Mark Shenton: “As welcome as all this activity is, it is also slightly worrying that the deluge of productions arriving simultaneously could dissipate the audience. Yes, musical aficionados will want to see them all; but a wider public may not have the funds or inclination to do so. It will also be an added challenge for producers to establish their shows in such a crowded marketplace.”
Blog
Why Is Music Pleasurable? (No Really…)
“Perhaps then, pleasure and music are connected in some way further removed from both the obvious sonorous tickle that music affords or the formal demands that music places on the listener. Perhaps we haven’t gone far enough when we suppose that pleasure in music derives from the recognition within it of a passionate utterance, or an imitation of nature, or an intense game of challenging listening to be played. Perhaps we’ve been asking too many questions about what in music is pleasurable, and too few about how pleasure is a phenomenon with musical qualities.”
Can Autistic People Really ‘Get’ Literature? (Yes)
“According to experts, autism’s ‘triad of impairments’ (in communication, imagination and social interaction) made literature a bad fit for the autistic brain. … If the mental states of others are beyond their reach, how can they possibly manage the moody jungle-gym of make-believe conflict that we call fiction? And if autistic people struggle with the dowsing rods of metaphor and irony, how can they divine a work’s deeper meanings?” Well, Ralph James Savarese begs to differ.
DC’s African American Museum Opens Admission WIthout Reservations
Visitors began lining up before 8 a.m. on the last day of the holiday weekend, which was the first of the museum’s September Walk-up Weekdays. Several hundred were waiting when the doors to the Smithsonian’s newest venue opened at 10 a.m.
Buying, Selling, And Collecting Conceptual Art (A Brief History)
Nate Heller surveys the, er, concept – from Marcel Duchamp right up to Tino Sehgal’s no-paper-trail-whatsoever performance pieces and Darren Bader’s “lasagna on heroin” (a hunk of lasagna injected with heroin) – and considers such issues with conceptual art as insuring it (tricky) and storage (doesn’t need much).
So You Think Immortality Would Be Grand, Do You?
The moral philosopher Samuel Scheffler at New York University has suggested that the real problem with a fantasy of immortality is that it doesn’t make sense as a coherent desire. Scheffler points out that human life is intimately structured by the fact that it has a fixed (even if usually unknown) time limit. We all start with a birth, then pass through many stages of life, before definitely ending in death.
DC’s National Book Fair Smashes Attendance Records
The festival, sponsored by the Library of Congress since 2001, drew at least 200,000 readers to the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in downtown D.C. They listened to talks and interviews with more than 100 authors, including Amy Tan, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Dave Eggers, Meg Wolitzer and Roxane Gay. Packed rooms were the order of the day for almost all the presentations.
Virginia Woolf’s ‘Orlando’: The First Triumph Of Trans Literature?
Jeanette Winterson: “The novel … begins with a famously disingenuous sentence: ‘He, for there could be no doubt about his sex … ‘ and then we spend the rest of the novel doubting exactly that. Is Orlando the first English language trans novel? It is, yet in the most playful way. Orlando manages his transition with grace and a profound truth. On seeing himself as a herself for the first time in the mirror, she remarks: ‘Different sex. Same person.'”
How We Separated Art From The Middle Classes
For all its sundry failings and inexcusable prejudices, conventional art history provided a fundamental framework for assessing quality. Grouping works according to such commonalities as place of origin, period and circumstances of execution, artistic intent, function and medium facilitated comparative judgments. In the last decades, academia largely rejected this sort of connoisseurship, because it was too often tied to “great man” narratives. Over the same period, professional art criticism was effectively obliterated by a journalistic obsession (both in the surviving print media and online) with glamour, scandal and money. While the art world was never entirely free from market forces, those forces are now essentially left alone to determine value.
Is It Exploitive To Use Real-Life Terrorist Attacks As Subjects For Feature Films?
“This year sees the release of two films which centre on the 2011 attack in Norway by rightwing extremist Anders Behring Breivik, which left 77 people dead. … Questions arise around the ethics of this particular docudrama style of film-making – what can a film based on real events tell us that documentary footage or eyewitness testimony cannot?”