Maybe its strategies and events at first sound disconnected from traditional museum reverence, but they can bring in people who never would have guessed how much they might enjoy the museum context. Says Nick Gray: “I don’t think anybody before Museum Hack has said, ‘We’re going to really intentionally go after people who think that they don’t like museums.’ ”
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Misty Copeland On The Mainstreaming Of Ballet
“It’s incredible that people are looking at dancers’ bodies as healthy, because that hasn’t always been the case. It’s been associated with us having eating disorders or being too thin, not being strong. For us to be in this moment and have [people] want to have a strong, lean, feminine body — I think it’s amazing. I hope going to these barre classes will introduce people to ballet in a way that they’ll want to step into an actual barre class.”
How Neuroscience Is Struggling To Understand Feelings In The Brain
“The question is not ‘Where is happiness in the brain?’ That’s like asking ‘Where is the perception of the sound of a dog barking in the brain?’ The better question is ‘How does the brain support happiness? What networks and processes are used to give rise to it?’ ”
Why It’s Important To Have Critics Of Color
“When an important work is met with thoughtful, engaged criticism, it gains depth and traction. And when each potent piece of writing reverberates as never before — shared, liked, and debated on social media — the critic has new opportunities to shape our increasingly toxic cultural discourse. For communities that have been historically shut out of that process, that power is pivotal. It’s the difference between being spoken about and being the authority on your own experience.”
Rise Of The Fake Museum
Call it the Kusama effect. Since Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Room exhibition has taken off (the recent Los Angeles opening of her show at The Broad sold out their 50,000 tickets in less than two hours), it has fueled a debate around selfie-friendly art. Although Kusama’s artworks were not necessarily made for the smartphone (many were made in the 1960s), it’s still part of the “made-for-Instagram” exhibits, or “selfie factories”.
Motion Picture Academy Expels Cosby And Polanski
In a statement, the Academy announced that the governing board had voted to remove the two disgraced stars “in accordance with the organization’s standards of conduct”. The board continued “to encourage ethical standards that require members to uphold the Academy’s values of respect for human dignity”.
How Riccardo Chailly Is Remaking La Scala
Italy is supposed to be a serious country these days, burying buffoonery and hedonism among the Coliseum ruins. Even Silvio Berlusconi is seen as an archaeological relic, not to be disturbed. So Riccardo Chailly’s embrace of opera buffa in his first full season as music director provokes the kind of disquiet that we might feel if Covent Garden reinstated Gilbert and Sullivan.
Kanye West’s ‘Slavery Was A Choice’ Argument Is Way Older Than He Thinks, And Way More Dangerous
“Kanye West’s ‘freethinking’ condemnation of generations of enslaved people’s failure to rebel,” explains Rebecca Onion, Slate‘s resident historian, “is drawn – whether he knows it or not! – from a dangerous ideology that’s older than the United States.”
Liam Scarlett Is Choreographing The Royal Ballet’s First New ‘Swan Lake’ In 30 Years
“When it was announced that the Royal’s feathery blockbuster was being entrusted to Scarlett, eyebrows were raised. It wasn’t his talent that was in question, it was his artistic unpredictability. He exploded on the scene in 2010, when, still a junior dancer, he created Asphodel Meadows, a beautiful one-act work that proclaimed his classical credentials. Yet he went on to wrong-foot audiences with dark and disturbing works such as Sweet Violets (2012), a gothic sex-and-death thriller about a Jack the Ripper serial killer, and Hansel and Gretel (2013), reimagined as a grotesque paedophile nightmare. But hey, he says, it’s only make-believe. ‘I was just trying to tell a good story. You don’t have to worry about me.'”
Why Stage Beckett’s Novels When He Meant Them To Be Read (And Wrote Plenty Of Plays Already)? Here’s Why
Judy Hegarty Lovett, director of Beckett specialists the Gare St. Lazare Players Ireland: “The challenge is both daunting and promising. When we first staged Beckett’s novel Molloy in 1996, there were fewer questions about why we wanted to take it from page to stage. We knew Beckett himself had staged elements of his prose works in a one-man show performed by Jack McGowan. If the author himself had attempted to do it, surely it was possible. In the intervening years, I’ve come to see the staging of his prose as a convergence of form and content similar to that of the written works, where the very means of communication is in doubt.”