A bidding war at Christie’s last week sent the price of a 3,000-year-old stone relief from $7 million to more than $28 million, setting a world record for ancient Assyrian artworks and raising fears among some archaeologists that soaring prices will fuel the market for looted antiquities as well as legally acquired ones.
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Alas – The Internet Is Designed To Spread Hate Faster Than Love
Social media platforms — and Facebook and Twitter are as guilty of this as Gab is — are designed so that the awful travels twice as fast as the good. And they are operating with sloppy disregard of the consequences of that awful speech, leading to disasters that they then have to clean up after.
Why Would You Write A Book Only For The Future? (No One Alive Now Will Read It)
“When you write a book you have the faith that it will reach out to someone else, to someone who is different from you and it will connect us. That you will be able to transcend the boundaries of the self, that was given to you at birth, that you will be able to touch someone else’s reality.” Yet in 96 years, when the seedlings become trees and the trees are sacrificed to the written word, it is impossible to know whose reality they will touch.
How To Revive A Town? “Curate” It!
Curating a town as one might an art collection — or in latter days, a party or store — is not a lonely pursuit. Wealthy individuals like Mr. Resnick, well-funded nonprofits and even corporations like Walmart have begun buying deserted American main streets, hoping to reinvent them with a fresh aesthetic.
Kenya Barris Of ‘Black-ish’ Fame Has Plans For Netflix
Barris left ABC after it wouldn’t air an episode of black-ish that was about NFL players kneeling during the Pledge of Allegiance – but he left, in what both sides describe as an amicable split, for a lucrative deal at Netflix. What’s he going to do with the new opportunity? He doesn’t say much, but he will tease: “I can say this. … I want to reboot what a family show is.”
Taking Your Play From MFA Shape To Off-Broadway Can Require More Than A Few Complete Rewrites
Ming Peiffer says that the moment she realized she needed to stop writing for others and start writing her own truth changed her play Usual Girls extensively. “I recoiled from the original play that I was writing, and [a new version] almost just spewed out. … Even as I realized that I was going to some very deep, dark, and uncomfortable places, by that point I was already going — there was an energy attached to it that I didn’t want to stop.”
Many Literary Magazines Are Born To Die
There are so many factors that kill lit mags. “Radical passion often meets practical reality. Sometimes the fire behind great literary magazines is the exact thing that causes them to burn out. Other magazines lose institutional funding, fold because of scandal, or vanish along with their masthead.”
Royal Ballet Soloist Says He Used Skin-Lightening Products For Auditions
Fernando Montano grew up in Colombia and came to the Royal Ballet in 2006. The soloist, “said he used cosmetics during his early years at Britain’s largest ballet company as he was one of only three black dancers.”
In London, A Beloved Independent Cinema Decides Not To Hand Over Control To A Commercial Theatre Group
The Phoenix Cinema has been run by a trust since 1912 (when it was the East Finchley Picturedrome), but the board was ready to sell to Curzon until protests by staff and patrons, including directors Mike Leigh and Ken Loach and actor Michael Palin, convinced it that wasn’t going to work.
As A Contemporary Art Collector Sells Off Her Collection To Support Social Justice, What’s Next?
Agnes Gund doesn’t want to be profiled and doesn’t want to be too lavishly praised for being rich and using her money to support a wide swath of the worlds of social justice, not to mention artistic culture. “Her cash reserve has shrunk after a lifetime of giving to AIDS research, abortion rights groups and arts organizations, among many others. The valuable paintings in her home by artists like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Ellsworth Kelly have mostly been promised to museums.”