Two years after she took the helm, “it appears that Kent’s fame has not attracted enough ticket buyers and donors to fund the new vision of the Washington Ballet, with more and better dancers performing the ‘Great Books’ of ballet. It’s a big risk, because the transformation will be costly and take years. And then there are the questions no one seems to have asked in the planning stages: Does the public want this kind of company, and will enough donors fund it?”
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Florida Man Tried To Defraud Sotheby’s By Bidding On Art As Somebody Else: FBI
Antonio DiMarco, an interior designer from Broward County, and New York art consultant Joakim von Ditmar have been charged with identity theft and conspiracy to commit wire fraud: they allegedly bid $7.5 million for a Rothko and an Ad Reinhardt under the name of an 80-year-old client of DiMarco’s.
Britain’s Regional Theatre Is In Real Danger, Even As It Does Terrific Work
Lyn Gardner, who sees more plays in more places around the country than just about anyone, will swear by the high quality of the UK’s regional companies. Yet, she writes, with every effort they make to bring in more revenue, more funding cuts just set them further back.
Arts Orgs In Birmingham Face Third Round Of Funding Cuts In Four Years
“The mooted cut – which would amount to just under £1m (30%) across the entire arts portfolio – would be on top of a combined £1.7m reduction in 2017 (34%), and a 25% cut the year before. It comes less than a year after the [city] council announced its intention to hold arts funding at a standstill until 2020.”
Wen C. Fong, 88, Curator Who Helped Build Met’s Asian Art Collections
“A leading figure in the history of Chinese art, Professor Fong taught for 40 years at Princeton University, where in the 1950s he established the nation’s first doctoral degree program in Chinese art and archaeology. Beginning in the early 1970s he was a driving force behind the Met’s ambitious effort to expand its collection of Asian art, including masterworks from China, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia and India, and add space in which to display it.”
Nigeria To Open Museum For Looted Benin Bronzes
“Major museums across Europe have agreed to loan important artifacts back to Nigeria for a new museum the country plans to open in 2021. The African nation’s Royal Museum will house a rotating display of artifacts, including the Benin bronzes that were looted during the Benin Expedition of 1897. The agreement marks a significant step after years of negotiations among European institutions and Nigerian authorities.”
The World’s Biggest Arts Center Just Opened In Taiwan
By turns galumphing and graceful, the roughly £260m hulk contains an opera house, concert hall, theatre and recital hall, seating up to 7,000 people within its curvaceous shell. As Taiwan faces ever more pressure for assimilation from mainland China, whose cultural building boom has led to a new museum or concert hall open practically every week in recent years, the National Kaohsiung Centre for the Arts, AKA Weiwuying, is a monumental statement that this plucky nation means business on the international cultural stage.
An Alternative History Of The Mythologies Of Silicon Valley
It is only now, a decade after the financial crisis, that the American public seems to appreciate that what we thought was disruption worked more like extraction—of our data, our attention, our time, our creativity, our content, our DNA, our homes, our cities, our relationships. The tech visionaries’ predictions did not usher us into the future, but rather a future where they are kings.
Opera Philadelphia’s Bet On The Future Of Opera (And What’s Fueling It)
A costly experiment? Surely, since box office revenue in these spaces is small relative to cost of production. Without philanthropic support, the project would be untenable. What Opera Philadelphia is discovering is that there are donors particularly anxious to invest in the future
A Fascinating Test: An Algorithm That Can Predict Artistic Success?
The idea is simple. Within these algorithms, notes are treated like the DNA of music. It all starts with an initial population of ‘songs’– each a random jumble of notes stitched together. Over many generations, the algorithm breeds from the songs, finding and rewarding ‘beautiful’ features within the music to breed ‘better’ and ‘better’ compositions as time goes on. I say ‘beautiful’ and ‘better’, but – of course – as we already know, there’s no way to decide what either of those words mean definitively. The algorithm can create poems and paintings as well as music, but – still – all it has to go on is a measure of similarity to whatever has gone before.