Khoi Vinh of Adobe: “Design thinking has a lot of downsides. It can be very superficial. It can be very misleading and the outcomes that it produces can be disappointing. It can lead to bad design. But it offers a useful lesson on how designers think about democratization of our craft.”
Blog
What’s It Like To Be A New York Times Book Critic? Terrifying
Parul Sehgal: “It’s constant panic, and guilt, and shame. Also pajamas. No, it’s a great gig, I’m not going to lie. … It’s monkish, but if you are into that sort of thing, it’s bliss. But with that, I think what propels me is also a feeling of responsibility. It’s also a feeling of working in a very strange genre, in that when you write a book review – and the book reviews we write at the Times are roughly 800 to 1,000 words – you’re serving a lot of masters.” (includes audio)
Is This Really The Right Time For A Spate Of Male-Authored, Male-Directed Musicals About Subservient Women To Come To Broadway?
Diep Tran: “There is one question that has been lingering both for me and many other women in and around the theatre: If we’re going to stage these retrograde works” – Pretty Woman, My Fair Lady, Carousel and Kiss Me, Kate are all on Broadway this season – “and ‘reinvent’ them for the 21st century, why are men the only ones being given the opportunity to do the rethinking – to give these old properties a ‘feminist twist’? Are male artists the only ones who get to define feminism in theatre in 2018?”
Commerce, Curation, Blockbuster Shows, And The Purpose(s) Of Art Museums
“‘The right function of every museum,’ wrote John Ruskin, the influential 19th-century art and social critic, ‘is the manifestation of what is lovely in the life of nature, and heroic in the life of men.’ Museums of the 21st century have moved on a bit. … They are also ‘destination’ enterprises, with permanent collections and special exhibitions, cafes and shops trying to attract as many visitors as possible in an age of global tourism. … As leading museums compete for crowd-drawing exhibits, and try to balance commercial interests and cultural diversity, visitors are bearing a rising proportion of the cost.”
Author Junot Díaz Reveals In Essay His Childhood Rape
“More than being Dominican, more than being an immigrant, more, even, than being of African descent, my rape defined me. I spent more energy running from it than I did living. … And always I was afraid – afraid that the rape had ‘ruined’ me; afraid that I would be ‘found out’; afraid afraid afraid. ‘Real’ Dominican men, after all, aren’t raped. And if I wasn’t a ‘real’ Dominican man I wasn’t anything. The rape excluded me from manhood, from love, from everything.”
In Twitter Fight With Critic, Mark-Anthony Turnage Says He Will Compose No More Operas
“Don’t worry Hugh. There will be no further operas by me that you will ever have to sit through again. I’m done with the genre. Going to leave it my more talented contemporaries and younger colleagues.”
The Big Encyclopedic Art Museum In A Little Massachusetts City
“Where might you expect to find William Hogarth’s fine and recently restored portraits of William and Elizabeth James, or a lobby-filling Roman floor-mosaic from Antioch that depicts a lively lion and antelope hunt? Or Otto Dix’s painting of a pregnant woman, which has its own visitors book nearby, so that people can record their usually extreme reactions to it?” Worcester, Mass., that’s where. Says director Matthias Waschek, “The big problem we have is that the collection is outsizing its city.”
How The Aix Festival Became A Hotbed Of New Opera
General director Bernard Foccroulle credits the festival’s artist development program, L’Académie du Festival Aix: “You really have to work with a vision of the long term. We have been able to give birth to 12 operas or interdisciplinary creations very close to opera. I’m not only happy with the quality of the works but also with the quality of the reception, because we have proved that we can find an audience for good new pieces today without compromise and without trying to be just popular.”
Who Is Junichiro Tanizaki? (Besides Being One Of Japan’s Most Important Novelists)
“Nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and even shortlisted the year before his death, Tanizaki is one of the more prominent figures in modern Japanese literature, and he is also well-known for his other endeavors, such as his translation of The Tale of Genji from old Japanese into the modern language. But on a more personal level, the question is not quite as strange as it might initially appear.
Ivor Guest, Who Transformed Study Of Dance History, Dead At 97
“In books, biographies, monographs and program notes, Mr. Guest became one of the foremost authorities on dance in the Napoleonic and Victorian eras and notably on the Paris Opera Ballet. Jane Pritchard, curator of dance for London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, described him as a cartographer of 19th-century ballet.”