Is it possible that our cultural #MeToo moment dampened enthusiasm for a painting of a nude girl by one of art history’s most reputed misogynists, an artwork the late writer Gertrude Stein described as lovely, complicated, disturbing and repellent?
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When Classical Music Is A Weapon (Has It Really Come To This?)
Weaponized classical music is just the next step in the commodification of the genre. Today, most young people encounter classical music not as a popular art form but as a class signifier, a set of tropes in a larger system of encoded communication that commercial enterprises have exploited to remap our societal associations with orchestral sound. Decades of cultural conditioning have trained the public to identify the symphony as sonic shorthand for social status — and, by extension, exclusion from that status. The average American does not recognize the opening chords of The Four Seasons as the sound of spring but the sound of snobbery.
Misty Copeland Says The Ballet World Still Has Race Issues
Copeland says she feels lucky, and like her success is almost unbelievable – but she wants some compatriots at the top. “She is adamant that a large part of her purpose as a public figure is to make sure up-and-coming black and brown dancers know they belong in the world of classical ballet – and feel welcome there.”
This Book Festival Is So Huge, It Needs A Survival Guide
The Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye has 1,600 residents – and thousands of people coming to its book festival. Its director explains why Hay is special: “I think we all have a special sense of place that defines what we do and how we do it. For Hay that’s the open green mountains and the dark skies, and it’s the fact that the town has 1,600 people and 28 bookshops. How many cities have that kind of wealth?” (Also: Survive by talking to other book fans.)
Bill Gold, Backstage Superstar Designer Of Famous Hollywood Posters, Has Died At 97
Gold designed the posters for Casablanca, A Streetcar Named Desire, Alien, and thousands more. “Long before poster artists turned to photography and computer-generated images in the 1980s and ’90s, illustrators like Mr. Gold billboarded movies with freehand drawings, based on scripts and first screen prints, that hinted at plots and moods and mysteries, without giving away too much — priming audiences for love, betrayal, jealousy, murder.”
Catching Up With Apple’s Siri, The Google Assistant And Amazon Alexa *Finally* Have Male Voices
Why does that make a difference? “The vocal variety now offered by these companies minimizes the subservient female assistant vibe. And as these assistants are increasingly being adopted in households with children, bossing around not just a female-voiced assistant seems like a healthy step in teaching gender equality and eliminating traditional gender role expectations. For younger children anthropomorphizing the bot, a changing voice may also make it clear that this is a computer entity, not a person.”
What Can The Oscars Learn From The Royal Wedding?
Despite three and a half hours of pre-wedding coverage, both the British and the American networks did a far better job of interviewing people than they do on the Oscars red carpet. Can this be replicated for the next Academy Awards?
The Animator Slash Director Who Brought Us ‘Secret Of Kells’ And ‘Song Of The Sea’ Dropped Out Of School At 15 And Worked In A Factory
Nora Twomey: The factory “was an incredible training for my imagination. The machinery was very loud so I had to wear earplugs and then headphones on top of the earplugs and I couldn’t talk to anybody. And I’d just make up stories and entertain myself with beginnings, middles and ends in my head for those 12 hours.”
Artist Amy Sherald, Who Painted The Portrait Of Michelle Obama, Has Won A Major Prize In Maryland
Sherald won the $40,000 Mary Sawyers Imboden Prize, capping off a couple of big years for the artist. “It’s only been in the past two years that the 44-year-old Sherald has received the career recognition of which most artists dream. In May 2016, she bested 2,500 other entries nationwide to win first place in the National Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, which carries a $25,000 prize. In October the National Portrait Gallery announced that Sherald had been selected to paint the official portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama.”
A Rare Full Interview With Elena Ferrante, On The Writing Process Behind The Neapolitan Novels
The author says she can’t remember what provided the inspiration for the novels, and that she definitely did not have everything plotted out from the beginning: “I never plan my stories. A detailed outline is enough for me to lose interest in the whole thing. Even a brief oral summary makes the desire to write what I have in mind vanish. I am one of those who begin to write knowing only a few essential features of the story they intend to tell. The rest they discover line by line.”