He was nominated for the best-director Oscar for the 1978 film “Midnight Express” and again 10 years later for “Mississippi Burning.” – The New York Times
Blog
The Gauguin Detective
Born in Calais, France, Fabrice Fourmanoir, 63, might once have been dismissed as a crackpot, a wannabe who would never be welcomed into the sophisticated enclave of art scholarship. But since January he’s gained some standing in this forbidding world, after playing a leading role in a blush-inducing admission by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles that a Gauguin sculpture, purchased in 2002 for a reported $3 million to $5 million, is not actually by Gauguin. – Washington Post
In Which A New York Times And Guardian Theater Critic Takes Online Theater Classes
Alexis Soloski: “As an undergraduate 20 years ago, I had majored in theater and back then, our training was exclusively and incontrovertibly face to face. Good acting happened in the moment, in the room, in the space between bodies and breath, action and intention. You couldn’t teach that online! … Or could you? For two humbling and sometimes humiliating weeks, I tried.” – The New York Times
Recreating The Sound Of Hagia Sophia
For a group of scholars, scientists and musicians, Hagia Sophia’s rededication as a Muslim place of worship threatens to cloak a less tangible treasure: its sound. Bissera Pentcheva, an art historian at Stanford University and an expert in the burgeoning field of acoustic archaeology, has spent the past decade studying the building’s extravagantly reverberant acoustics to reconstruct the sonic world of Byzantine cathedral music. – The New York Times
How Books Became Cheap: An Illustrated Timeline Of Publishing Technology
From woodblock printing (3rd century) to movable type (11th century — sorry, Gutenberg) to stereotyping (in the original sense; ca. 1700) to paperbacks (ca. 1845) to hot-metal typesetting (ca. 1884). – Lapham’s Quarterly
The Radio Audience Has Changed In The Pandemic. But Radio doesn’t Seem To Have Changed
When I pop around and listen to public radio streams from around the country, they almost universally sound like they did before the pandemic started. Same with the programs themselves. Things have changed topically, but not formatically. The audience dynamics have completely changed, so why hasn’t the stations’ sound? – Current
Not 20 Years After World War II, Modern Design Reintroduced Tokyo To The World
Jason Farago: “Tokyo 2020, its name unchanged, will now take place in July 2021 if it takes place at all. Yet all around the Japanese capital is the legacy of another Olympics: the 1964 Summer Games, which crowned Tokyo’s 20-year transformation from a firebombed ruin to an ultramodern megalopolis.” – The New York Times
TikTok Will Give Billions To Creators
The video-sharing social media app said in a blog post Wednesday that it will give creators in the U.S. over $1 billion in the next three years, and more than double that globally. – CNBC
America Needs A Truth And Reconciliation Commission — And It Should Be Televised
Wesley Morris: “What would an American version be? Court, theater, a hearing, a telethon, therapy, TV, church, Ken Burns, Anna Deavere Smith? Each perhaps — and more. Who would make it? I don’t know…. The production, however, is merely the second hurdle to clear. The first would be convincing executives that it’s worth doing in the first place. Here’s what to say about that: The entertainment industry itself has more than a century of harm to atone for and ameliorate. Any company that believes the solution to ‘systemic racism’ is The Help shouldn’t mind a surrender of its airwaves.” – The New York Times
Defending Kitsch
Kitsch is a conflicted term—hard to strictly define, but as with Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s joke about pornography, one knows it when one sees it. For the purchasers of kitsch in nineteenth-century Munich, reproductions of elaborate and intricate decoration were a means of class ascension. But they also signaled a type of bourgeoisie cluelessness concerning taste, discretion, and style. – JSTOR