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Opera Australia Threatened With Fines For Hiring Too Many Foreign Singers

In the perpetual tug-of-war between hiring the best artists available from anywhere and helping Australian singers make a living in their home country, the balance has swung to the former, with the number of non-Australians in leading roles in the company having tripled over the past seven years. So a government report has recommended docking funding for Opera Australia by up to $200,000 if it doesn’t maintain an “appropriate balance” of Australian and foreign singers.

Afghanistan’s Cinema History, Some 7,000 Films, Saved From The Taliban

“When the Taliban charged in to Afghanistan’s state-run film company in the mid-1990s intent on destroying all the movies, Habibullah Ali risked everything to save them. He hid thousands of reels of footage showcasing Afghanistan’s rich cultural history … Two decades later those reels, which include long-lost movies and documentary images of Afghanistan before it was ravaged by violence, are being made available to watch again through digitisation.”

Top Posts From AJBlogs 09.26.17

Zero Sum Funding?
The pursuit of grants, sponsorships, and donations is a central focus of all nonprofits – the arts no less than any other type of tax exempt entity. It keeps us up at night, permeates our dreams … read more
AJBlog: Engaging Matters Published 2017-09-26

Tom Petty at the Hollywood Bowl
Last night, Tom Petty concluded a lengthy tour with the third of three shows at the Hollywood Bowl. The tour was designed to look back at 40 years with his band, The Heartbreakers, and … read more
AJBlog: CultureCrash Published 2017-09-26

Writer on a Rampage
In a tribute to the late German author Carl Weissner, who wrote experimental fiction in both English and German in addition to translating more than 100 books by dissident American and British authors, … read more
AJBlog: Straight|Up Published 2017-09-26

 

Guggenheim Removes Controversial Art From Exhibition

The works, all by conceptual Chinese artists, came under fire last week when activists characterized them as “instances of unmistakable cruelty against animals in the name of art.” The criticism erupted after a measured preview of the show ran in The New York Times, titled “Where the Wild Things Are: China’s Art Dreamers at the Guggenheim.” The comments on the article, however, reflected the distress many experienced even before the show’s opening.

Research: How We See Color, What We Name It…

“Why should humans all choose roughly the same places to identify transitions, when color is just photons, irreducible quanta of light on a continuous spectrum of wavelengths? Linguists might say it’s because language creates cultural norms. Anthropologists might say it’s because some colors have more cultural relevance than others. Neuroscientists and physiologists might say it’s because of the specific light-sensitive cells in the primate eye tuned to pick up red, green, and blue wavelengths and send signals to the visual cortex—trichromatic vision.”

How Politics And The American State Department Helped Shape Post-War Art

The end of New Deal subsidies led to a new wave of competition between artists, and the abstract-expressionist style expanded. The market for this new art was energized by a number of factors: the postwar period of inflation and the pent-up demand and incomes from the war led to a new cascade of collectors. Additionally, French art was no longer imported after 1944, and the European art market had been devastated by the war.