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Was John Baldessari The Most Important Art Professor Of The 20th Century?

Starting in the early 1970s, Baldessari became one of the first professors at the California Institute of Arts, a school in Santa Clarita that became a locus of artistic experimentation on the West Coast when the art scene there was perceived as less significant than New York’s. Baldessari, famously, taught a class whose name signified a lot: “Post-Studio Art.” – ARTnews

Was This Woman The 20th Century’s Most Scandalous Opera Star?

Lydia Locke (1884-1966) “rose to prominence in the early 1900s, when mass celebrity was still a relatively new concept. But the American soprano embraced the label, making news both for her performances at the world’s most prestigious venues and for her fashion choices. Yet it was her tumultuous personal life that garnered the most attention: Between seven marriages, two dead husbands, and one fraudulent baby, her life was scandalous even by the standards of today’s news.” – Mental Floss

An Artist Using Virtual Reality To Make Climate Change More Real

“The technologies allowed me to show things to you—for example, how past landscapes can change overtime, how you can look from the scale of a beetle, how you can change your perspective. These things are what this technology is very good at. You can also jump around in time and you can slow down time in virtual reality—you can change your scale in different dimensions.” – Artnet

‘There Is More Theatre In Here Sometimes Than In The Outside World’: At Milan’s Home For Retired Opera Divas

Yes, divos too. Since 1902, funded by revenues from the composer’s operas, Casa Verdi has been an old-age refuge for singers and musicians, not all of them famous. Today, some 60 retirees live there, paying according to their means. And, since 1999, they’ve been sharing the home with 20 music students, the elders providing the youngsters with lessons and guidance and the students livening up the place. – The Guardian

Woolly Mammoth Theatre’s New Leader Pushes To Be Artistic Leader In Fighting For Social Justice

To survive long-term, companies such as Woolly need to convince social-justice-minded, cash-challenged millennials to buy tickets. The crucial challenge: Can they do this without alienating a crowd who, liberal as they may be, might also be slower to get with the times? Or do you have to, in effect, fire one audience to lure the other? – Washingtonian

Four Nonwhite Ballet Professionals Talk About How They’re Addressing The Ethnic Stereotypes In Classic Story Ballets

“[Lyndsey Winship] talked to dancers and choreographers [Shobana Jeyasingh, Céline Gittens, and Final Bow for Yellowface co-founders Phil Chan and Georgina Pazcoguin] about ballet’s slow pace of change, which problematic ballets should be thrown out and which ones could be creatively reimagined.” – The Guardian

*What* Teutonic Efficiency? Germany’s Cultural Building Projects Plagued By Delays, Budget Overruns, And Shoddy Construction

The gut renovation of Cologne’s opera house is running eight years late and more than double the original budget — and that’s only up to now, since the basements are full of ductwork, cabling and pipes that were badly coordinated and may need to be completely redone. Munich’s Deutsche Museum renovation, Berlin’s Humboldt Forum and the Pergamon Museum are all similarly late and roughly half a billion euros or more each; the Stuttgart opera house renovation may cost a billion. “For a country that thrives on a reputation for efficiency and engineering prowess, its recent record is sobering.” Catherine Hickley looks at why things are going so wrong. – The New York Times

Smithsonian American Art Museum Provides Long-Distance Learning To Schools On U.S. Military Bases All Over The Globe

“The museum’s educators provide lessons in art and art history as well as English language arts, social studies and even science and math. … The list of past subject areas includes surrealism, the Harlem Renaissance, the art of persuasion, the Civil War and Italian mathematician Fibonacci.” – The Washington Post

Can An Artist-In-Residence Really Transform A Big-City DA’s Office? This One Means To Try

Muralist James “Yaya” Hough, 44, was released last year after 27 years in prison, and within a few months he was hired for the new artist-in-residence position in the office of reformist Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner. “Hough told Hyperallergic that he was looking to program workshops that will foster conversations between the DA’s 600 or so employees, survivors of crimes, and those currently serving time in the criminal justice system.” – Hyperallergic