“Barcelona’s city council has refused to greenlight a planning application for an outpost of [St. Petersburg’s] State Hermitage Museum. The council took issue with the site chosen for the project … and traffic congestion in the area as well as unanswered questions about the new institution’s staffing, projected visitor numbers, and admission prices.” – Artforum
Blog
Plácido Domingo Starts Losing Engagements In Europe — And In His Birthplace, No Less
The continent had been resistant to the accusations of sexual harassment that ended Domingo’s U.S. career, but following the AGMA report, Spain’s Culture Ministry cancelled his invitation to perform in Luisa Fernanda at Madrid’s Teatro de la Zarzuela in May, following which Domingo withdrew from La Traviata at the city’s Teatro Real the same month. (Meanwhile, news of the AGMA report has inspired another accuser to come forward publicly.) – Yahoo! (AP)
Fred Adams, 89, Visionary Founder Of Utah Shakespeare Festival
In 1961, Fred Adams — then a theater professor with two years of experience at the College of Southern Utah (now SUU) — and Barbara Gaddie, his girlfriend (they married in 1963), were in a laundromat when they hatched the idea for a Shakespeare festival in Cedar City. Adams went to Ashland, Ore., to study how the Oregon Shakespeare Festival worked. He came back to Cedar City, and cajoled the Lions Club to donate $1,000 — the entirety of the first festival’s budget in 1962. Townspeople and students built sets, props and costumes. – Salt Lake Tribune
Royal Shakespeare’s Gregory Doran Hits Back At Idea That “Wokeness” Is Threatening Shakespeare
“Dominic Cavendish fears that the woke wolves are beginning to police Shakespeare, and that ultimately they will apply a sort of politically correct censorship which will render the plays unperformable. I can’t agree with that. I think directors, especially some of the freshest and most radical today, many of whom are women, want to reveal what is most urgent, most resonant and sometimes most challenging in his work, and address those issues head on.” – The Stage
LA’s REDCAT Hires A New Director
Joao Ribas has recently worked as an independent curator and writer. In 2019 he was the commissioner and curator for the Pavilion of Portugal at the Venice Biennale and curator of a photography exhibition at the National Gallery of Kosovo. In 2018 Ribas was the director of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal. – Los Angeles Times
How To Make Historical Ballet Relevant
Exploring the context in which the ballets arose offers insight into their complexity, and helps us question contemporary assumptions about the choreography, librettos, and music that have survived. By pairing imagination with historical awareness, we can rediscover the experiential aspects of dance and music and gain insight into these arts as we practice them today. – San Francisco Classical Voice
Yuja Wang Upset Her Audience In Chicago When She Mixed Up The Order Of Her Program (On Purpose)
Because of cultural tradition, each audience brings specific expectations to a performance. Classical listeners, who are steeped in the European performance practices, have been conditioned to want to know as much as possible about the music before a note is sounded. Jazz audiences – who have embraced a more casual, all-American approach to listening – generally sit back and savor the sounds, recognizing standard tunes, enjoying obscure works and realizing that free-flying improvisations may have no title at all. – Chicago Tribune
Shocking: How Easily Humans Are Getting Intimate With AI
We’re witnessing a major shift in traditional social life, but it’s not because we’re always online, or because our tech is becoming conscious, or because we’re getting AI lovers like Samantha in Spike Jonze’s film Her (2013). To the contrary, we’re learning that humans can bond, form attachments and dedicate themselves to non-conscious objects or lifeless things with shocking ease. – Aeon
There’s A Taco Bell Literary Quarterly (Honest To God)
“You can read Volume 1 online and Volume 2 should be dropping any day now.” The publication’s mission? “Taco Bell Quarterly is the literary magazine for the Taco Bell Arts and Letters. We’re a reaction against everything. The gatekeepers. The taste-makers. The hipsters. Health food. Artists Who Wear Cute Scarves. Bitch-ass Wendy’s. We seek to demystify what it means to literary, artistic, important, and elite.” – Literary Hub
Rem Koolhaas Discovers The Countryside (And Comes Off As A City Rube)
Having spent 50 years theorizing about cities, he grew annoyed by how much time his fellow urbanists spend theorizing about cities. So he pulled on his wellies and went tromping out into the sticks with a mixture of wistfulness and obstinate naïvete. The countryside “is largely off (our) radar,” he writes, making that parenthetical our do a lot of heavy lifting. You’d have to be a pretty serious indoorsman to be startled by some of the changes he chronicles, or to believe that the world beyond cities was ever an “ignored realm,” as he calls it. – New York Magazine