As a cultural industry that has long been informed by, and intent on sending messages about, the dispossessed, Broadway has been at the vanguard of the movement to fend off Trump’s more isolationist policies. But it has sometimes taken different roads in getting there, as much preaching unity in the face of divisiveness as using the tools of division itself.
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What It’s Like To Auction Off A $157 Million Modigliani
“Helena [Newman] is the chairman of Sotheby’s Europe and co-head of Impressionist & Modern Art Worldwide and also happens to be the auctioneer who recently sold the firm’s most expensive painting to date: a 1917 Modigliani that went for $157.2 million. Helena tells us how she finds and sells some of the most expensive art in the world and what it takes to command a room full of people bidding millions of dollars on masterpieces.” (podcast)
A Pocket History Of Americans For The Arts
“I have watched the organization, and its signature convening, grow and evolve over time—responding to the field’s changes and the external environment in which we all operate. There have been so many conventions, over so many years, that it’s hard to pull memories out of the haze where they all blend together.”
Improvisation – How Exactly Do Jazz Musicians, Freestyle Rappers, And Improv Comedians Pull It Off?
“In this presentation we explore the science of improvisation, with rapper GoldLink, jazz pianist Jason Moran, and comedy duo Andy Bustillos and Alex Song of Upright Citizens Brigade. We’ll get inside the artists’ heads to see how their quick creative process allows them to step into the spotlight — without knowing what’s coming next.” (multimedia feature)
The Critics Loved This Movie. Audiences Hated It. So What Gives?
The average American moviegoers apparently expected a different/scarier/better horror movie than this one. Are the critics who admired it just a bunch of buttheads? Are multiplex audiences too jaded to appreciate its bizarre, slow-building atmospheric tension?
How Vice Media’s Shane Smith BSed His Way Into A Media Empire (That He’s Now Stuck With)
Over 25 years, “Vice had grown from a free magazine to a company with 3,000 employees spread across a cable network, more than a dozen websites, two shows on HBO, an ad agency, a film studio, a record label, and a bar in London. Vice had become the tenth-highest-valued private company in America” – largely thanks to co-founder Shane Smith’s gift – using persuasion, exaggeration, and sometimes outright deception – for convincing investors to hand over millions of dollars. Turns out, though, that Smith had expected to cash out well before now. Reeves Wiedeman reports how it went down.
George Orwell Predicted The Difficulty Of Writing When Truth Has Been Undermined
Orwell was right. The totalitarian regime rests on lies because they are lies. The subject of the totalitarian regime must accept them not as truth—must not, in fact, believe them—but accept them both as lies and as the only available reality. She must believe nothing. Just as Orwell predicted, over time the totalitarian regime destroys the very concept, the very possibility of truth. Hannah Arendt identified this as one of the effects of totalitarian propaganda: it makes everything conceivable because “nothing is true.”
How Did Propaganda Get Such A Bad Name? (Blame George Orwell)
“The posters and films produced in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 40s have become totemic representations of the genre, and as such the idea of ‘propaganda’ is now synonymous with aggressive, bold representations of utopian ideals, spouting malicious untruths against enemies, or manipulating and controlling their compliant populations. Such a simplistic conception undermines the often complex, creative and thoughtful productions of propagandists whose work in that crucible of political agitation still appears fresh and thought-provoking today.”
What Is Enlightenment? Artforum Tackles The Question
“Conceived variously as an epoch, an idea, and an attitude, even a ‘sick’ word, as one contributor puts it in our pages, Enlightenment continues to inspire and rankle. … Artforum invited a group of writers, scholars, and activists — Adrian Piper, Michelle M. Wright, Charles W. Mills, J. M. Bernstein, Boaventura De Sousa Santos, MTL Collective and Jasbir K. Puar, and Sarah Nicole Prickett — to return to Johann Friedrich Zöllner’s question, famously answered by Kant in 1784 and then again by Foucault immediately before his death from AIDS in 1984.”
In Praise Of The Mighty Dinkus
“Three months ago, I was a normal person. Now all I think about 24-7 is the dinkus. Did you know that dinkuses is an anagram of unkissed? I did. For the uninitiated, the dinkus is a line of three asterisks (* * *) used as a section break in a text.” Daisy Alioto offers some reasons to love it.