Artists are expected to make work about fighting climate change and fascism, or promoting gay rights, Piotr Bernatowicz says. “Artists who do not adopt this ideology are marginalized,” he said. Bernatowicz wants to change that and promote artists who have other views: conservative, patriotic, pro-family. His plans are transforming the museum into the latest battleground in Poland’s culture wars, which pit liberals against the governing populist Law and Justice Party, as well as other conservative groups. – The New York Times
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The Problems With Translating Shakespeare Into Modern English, And How The Playwrights Who Did It Dealt With Them
Writer and dramaturg Loren Noveck was skeptical of the Play On Shakespeare project, and not because she’s a purist: “The Bard,” perhaps the paradigmatic Dead White Male, takes up so much space on stages, in season schedules, and in the minds of theatre folk that there’s not nearly enough room for newer voices dealing with contemporary issues. (Not to mention the now-abhorrent 17th-century attitudes in some of the plays.) But the playwrights tell Noveck that they were well aware of these questions, and they talk to her about their answers. – HowlRound
Is The Future Of The Arts To Be Seen In The Middle East?
By being thrust forward in time at warp speed over the last few decades — fueled by seriously cranked-up air-conditioning and the bountiful oil production from beneath their deserts that began ramping up in the 1950s — these traffic- and heat-fueled metropolises have the space, desire and revenue to help create the new frontier for arts and culture. – The New York Times
Paris Project Helps Refugee Artists Resume Their Practices
As reporter Jeffrey Brown visited the headquarters of the Agency of Artists in Exile, “an Ethiopian man belted out a traditional song with accompaniment from this phone. Across the hall, a Yemeni woman used her vast trail of official asylum-seeking papers, accumulated over two years of navigating France’s legal process, to create an art installation. … And a Kurdish actor who fled Turkey practiced a monologue about his first days in Paris.” (video) – PBS NewsHour
After 34 Years, Ballet Memphis Founder Dorothy Gunther Pugh Will Retire
Pugh founded Ballet Memphis in 1986 with two dancers and a $75,000 budget. The organization grew over the years and now has a company of 21 dancers and a four-million-dollar budget. It also performs a full season in Memphis and tours nationally and internationally. – The Commercial Appeal
How Dead-Musicians-Touring-As-Holograms Became Serious Business
Yes, classical music types have rolled their eyes at dead-Maria Callas and dead-Glenn Gould tours, but rock is another matter. Since the long-departed Tupac Shakur (re-)appeared at the 2012 Coachella Festival, the field has grown, with recent concerts by the images of Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, and Frank Zappa posting impressive ticket sales and a full tour by a reanimated Whitney Houston coming this year. And with the acts that form the bedrock of the live music touring business made up of people now in their 60s and 70s, and with recently-dead stars like Prince and David Bowie still having legions of fans, the musical hologram business may soon be booming. Reporter Mark Binelli watches the hologram creators at work. – The New York Times Magazine
Are We Losing Our Ability To Listen?
None of us are good listeners all the time. It’s human nature to get distracted by what’s going on in your own head. Listening takes effort. Like reading, you might choose to go over some things carefully while skimming others, depending on the situation. But the ability to listen carefully, like the ability to read carefully, degrades if you don’t do it often enough. – LitHub
Paris’s Musée d’Orsay Hires An Instagram Artist-In-Residence
“[The museum] has invited the illustrator Jean-Philippe Delhomme to take over its Instagram account every Monday during 2020. On the account he will post a different drawing each week, depicting an artist as a contemporary social media user.” – The Guardian
‘One Of The Cleverest And Most Successful White-Collar Criminals In The History Of This State’: Broadway Producer Adela Holzer Dead At 90-Something
She had two hits onstage (Murray Schisgal’s All About Town and Terrence McNally’s The Ritz) and numerous flops, adoring profiles in The New York Times and People magazine, three criminal trials, a total of 14 years in prison, Roy Cohn for a lawyer and Jean Harris for a cellmate, and a mountain of Ponzi schemes, fraudulent businesses, and lies (not least her age). – The New York Times
First Glimpse Of Treasures In 15th-Century Emperor’s Tomb
“The sepulchre of Frederick (Friedrich) III, emperor from 1452 until his death in 1493, the greatest monument in Vienna’s cathedral of St Stephen’s, in the city’s historic centre, has been shown to contain his enamelled gilded crown and imperial regalia.” And this has been revealed without opening the tomb, whose cover weights eight tons. – The Art Newspaper