“The business is horrible, it’s been horrible forever and it’s worse now because of Twitter and Facebook and YouTube, so legitimate actors that have trained in the profession have a harder time getting hired than personalities on YouTube, or on Twitter.” And what’s more, movie stars “should come to the stage with the right intention. And they should be stage-worthy, not try to come to the stage for credibility.”
Blog
Women Performers Have Been At The Heart Of The Circus For 250 Years, And They’re Still Breaking Paths Today
“It has been 250 years since ‘modern’ circus was born with Philip Astley’s invention of the equestrian ring in London in 1768. … What is often overlooked about that first event is that Patty Astley, a talented equestrian, was right there alongside her husband in the creation of modern circus. As part of her act, she rode around the ring with her hands and arms covered in bees. The history of circus is replete with powerful, talented female performers and artists. But they have often been overlooked in favour of their male counterparts.”
Marcia Thompson, 94, Ford Foundation Officer Who Helped Change The Way Arts Orgs Are Run And Financed
“The National Arts Stabilization Fund, a consortium of private and corporate philanthropies … , grew out of her collaboration, beginning in the late 1950s, with a Ford vice president, W. McNeil Lowry, to create incentives for symphonies, ballet companies, theaters and other arts groups to liquidate their deficits and build working capital reserves. The model’s disciplined, businesslike approach inspired Congress to subsidize the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 04.10.18
Market Madness: Sotheby’s to Auction 13 Berkshire Museum Works this May
Notwithstanding its direct relevance to the Berkshire Museum’s mission (which includes both history and art) and the museum’s professed concern for the education of schoolchildren, a portrait of our first President is among its works to be sold at Sotheby’s American Art sale on May 23. … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2018-04-10
Denny Zeitlin’s Birthday
As you will momentarily see and hear, Zeitlin has retained the vigor and style that have helped keep him one of the most consistently interesting pianists of his generation. … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2018-04-10
Metropolitan Museum Of Art’s New Director Is –
“For the first time in 60 years, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has reached beyond its own doors for a new leader … Max Hollein, 48, currently the director and chief executive of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and a veteran of Germany’s oldest art foundation, will become its 10th director this summer.”
Pleasure Junkies – Scientists Argue Over Our Responses To Art (and Porn)
Julia F. Christensen, a neuroscientist at the The Warburg Institute at the University of London who studies people’s responses to dance choreography, argued that many of us have been turned into “mindless pleasure junkies, handing over our free will for the next dopamine shoot” provided by social media, pornography and sugar. She offered up an unconventional solution: art, which she says engages us in ways these other pleasures do not and can “help overwrite the detrimental effects of dysfunctional urges and craving.”
Ode To The Magic Of Libraries
The census of American libraries spans a wonderful diversity of institutions, from modest municipal book rooms and mobile libraries to the grand collections of such hallowed places as the Morgan, the Folger, the Huntington, and the Smithsonian. Surveys of library users reveal a passionate attachment to these institutions, one that is voiced in very human terms. The word love is an emotion often expressed toward libraries, and not just for National Library Week. Libraries are places in which people are born—as authors, readers, scholars, and activists. (Think Eudora Welty, Zadie Smith, John Updike, and Ian Rankin.)
A New Golden Age For The Irish Novel?
There is an expectation of what the Irish novel should look like, the themes explored and the style in which it’s delivered. And it’s not that our present day authors are moving away from tradition but they’re doing what Irish literature does best: challenging style and subject matter. The result is a literary age that is full of possibility.
Two Tween “Franchise” Plays Break Broadway Box Office Records
The Harry Potter play, based on a new story by author J.K. Rowling in collaboration with Jack Thorne and John Tiffany, announced Monday that it had set a Broadway record for the strongest preview grosses: $2.1 million in ticket sales for the week ending Sunday at the Lyric Theatre. The Potter news came on the same day that Disney Theatrical Productions announced that its stage musical adaptation of “Frozen” had broken a house record at the St. James Theatre for the second week in a row. After grossing $2,246,997 for the week ending April 1, “Frozen” went on to gross $2,275,395 the following week.
Echo Chambers Versus Trust Bubbles
“There are two very different phenomena at play here, each of which subvert the flow of information in very distinct ways. Let’s call them echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Both are social structures that systematically exclude sources of information. Both exaggerate their members’ confidence in their beliefs. But they work in entirely different ways, and they require very different modes of intervention. An epistemic bubble is when you don’t hear people from the other side. An echo chamber is what happens when you don’t trust people from the other side.”