In a New York Times Acting Class video, “[the actor] explains how he becomes 19 characters in David Cale’s play Harry Clarke, which follows a shy Midwesterner as he reinvents himself as a Cockney Englishman.”
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The Killer-Nanny Novel That Slayed All France And Won The Prix Goncourt
“Chanson Douce, [Leïla Slimani’s] second novel, sold six hundred thousand copies in its first year of publication, making Slimani, who lives in Paris, the most-read author in France in 2016. Elle put her on the cover, in red lipstick and a jumpsuit: ‘leïla slimani superstar.’ Politicians of varying persuasions clambered to reheat themselves in her glow. … Emmanuel Macron, now France’s President, reportedly invited her to be his minister of culture. ‘I love my freedom too much,’ she told me when I asked about it.”
The Problems With ‘Little Women’ (It’s Not Exactly A Feminist Milestone)
Samantha Ellis argues that the March sisters end up squelching themselves as they marry (except, of course, for the one who ends up dead), and each of the sequels, starting with the immediate one (Good Wives) is harder than the last. And this could all be quite deliberate on the part of Louisa May Alcott, who never wanted to write Little Women in the first place.
Rescue-Takeover Plan For San Antonio Symphony Collapses
“The group of donors set to take over operations of the San Antonio symphony has backed out of the deal after discovering a potential $8.9 million pension liability, leaving the future of the orchestra in doubt. … The Symphony Society of San Antonio has been running the orchestra since 1939 and was supposed to relinquish control to the new group earlier this year.”
Turns Out ‘Salvator Mundi’ Was Not The Last Leonardo Da Vinci In Private Hands
“It turns out there is another – even two – out there. And at least one dealer thinks they could be worth as much as $200 million each. Both are smaller-scale, devotional paintings depicting the same image: the Virgin Mary with the Christ child in her lap. The baby is holding a cross-shaped stick used to wind yarn, which has inspired the shared name, The Madonna of the Yarnwinder.”
Art Is ‘Not A Luxury Good,’ Says Larry Gagosian, ‘It’s Not A Hermes Bag’
“It’s not a luxury product. I mean it may appear to people who buy Hermes bags, but it’s not a Hermes bag. Sometimes people try to categorize it as a luxury. It’s a disservice to art in my opinion. And it really distorts the nature of the market.” (Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?) (video)
‘Relentless’ Playwriting Prize Goes To Script Whose Title The Times Won’t Print
The American Playwriting Foundation’s $45,000 Relentless Award, funded by a libel settlement from The National Enquirer for a false story about Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death and given for an unproduced script judged blind, was won by Gracie Gardner for a play whose title — well, we’re too squeamish to print it, too. (Cool fact: all eight semifinalists were written by women.)
The Year’s Top Ten Battlefronts In The Culture Wars
“Here’s a selective, not-so-nostalgic look back at some of the fiercest fights from a year when just about every cultural event and artifact became an arena for asking not just ‘Which side are you on?’ but ‘Do you really have my back?'”
Why The Culture Wars Of 2017 Are Not Like The Culture Wars Of The 1990s
For a start, unlike the battles over the “NEA Four” and Chris Ofili’s painting The Holy Virgin Mary (the one that incorporated elephant dung), the censoring impulse this time is coming from the left at least as much as the right (as with Dana Schutz’s painting of the murdered Emmett Till). However, argues Isaac Kaplan, the key difference between then and now isn’t the political identification of those objecting to the art – it’s how much actual power they have.
Guerrilla Penis Mural Appears In Manhattan’s Chinatown On Christmas Eve
“The painting, on an apartment building on Broome Street in the Lower East Side, was commissioned by a local street art foundation and made by a Swedish artist, Carolina Falkholt, as a companion to a similarly vast if more abstract vagina, further east on Pike Street.” The landlord has now had it painted over.