Peter Schjeldahl: Online “virtual tours” add insult to injury, in my view, as strictly spectacular, amorphous disembodiments of aesthetic experience. Inaccessible, the works conjure in the imagination a significance that we have taken for granted. Purely by existing, they stir associations and precipitate meanings that may resonate in this plague time. Why does the art of what we term the Old Masters have so much more soulful heft than that of most moderns and nearly all of our contemporaries? – The New Yorker
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Sad: Pictures Of The Demolition Of The Old LACMA
The work that began Monday focused on the museum’s 1965 Leo S. Bing Center, a 600-seat theater designed by architect William L. Pereira that has been used for film screenings, musical performances, talks and other events. Interior demolition of three other buildings — Pereira’s 1960 Hammer and Ahmanson buildings as well as Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates’ 1980s Art of the Americas building — is underway as well. – Los Angeles Times
Montreal’s Franglais Rap: Multi-Culti Creativity Or Threat To The Survival Of French In North America?
“To their legions of fans, the groups give voice to the bilingual vernacular of a multicultural city, marinated by its past French and British rulers, the forces of globalization and successive waves of immigration. … But they have also spawned a backlash in Quebec, … where critics have castigated them as self-colonizers who are ‘creolizing’ the French language and threatening its future.” – The New York Times
Mahler’s 8th: The antithesis of social distance in a new PhilOrch recording
This Mahler 8th arrives some four years after the live performances, and it signals not only a high-water mark in Nézet-Séguin’s relationship with the orchestra but a certain evolution in the performance practice of the piece itself. – David Patrick Stearns
Small Consolation: Museums’ Hit-&-Miss Attempts to Engage Audiences Via “Virtual Exhibitions”
Too much of museums’ existing online content, now being repurposed, reminds me of “park and bark” — the great opera stars of yesteryear, standing stock-still at center stage and belting out their arias. By contrast, I found much to admire in purpose-built content that some museums managed to put together on the fly. – Lee Rosenbaum
Fenway Park’s Organist Is Playing The Games Even Though Baseball Has Been Canceled
Normally, Josh Kantor is in a perch at Boston’s venerable baseball park, churning out tunes as the home team’s official organist. In late March, with the season put on pause due to coronavirus concerns, he decided he would try a single video stream from behind his Yamaha Electone and leave it at that. But the online response convinced him to come back the next day. And the next. Kantor is now pledging to continue the “7th-Inning Stretch,” as he calls his 30-minute show, until baseball returns or people get sick of it. – Washington Post
Archaeologists Open Egyptian Mummy’s Coffin And Discover 3,000-Year-Old Paintings Inside
At the Perth Museum and Art Gallery in Scotland, conservators working to preserve the remains of an ancient priestess or noblewoman named Ta-Kr-Hb opened her sarcophagus and found two paintings of a goddess in a red dress called Amentet. – Smithsonian Magazine
Say Goodbye To The Cleveland Plain Dealer As Owners Dismantle It
“The paper’s remaining staffers are now faced with a devastating decision: they can either leave and let the state’s largest paper, (and the country’s first News Guild), die, ceding victory at last to the Newhouses of Advance Publications who’ve been ruthlessly and methodically busting the PD’s union for years; or they can stay on, suffering the indignities of filing low-stakes stories on distant locales that haven’t been part of the paper’s regular coverage area for years.” – Cleveland Scene
Another Landmark Postmodern Dance Piece You Can Perform At Home
Last week it was one by Yvonne Rainer. This week it’s Trisha Brown’s 1971 Roof Piece, in which “dancers scattered themselves across the roofs of SoHo and played a dance version of the game Telephone.” Recently members of the Trisha Brown Dance Company got together on Zoom to do an adaptation they call Room/Roof Piece — and they recommend that you get some friends together and do the same. Here’s how. – The New York Times
Seattle Is Boarded Up. Seattle’s Artists Are Painting Murals On The Boards
Plywood started going up about two weeks ago after vandals began smashing windows of closed businesses. That led to more plywood from store owners who feared they might be next. Things were starting to look bleak all over town. Already artists are out and about, painting murals to combat the growing blight as the novel coronavirus pandemic forces continued closures of local businesses and restaurants. – Seattle Times