eritrea and Uganda. More than 250,000 visitors flocked to V&A Dundee in the space of just months after it opened its doors in September. – The Scotsman
The World’s Oldest Surviving Form Of Theatre
The Japanese musical drama called Noh has been practiced without a significant break since the 14th century. In this short documentary, The Spirit of Noh, actor Michishige Udaka tells filmmaker Edwin Lee, “The actor wearing the Noh mask is not acting as a modern-day person, but as a spirit or wraith.” (video) — The Atlantic
New Yale Review Editor On Art And Politics
“To me, there is something thrilling about thinking through the ideas of our time alongside poems and fiction. Literature, with its idiosyncrasies, its heresies, its visions, can provide a kind of subversive push-pull against what the critic Alexandra Schwartz aptly called ‘the rubbery chew’ of op-ed culture.” – Lithub