“[Her] poise, languid glamour and fine singing voice catapulted her to stardom as a teenager in the early 1930s and kept her there for decades, whether in melodramas, frisky comedies or light musicals. … If her pre-war movies emphasized her sparkle and charm, the postwar years elicited some of her most riveting dramatic performances. Much of her critical legacy rests on three celebrated films she made with director Max Ophuls: La Ronde (1950), Le Plaisir (1952) and The Earrings of Madame de … (1953).
Blog
Harlem School Of The Arts, Back From The Dead And Growing
“Just seven years ago, the school, founded in 1964, was $2 million in debt and temporarily closed. Today, the school has not only recovered, but is pivoting from a place that primarily provided arts education for children to a full-fledged performing arts center.”
Looted Benin Bronzes To Be Lent Back To Nigeria
“A group of major cultural institutions in the UK and Europe … is seeking a way to end decades of wrangling over the estimated 4,000 bronze and ivory artefacts looted by the British army from what is now southern Nigeria as part of a punitive expedition in 1897. Since the 1960s, Nigeria has repeatedly called for their repatriation.”
Chicago Launches A Citywide Dance Festival
“This weekend, Chicago dance artists and venues are opening their doors and inviting the public to stages all over the city to witness excerpts, works-in-progress and studio processes from our rich community of independent artists and small to midsize dance companies. Called Elevate Chicago Dance, the Chicago Dancemakers Forum (CDF) is the presenter of the multiday, multivenue, mostly free festival aimed at highlighting Chicago dance and increasing the visibility of established dance artists across a range of genres and disciplines.”
Edinburgh Plans Its First Newly-Built Concert Hall In Over A Century
“The [£10 million] fundraising drive for the £45m New Town project, which will be known as The Impact Centre, has been triggered ahead of the first plans being unveiled next month. The 1,000-capacity venue, earmarked for a site behind the Royal Bank of Scotland’s historic head office on St Andrew Square, will become home to the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, but will also be available for performances of all kinds of music.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 10.18.17
Dandy Danforth: Framingham Approves Win-Win University Partnership to Rescue Museum & Its Collection
I recently denounced as a bad role model for the Berkshire Museum the deplorable disposals by the New-York Historical Society in 1995. Those selloffs were recently touted by Felix Salmon in a Berkshire Museum-related article as … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2017-10-18
Lauren Greenfield and “Generation Wealth”
Generally, I think the art world has missed the opportunity to address the Great Recession and the amping up of income inequality and the one percent that followed. But some visual artists have made … read more
AJBlog: CultureCrash Published 2017-10-18
David Hare: Directors Now Have Too Much Power Over Playwrights
“When I entered the industry the playwright was regarded as the most important person in the process and slowly in the new century things have moved over to director’s theatre, and the directors not only run the theatres, choose the plays, but they also want to be auteurs in the rehearsal room, and that is a new development.” Hare said playwrights are being forced to write like film writers, which he believes is unhealthy for theatre.
Why Common Sense Isn’t Always A Reliable Moral Guide
Why bother with moral philosophy when common sense serves most of us perfectly well? The simple answer is that, as history shows, commonsensical beliefs are very often wrong. Slavery, marital rape, and bans on interracial marriage were all widely accepted in the relatively recent past. Much like fish who, as the proverb goes, are the last to discover water, humans are so immersed in immorality that we can be entirely unaware of it.
Will We Ever Get To The Point Where We Interact With Machines As We Do With Humans?
“Today, the technical ability to produce a robot that truly looks and moves and speaks like a human remains well beyond our reach. Even further beyond our grasp is the capacity to imbue such a machine with humanness—that ineffable presence the Japanese call sonzai-kan. Because to re-create human presence we need to know more about ourselves than we do—about the accumulation of cues and micromovements that trigger our empathy, put us at ease, and earn our trust. Someday we may crack the problem of creating artificial general intelligence—a machine brain that can intuitively perform any human intellectual task—but why would we choose to interact with it?”
Creativity Versus The Arts
I think these creative endeavors resonate with people because they are grounded in each participant’s lived experience (rather than universal plots or a reflection of someone else’s perspective) and, as such, they cannot help but be authentic. Perhaps what we call “bad” or “amateur” art isn’t because of “aesthetics,” but because it feels derivative of some form that already exists rather than growing from this place of fearless, individual experience. But how then do we nurture this creative authenticity?