“Bell is only the second holder of the music director role at the Academy, succeeding the Academy’s founder Sir Neville Marriner, who held the post from the orchestra’s formation in 1958 until 2011 … The violinist first collaborated with the orchestra in 1998, when he was 21 years old, in a recording of Bruch and Mendelssohn concertos, with Marriner conducting.” – The Strad
Blog
Philadelphia Has Had A Major Antiquities Museum For Well Over A Century. Finally, It’s Truly Welcoming The Public.
The Penn Museum (officially, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology) has theoretically been available to visitors since its opening in 1887, but it was actually used almost entirely by researchers until 2012. Since then, attendance has risen to about 180,000 a year — a figure which should leap dramatically starting this weekend, when 10,000 square feet of new exhibition space will house hundreds of items never before shown to the public. – The New York Times
Arts Institutions In Venice Reeling From Record Flooding
Salt water from the lagoon covered 80% of the city, reaching levels of up to six feet, the second-highest since records began about 90 years ago. The Biennale, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, La Fenice opera house, and St. Mark’s Basilica are among the many museums, archives, and other institutions that have temporarily closed while trying to contain the damage. – Deutsche Welle
Desperate Rio Art Museum Gives Layoff Notice To All Staff, May Shut Down
The Museu de Arte do Rio, opened in 2013 in the Praça Mauá on the city’s waterfront, has not been receiving its scheduled payments from the Rio de Janeiro prefecture government; all 126 employees, who haven’t been paid since September, received the legally required advance notice for layoffs this week. – The Art Newspaper
On Words Out Of Cultural Context And Banning Or Favoriting Them
“The United States has never been totally segregated, but this new world exposes everyone to everyone else in unprecedented intensity. Just like we sound like our friends, just like someone with a new friend group will inevitably find bits of new language and inside jokes slipped into their own speech, vernacular from here and there and wherever sneaks into conversations between people who’ve never been to those places.” – Public Books
Why Netflix Shouldn’t Give In To Movie Theatres For Its Releases
Netflix can deliver filmmakers a prospective audience of 300 million people (and growing) with each release. This film distribution strategy is enabling rich, diverse stories to reach a massive audience. And that should be celebrated as a win for movie lovers — and the movie business. – The Hollywood Reporter
A “Decade Of Reckoning” For Classical Music
Anne Midgette: “The music isn’t the problem, it’s the way we’re offering it.” Big, inflexible institutions take away the “oxygen and funds” from the smaller organizations, she argues, which typically have a stronger vision and take more risks. Audiences, she adds, prove time and again there’s no lack of interest. “I think the only reason orchestras are struggling is that not everybody wants to go and sit in a concert hall and have that experience. It’s not that people don’t want to hear Beethoven.” – NPR
Why Britain’s Working Classes Are In To The Classics
“Classical materials have been present in the identity construction and psychological experience of substantial groups of working-class Britons. Dissenting academies, Nonconformist Sunday schools and Methodist preacher-training initiatives all encouraged those who attended them to read widely in ancient history, ideas and rhetorical handbooks.” – Aeon
Why I Love “Bad” Movies
“We bad-movie watchers have our own anticriteria, the sorts of badness we prefer. Some of us use the term “bad movies” to mean, simply, films that emerge from a supposedly lowbrow genre, or films that are stylized in the manner we tend to label “camp.” (Road House from 1989 is this kind of bad movie, and is very good at being one.) Some of us prefer movies that are exploitative and tacky but, in a Nietzschean way, supposedly more alive than respectable ones.” – Hedgehog Review
The End Of The “Rude” Press
When I was growing up, every major American metro area had both a polite press—the local dailies—and a rude one: the alt-weeklies. The alt-weeklies were funded by advertisers the family-friendly media wanted nothing to do with. In the end, many of these publications were also simply killed by rich idiot owners or corporations that routinely purchase publications and ruin them out of both greed and incompetence. And so we (mostly) don’t have alt-weeklies anymore. – The New Republic