“Given the Christie’s result, there is a temptation to wonder if the art market will be recalibrated in the way that it was in 1987, when Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” sold for $39.9 million. That price also blew minds, being almost four times the previous high for any artwork at auction at the time.”
Blog
Of Art And Fallen Artists (Do We Reject The Art Now?)
“Wrestling with what to do with the product of tainted executives, artists or news figures is not that far from the eternal issue of how (or even whether) to separate our views of art from our views of the artists. Wagner was blatantly anti-Semitic. Alfred Hitchcock abused actresses who worked for him, so openly that you can see his dysfunctional psychosexual power dynamics right onscreen. Roman Polanski was convicted of having sex with a 13-year-old, but does that mean “Rosemary’s Baby” should have been pulled from circulation?”
What We Learned On a 13-Hour Immersive Theatre Performance On A Plane From London To JFK
“Our work is interactive so audiences are not passive observers but in the midst of the action, both as witnesses or participants. We had members of the press offering to write a tale for our heroine’s birthday and one passenger, who had forgotten to take his usual Valium dose, dealt with his in-flight nerves by becoming a character in the show. However, being thrust into a theatre show for 13 hours can be bit much, even for the most ardent theatre-goer.”
Britain Has Been Thrown Out Of The “European Capital Of Culture” Program
The Government has been advised to discontinue the selection process for the five bidding cities – Belfast, Dundee, Nottingham, Milton Keynes and Leeds – “immediately”. The DCMS said it is “deeply disappointed” with the decision and is in “urgent discussions” with the European Commission on the matter.
Why Are Our Buildings So Tightly Sealed?
“Our current built environment squanders too much fresh water and other vital resources, and tips too many poisonous substances into our surroundings. To develop a more sustainable relationship with the natural world, we need to allow chemical exchanges that take place within our living spaces, and between the inside and the outside. We need to embrace permeability.”
The Revolution That Flash Photography Created
“Flash brings a form of democracy to the material world. Many details take on unplanned prominence, as we see in the work of those Farm Security Administration photographers who used flash in the 1930s and laid bare the reality of poverty during the Depression.”
Should Theatre Reflect Audience Or Create It?
“Populism aims to represent the people. That can function on two levels: reflecting it on the one hand and creating it on the other. With the former, we assume that the people exist before a representation of them is made. With the latter, we want to make it exist. This second concept is performative; we understand that it is close to the performance. The link with theatre and the other performing arts depends perhaps on how we should understand what an audience is.”
Why Spoken English Is So Different From Written English
“Modern languages with a long literary tradition show a stark split between their written and spoken styles across many contexts. In current English, writing uses more varied vocabulary than conversational speech, and it uses rarer and longer words much more often. Certain structures (such as passive sentences, prepositional phrases, and relative clauses) appear more often in written than spoken language. Writers generally elaborate their ideas more explicitly through syntax whereas speakers leave more material implicit. And written language stacks clauses inside each other to a greater depth than spoken language. This is one of the most striking differences between speech and text; sentences like the opening line of the Declaration of Independence simply do not occur in conversation.”
A Warning About The Imprisonment Of The French Language
Facing the “aberration” of gender-inclusive styles, the French language is henceforth in “mortal peril.” (Yes, it says that.) Adaptations such as écrivaine for female writer, or la ministre for a female minister, will end in a “disunified language, disparate in its expression, creating a confusion that verges on illegibility.” The new spellings and syntactical signs will burden teachers and complicate reading. The dream of a coherent francophonie – the international community of French speakers – will be annihilated by the additional spellings and complexity “to the benefit of other languages that will profit from this confusion to prevail around the world.”
How Our Attempts At Crowdfunding Failed Big Time (And Taught Us How To Think Better)
Well, it was hard – possibly worse than anyone had advised.