Zaryadye Park, designed by High Line architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro and located on the site of the old Soviet-era Rossiya Hotel, isn’t having trouble because of shoddy work. (Not with those architects, nor with the personal interest of Vladimir Putin.) The problem is vandalism: the first day, someone threw an object through the glass roof of the media center and concert hall, and more than 10,000 plants in the park have been trampled or stolen.
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MIT Opens Its First Full-Fledged Theater Building
“The urgent need for a new, purpose-built theater space became clear when MIT Theater’s home in the 19th-century Rinaldi tile factory had to be demolished as the Kendall Square redevelopment began in 2016. … Other functions of the theater program were scattered around campus – in Kresge Auditorium, the Walker Memorial, and Buildings 4 and 10. W97 [as the new building is called] both replaces the Rinaldi facilities and consolidates all the other theater activities under one roof.”
Pssst! Let’s Not Call Them Stores Anymore (They’re “Experiences”)
“Retailers are, very consciously, promoting these in-store “experiences”—or at least, they are doing so at the flagship stores in big cities that they like to draw attention to. It’s a reaction to the fact that buying is now something that can be done anywhere, and that reaction can be detected in a linguistic shift.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 09.14.17
Concept Test Kitchen, Episode 1
I’m launching a new experiment with this pilot episode of “Concept Test Kitchen” – a video series presenting interesting frameworks or approaches to arts management (‘recipes for thinking’), so you can share back whether or when they may be useful. … read more
AJBlog: The Artful Manager Published 2017-09-14
Smith Smites: Tom Campbell’s Precipitous Fall from Favor (plus, my I-told-you-so)
Now that we know what the Metropolitan Museum wants in its next director, I’m going to allow myself an I-told-you-so moment about its last director, responding to Roberta Smith‘s recent autopsy of Tom Campbell‘s trouble-plagued tenure. … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2017-09-14
“The Difference Between Quality Art and Crap” Take Three
Though as usual most of the feedback to my recent blogs comes via private emails rather than public responses, a flurry of interesting posted responses here and via Facebook spurs me to rant some more. … read more
AJBlog: Unanswered Question Published 2017-09-14
Youssou N’Dour on stage & screen, PoKempner photos
Photo-journalist Marc PoKempner‘s images from the Chicago Jazz Fest, as featured in my previous post, and these from Senegalese superstar Youssou N’Dour’s rousing … read more
AJBlog: Jazz Beyond Jazz Published 2017-09-14
Kentucky Governor Tells Universities They Should Cut Programs That Don’t Directly Lead To Jobs (Like Dance)
“If you’re studying interpretive dance, God bless you, but there’s not a lot of jobs right now in America looking for people with that as a skill set,” he said Tuesday. Kentucky has cut state funding for higher education by more than $200 million since 2008.
Market Collapse: 22 Million Americans Will Have Cut Their TV Cords By The End Of This Year
“By 2021, the number of cord-cutters will nearly equal the number of people who have never had pay TV — a total of 81 million U.S. adults. That means around 30% of American adults won’t have traditional pay TV at that point, per eMarketer’s revised forecast.”
Why It’s So Hard To “Live In The Present”
“To live in the present is to appreciate the value of atelic activities like going for a walk, listening to music, spending time with family or friends. To engage in these activities is not to extinguish them from your life. Their value is not mortgaged to the future or consigned to the past, but realized here and now. It is to care about the process of what you are doing, not just projects you aim to complete. The advice is easy to misread.”
Simon Rattle’s Plan To Remake London Music
“Five years have passed since the LSO began secret negotiations to bring the Liverpool-born conductor back to his homeland after his 16 sometimes turbulent years at the helm of the Berlin Philharmonic, and more than two since his appointment as the LSO’s music director was announced. Who would blame the orchestra for making a big fuss about his first concerts in his new job?”
Movie Directors Have Declining Clout As Hollywood Gets More Risk Averse
“In an industry financially dependent on an ever-smaller handful of films, studio executives are less willing to take chances and more willing to make big changes if needed, even if the moves generate ugly headlines or expensive reshoots. When hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake in ticket sales and ancillary businesses, no one is irreplaceable.”
Where The Idea Of “White People” Came From
“Bolstered by a positivist language, the idea of race became so normalised that eventually the claim that anyone would have coined such an obvious phrase as ‘white people’ would begin to sound strange. But invented it was. With the reemergence today of openly racist political rhetoric, often using disingenuously sophisticated terminology, it’s crucial to remember what exactly it means to say that race isn’t real, and why the claims of racists aren’t just immoral, but also inaccurate.”