“The voguing balls of Harlem, the hoochie koochie dances of rural America, the elaborate, prancing gait of runway models – these aren’t influences that routinely feature in contemporary dance. Yet for the American choreographer Trajal Harrell they’ve proved extraordinarily fertile. … His pieces might feature a man posing semi-naked in a pair of Hermès scarves, a woman encased in a small black cube meticulously removing her swimsuit, or a man in a gaudy oriental skirt, gravely shaking his booty.”
Blog
Israeli Artist Claimed She Stole Items From Auschwitz For Her Work
Ten days before her art school’s graduate exhibition opened, Rotem Bides claimed that the objects in her installation in the show had been taken from the museum at the Auschwitz-Birkenau prison camp. All hell broke loose, and her work was about to be removed – then she released a statement swearing that the items had not been taken from the Auschwitz museum itself.
Seattle Voters Reject Sales Tax For Arts
“Proposition 1, which requested a 0.1 percent sales tax – or a penny for every $10 spent – was being rejected by 55 percent of [King County] voters, with 45 percent approving.”
Anger Over Gov’t Funding For Emma Rice’s New Theatre Company
Gosh, and everyone had seemed to be on her side. Wise Children, the troupe Rice is starting after she leaves Shakespeare’s Globe, was awarded roughly £2 million (£475,000 per year) by Arts Council England, even though it didn’t exist even on paper until eight days before the application deadline. What’s more, Wise Children received money earmarked for southwestern England, which the company claims it will serve, even though it’s registered in London and will be resident at the city’s Old Vic. Following a furious denunciation in the industry press last week, controversy over the grant is mounting.
Judith Jones, Who Edited Anne Frank, Julia Child, And John Irving, Dead At 93
She launched her career by rescuing The Diary of Anne Frank from a reject pile in Paris and insisting to her boss that it must be published in English. While she worked on literary books throughout her decades at Knopf, overseeing works by Irving, Anne Tyler, and many others, she made her biggest impact on American life with cookbooks: she discovered and shepherded Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking as well as volumes by the likes of James Beard, Lidia Bastianich, Madhur Jaffrey, and Edna Lewis.
Channeling A Gay Black Avant-Garde (And Crazy) Composer In, Of All Places, The United Arab Emirates
Seph Rodney sees a music-and-video project about the late Julius Eastman at the Sharjah Biennial.
Top Posts From AJBlogs 08.02.17
Who’da Thunk?
I don’t like spending money. I’m leery of signing up for ongoing contracts for service unless I really, really have to (want to). So when we bought a new “pre-owned” car that came with a three-month trial subscription to SiriusXM™ satellite radio I was not overwhelmed with joy. But here’s what happened. … read more
AJBlog: Engaging Matters Published 2017-08-01
Bard SummerScape’s latest operatic resurrection: Dvorak takes Boris Godunov many steps further
Dmitrij is an opera that keeps growing before your very ears. And growing. And growing, until you have some of the most dramatically apt music Dvorak ever wrote for the stage. … read more
AJBlog: Condemned to Music Published 2017-08-01
The Frank Lloyd Wright Problem
Academicians warned decades ago that “the restrictive control of the master’s archives for a quarter-century after his death in 1959 by his widow, Olgivanna (who died in 1985), would set back Wright studies for a full generation, if not longer. Dissertation advisers prudently steered doctoral candidates away from Wright topics because of the extortionate research and reproduction fees demanded by his foundation, as well as the editorial approval it demanded for publications that used material from the Taliesin archive. The rise of poststructuralist criticism further eroded younger scholars’ interest in an architect whose uniquely personal approach to architecture had little to do with the period’s fascination with literary theory.”
Divide Between The Arts And Those With Disabilities Is Wide (And Often Inadvertent)
“There is a fine line in promoting artists’ work appropriately. All too often artists with disabilities are given empathetic reviews replete with that “inspiration porn” trope of heroism overcoming tribulations, but ultimately they are not taken seriously as artists. Aesthetic validation is far more important than sympathy.”
Criticism At A Remove – But Why Does Criticism Have To Stand Apart?
Rita Felski asks what might happen if we looked not “behind the text” but “in front of the text, reflecting on what it unfurls, calls forth, makes possible.” In doing so, she seeks to rehabilitate the validity and importance of what we might call “literary desire”: the force that drives you to reread your favorite book yet again; or to finish that work of genre fiction even when you know the ending; or to press a beloved book awkwardly into a distant acquaintance’s hands in hopes that she, too, will come to love what you love and might one day talk with you about it.