A man who buys art in estate sales snagged the entire contents of a house – and that happened to include the “Woman-Ochre,” stolen from the University of Arizona Museum of Art in the 1980s. He was going to hang it in his own house until people in his shop noticed it was a de Kooning – and a Google search led him to the truth.
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There’s A Big Hole At The Center Of The Arts, And It’s Shaped Like The Working Class
That’s the case, at least, in the U.K., according to a new report: “The systematic eradication of arts education in schools, sky-high drama school audition fees, chronic low pay and a lack of diversity behind the scenes are all contributing to a diversity crisis on our stages and screens.”
Degas Was A Raving Anti-Semite, And His Attitudes Infect His Art
He cut off his Jewish friends after the Dreyfus Affair, and he read a nationalist, anti-Semitic newspaper, and as the 21st century deals with the fact that we haven’t actually left murderous racism behind, “it also becomes harder to relegate Degas’ inhumanity to an artifact of a time when racism and bigotry were more acceptable. His cruelty becomes, instead, an indelible component of his artistry.”
Is Fear Of The Bard Killing James Ivory’s Planned ‘Richard II’?
Yes, that’s James Ivory of Merchant Ivory fame. “Despite 50 years of critical acclaim and Oscar recognition, plus British actors Tom Hiddleston and Damian Lewis lined up to star in his production, financiers are refusing to part with their money. ‘They look at you like you’re crazy. … There is an assumption that there is no money to be made from such an investment.'”
Could This Technology Solve Electronic Ticketing Problems?
“As Citizen Ticket’s technology – BitTicket – is based on blockchain, it means that batches cannot be oversold and tickets cannot be copied or counterfeited, while the number of tickets in a transaction is also monitored.”
Jack Rabinovitch, 86, Had Major Impact On Canada’s Literary Scene
Mr. Rabinovitch died on Sunday at the age of 87, a few days after falling down the stairs of his Toronto home. On Wednesday he was laid to rest, with hundreds of mourners gathering at the city’s Beth Tzedec Congregation to pay their respects to the man who, through a small act of literary philanthropy, did more to alter the course of Canadian letters over the last few decades than just about anyone else in the country.
Political Theatre Controversies Go Way Back. Consider This 1624 Play That Makes A Great Cautionary Tale
“Whenever anyone tries to argue that theatre shouldn’t ‘be political,’ I like to tell them the story of A Game at Chess. Thomas Middleton’s last play, which premiered in 1624, is mostly unknown outside of academia today; in the seventeenth century, however, it made quite a splash and resulted in the closure of the Globe theatre.”
What Music Did Alexander Hamilton Listen To?
“While rap aficionados and theater nerds have exhaustively cataloged the rich referential web of Mr. Miranda’s “Hamilton” score, little attention has been paid to the show’s engagement with the music that Alexander Hamilton would have known in his lifetime.”
When Artificial Intelligence Software Comes Out Even Stupider Than Its Creators Had Hoped
Reporter Jacob Brogan talks with researcher Janelle Shane – who created a neural network to tell knock-knock jokes, only to have it become fixated on the Cow With No Lips joke – about “what’s going on under the hood, what her creations might teach us, and why it’s so funny when neural networks go bad.”
Are Social Justice Warriors Making The World An Uglier Place?
“From declaring that one should interrogate one’s musical tastes for classism to fretting about yellow face in opera to musing as to whether a man can write a novel about rape culture, in the hands of the social justice warriors, artistic and cultural criticism is increasingly less about aesthetics and more about virtue signaling by the critic. Like all other fundamentalists, these secular descendants of the Puritans are so preoccupied with enforcing their rigid morality that they’ve forgotten the importance of beauty and creativity.”