“People get hung up on how eccentric some of his ideas were, but the core of his claims remains relevant and important. That is to say: our aesthetic experience, our experience of beauty in ordinary life, must be central to thinking about any good life and society. It’s not just decoration or luxury for the few. If you are taught how to see the world properly through an understanding of aesthetics, then you’ll see society properly.”
Blog
Some Fascinating Conjecture About National Portrait Gallery Attendance Figures
The gallery’s exhibition figures for last year and the first part of 2018—which are not in dispute, because they are ticketed and thus use a different system—will no doubt give the gallery pause for thought, because its contemporary exhibitions have been poorly attended.
Two Mexican Artists Created Acclaimed Murals At LA’s Central Library. Then They Were Deported
For months, the Central Library has not publicly addressed the artists’ deportations or disclosed their case to patrons or press who have covered the “Visualizing Language” exhibit at the Central Library.
Highly Regarded LA Central Library Lit Program Directors Out In Wake Of Mural Artists’ Deportation Controversy
The Los Angeles literary landscape shifted significantly this week with the departure of Louise Steinman from ALOUD, the reading series based at the downtown Central Library that she founded and ran for 25 years. A representative of the Library Foundation confirmed the departure of Steinman and ALOUD associate director Maureen Moore, who was the driving force behind the rotunda exhibit “Visualizing Language” by Oaxacan artists that gained international attention.
Independent Music Festivals Say Live Nation’s Dominance Of Music Industry Is Stifling Competition
The US company or its subsidiaries control some of the country’s biggest outdoor live music events including Latitude, Isle of Wight festival, Reading and Leeds, Parklife and Lovebox. The AIF said Live Nation had a 26% share of the market for events with a capacity of more than 5,000 people, compared to its nearest competitor, Global, with 8%.
How Blue Can It Get? Simon Schama Visits The Pigment Archive Of Record
“Rows of pigments in tubes, jars, and bowls are visible through the doors of floor-to-ceiling cabinets. … There are the products of nineteenth-century chemical innovation — viridian green, cadmium orange, and the chrome yellow with which van Gogh was infatuated but which, over time, has begun to darken his sunflowers. But at the heart of the Forbes Collection are the natural pigments that were the staples of painters’ inventories before chemically synthesized paints replaced the impossibly esoteric, the dangerously toxic, the prohibitively expensive, and the perilously fugitive.”
How Social Media Is Influencing Book Design
“If I don’t like the cover, I won’t photograph it and put it on my feed,” says Femke Brull, a “bookstagramer” who runs @booksfemme. While she won’t avoid promoting a loved, if less-attractive book, she opts for a snap of the title page instead – even if it is less memorable than a beautifully covered counterpart. And she will “pay extra” for what she considers a better-looking edition.
End Of An Era: The Village Voice Is No More
Three years after buying The Village Voice, and a year after the paper shut down its print edition, owner Peter Barbey told the remaining staff today that the publication will no longer be posting any new stories.
‘The Walking OED’: Oliver Sacks’s Widower Remembers His Etymophilia (Love Of Words)
Bill Hayes: “He delighted in etymology, synonyms and antonyms, slang, swear words, palindromes, anatomical terms, neologisms (but objected, in principle, to contractions). … Oliver loved words so much, he often dreamed of them, and sometimes dreamed them up. One morning, six years ago, I found a phrase he’d written on the white board in the kitchen. All it said was ‘5 a.m. Nepholopsia.'”
Why The Rock-Dominated Pop Music Canon Is Finished
I suspect we may be at the end of the age of the canon, for now at least. For all those mixed bills at festivals, and playlists that place Beyoncé next to Black Midi, I suspect best-ever lists, from here on, will be specialised. They are more likely to go by genre, in specialist titles: the best hip-hop album ever, the best metal album ever, the best electronic album ever. It’s simply easier to do it that way than to attempt to evaluate the relative worth of Lemonade against Led Zeppelin IV.