Blog – Page 1929 – ArtsJournal Wayback

Canadian Breaks Into House To Drink Wine And Play Piano

Only in Ontario? “According to [local police in the town of Erin], the man broke-in to the unlocked residence, drank a bottle of wine from the fridge, then proceeded to play the family’s piano until he was caught. There were two residents located upstairs at the time of the break-in.” (One shudders to think how this might have played out in Florida.)

Police Called On Ohio Man Because Someone Mistook His Bassoon For A Rifle

A 22-year-old bassoonist was in a church parking lot in the town of Springfield, sitting on his trunk and playing scales while waiting for a rehearsal to start, when he was slowly approached by police wearing bulletproof vests. It seems a nearby citizen, worried by mass shootings in the news and unfamiliar with large double-reed instruments, had called 911. Said the young man, “In the right kind of light, it looks like a bazooka, but I don’t think it was the right kind of light.” (Again, one shudders to think how this might have played out in Florida.)

Fluxus Artist Geoffrey Hendricks Dead At 86

“The Flux Divorce” – a famous public ceremony he staged with his wife, artist Nye Ffarrabas, to mark their split – “was just one of many adventurous artworks and art events he created or participated in during a career that also included teaching art at Rutgers University for 47 years. Mr. Hendricks literally looked to the heavens for inspiration for some of his art; he was known for paintings of the sky, which he would render on traditional canvases and assorted other surfaces. (A fellow artist, Dick Higgins, gave him the nickname Cloudsmith.) But, like other Fluxus artists, he went far beyond the boundaries of painting.”

How Doctors Learn To Be Doctors… In Humanities

“As a philosophy major in college before medical school, I believe I learned what it means to be a good doctor equally from my humanities classes as from my science classes. Studying the humanities helps students develop critical-thinking skills, understand the viewpoints of others and different cultures, foster a just conscience, build a capacity for empathy, and become wise about emotions such as grief and loss. These are all characteristics that define a good doctor.”

Taylor Swift Is Experimenting With Anti-Scalper Ticketing (But It’ll Cost You)

Swift’s team is undertaking an experiment that lists her tickets on Ticketmaster near prices they believe the market demands — much higher than what it usually costs to see a stadium concert. It’s a competitive play aimed directly at pricing scalpers and online bots out of the business, and it could keep large quantities of tickets off the secondary market. The bold move also helps Swift pocket a larger profit from face-value tickets by attempting to eliminate a middleman that legislators have struggled to erase.

Graphic Violence In Video Games – What’s The Moral Relationship To The Real World?

Virtual sexual violence and virtual murder are alike in that they don’t involve real victims, and both would be uncontroversially wrong if done in real life. This creates what philosopher Morgan Luck called ‘the gamer’s dilemma’: how can we be so sanguine about virtual bloodletting, but react with appalled horror to the idea of simulated paedophilia or sexual violence?

How Do You Determine Whether An Artwork Is Really A Leonardo?

To find a new Leonardo is to strike the purest vein of artworld gold. But only a few dozen of his works exist worldwide, and one of them sold recently for more than any other artwork in history. Leonardos have become a cultural currency, so to have discovered a once-lost drawing is a position of enormous potential power. If it is authentic, of course. The French seem to think so, but are they right? And how can they be sure?

Research: These Seven Moral Values Seem Common Across The Globe

“These seven moral rules – love your family, help your group, return favors, be brave, defer to authority, be fair, and respect others’ property – appear to be universal across cultures. My colleagues and I analyzed ethnographic accounts of ethics from 60 societies (comprising over 600,000 words from over 600 sources). We found that these seven cooperative behaviors were always considered morally good.”

Bloomberg Philanthropies Is One Of The Few Remaining National Arts Funders. Here’s How They Did This Year

Through initiatives that include facilitating collaborations between artists and local governments to address civic issues, capacity-building for small and mid-sized cultural institutions, and increasing visitor engagement through the use of digital technology, Bloomberg Philanthropies works to improve quality of life by strengthening the arts in cities across the globe.