“In September, with no shortage of Trumpian Goliaths rising up to threaten ever more of the institutions we rely on, we checked back in with a number of the activists whose work [Scott Sherman’s book Patience and Fortitude] documents. How, we asked, does the movement to save the NYPL look with a few years’ hindsight? What lessons might their experiences offer to activists taking stands against the powerful today? The answers we got back amounted to a crash course in effective resistance.”
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Indianapolis Museum Of Art Director Defends New Vision For The Institution
“Newfields is a new brand for a new type of an organization. Our mission is to create exceptional experiences with art and nature and the nature part is all of a sudden being revealed in pretty serious and very positive, successful ways. “I still think we’ve got a little ways to go before more people understand that we’re all of these things and that we still are a great art museum doing programs and hiring curators and acquiring art, but some people are caught off guard, like, ‘Well, what are they doing on their grounds?'”
How YouTube And Vimeo Have Transformed The Dance World
“Today, choreography once considered sacred and only transferred person-to-person is now self-taught, edited and remixed in bedrooms and basements, across the U.S. and beyond. No aspect of the dance industry, however commercial or ‘purely artistic,’ remains untouched by the explosion of video around the internet over the past decade. It’s made a profound impact on everything from how students learn to what audiences want, when choreographers succeed and which artists win support from donors, funders and presenters.”
Met Museum’s New Admissions Policy Marks A Retreat From Being A National Museum
Phil Kennicott: “It will say to donors — who should take note and respond appropriately — that the Met no longer intends to be the country’s de facto national art museum. By sheer size and visitor numbers, it may remain the most prominent art museum in the country. But it now distinguishes between a local public — those who live in New York — and the rest of the country, which it treats merely as clients. It cannot reasonably approach major donors, those with art they want to leave in the public trust and those with money who hope to support access to that art, and say: We are the nation’s museum.”
Met Museum’s New Admission Policy Speaks To Much Bigger Problems
Jerry Saltz: “I do not begrudge the Met for trying to do whatever it can to maintain its preeminence. Yet this first-time attempt to raise admission before its new director arrives — intended to raise $6 million to $10 million annually — doesn’t entirely pass the smell test. It has an air of expediency, nervousness, an idea drought, of managers rather than art being in charge. Especially since the museum just spent more than $65 million on the space-eating, flow-disrupting, patron-inscribed fountains in the newly renamed Koch Plaza. This single act of philanthropy (Vegas fountains and all) would have covered almost ten years of this iffy admissions policy.”
Meet America’s Most-Produced Playwright: She’s A 35-Year-Old Atlantan In San Francisco
Lauren Gunderson: “I have come along at a very open time. In my career, if there has been massive sexism against me, I haven’t felt it much or perhaps I’ve been too busy to notice or something! So I have great hope for the future and we’re already seeing it.”
Daring Jewel Heist At Venice’s Ducal Palace In Broad Daylight
Venice Police Chief Vito Danilo Gagliardi said that the stolen items were a pair of earrings and a brooch made of diamonds, gold and platinum. The pieces — owned by Sheikh Hamad bin Abdullah Al Thani — were snatched in the bold daytime robbery on the last day of the exhibit. A preliminary investigation revealed that the pair were able to delay the alarm system for one minute so it wasn’t triggered until the thieves were making their escape, Gagliardi said. He described the culprits as “skilled.”
Japanese Comedian Uses Blackface To Dress Up As Eddie Murphy; US Twitter Erupts, Japanese Twitterverse Isn’t So Sure
“In a show that aired on New Year’s Eve, the Japanese comedian Masatoshi Hamada appeared in a Detroit Lions football jacket, a curly wig and dark makeup, an attempt at imitating the actor Eddie Murphy’s character from the 1984 movie Beverly Hills Cop.” The initial social media reaction, started (in English and Japanese) by a bilingual African-American columnist in Japan, was #StopBlackfaceJapan. But some local fans insist that the practice doesn’t and shouldn’t have stigma attached to it there.
The ‘Death Effect’ On Artists’ Prices Actually Happens Before They’re Dead (If They Live Long Enough)
“[A pair of research economists] say the death effect – traditionally conceived of as the price bump an artist gets after her death – is actually only observable for living artists, and only in the five years leading up to an artist’s death. In redefining the ‘death effect,’ their research helps explain rising prices for a large cohort of prominent artists reaching advanced ages.”
Angels In America’s Original Prior Walter Will Now Play Roy Cohn
Stephen Spinella originated the role of the young AIDS patient at the center of Tony Kushner’s drama in its 1991 world premiere, and he won back-to-back Tony Awards for it in 1993 and ’94. This spring, in a revival at Berkeley Repertory Theater in California, Spinella will play the part farthest from Prior’s type (and, arguably, Spinella’s own): the furious, ailing, closeted and desperate lawyer who made his name as an anti-Communist hatchet man for Sen. Joseph McCarthy.