On Wednesday the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art announced Sandra Jackson-Dumont as its new director and chief executive officer. She comes to L.A. from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where since 2014 she has headed education and public programs. – Los Angeles Times
Blog
Zadie Smith: Art Of The Muse
“The Yoko Years. The Decade of Dora. Accounts of the muse–artist relation were anchored in the idea of male cultural production as a special category, one with particular needs—usually sexual—that the muse had been there to fulfill, perhaps even to the point of exploitation, but without whom we would have missed the opportunity to enjoy this or that beloved cultural artifact. The art wants what the art wants.” – New York Review of Books
Scientists Figure Out Direct Brain-To-Brain Communication
In a new study, technology replaces language as a means of communicating by directly linking the activity of human brains. Electrical activity from the brains of a pair of human subjects was transmitted to the brain of a third individual in the form of magnetic signals, which conveyed an instruction to perform a task in a particular manner. – Scientific American
Overworked, Underpaid Young Architects In UK Start Drive To Unionise
“Unpaid overtime, precarious contracts, working hours so antisocial your only friends are people who do the same job … after a minimum of seven years’ education and professional training, the reality of working as an architect can be a bleak prospect. It’s not hard to see why so many of them wear black, as if in permanent mourning for the lives they once had.” – The Guardian
Once Upon a Time There Was Romance
Do you ever wonder how choreographers choose their titles? After seeing James Whiteside’s New American Romance on the last day of American Ballet Theatre’s fall season at the former New York State Theater, I spent some time pondering that. – Deborah Jowitt
Picasso Fiasco: Jarring Juxtapositions & Missed Connections at the New MoMA
The aggressively transgressive new MoMA, trying to combat museum-ennui by shaking up its displays, has aimed its cannon at the canon. Its disruptive installation strategy audaciously breaches traditional geographic, temporal and art-historical boundaries, arranging shotgun marriages among strange (and strained) bedfellows and sundering longtime soulmates. – Lee Rosenbaum
The twenty-five record albums that changed my life (13)
Forty-nine years after the fact, I can’t remember how or why I first got interested in Miles Davis. Not that you would have needed a reason to be interested in Miles in 1970. – Terry Teachout
Can Painting Murals On City Streets Change How People Use Cities?
The Asphalt Art Initiative will award 10 small or mid-sized cities with grants of up to $25,000 to create colorful murals on streets, intersections, and crosswalks, or vertical surfaces of transportation infrastructure like utility boxes, traffic barriers, and highway underpasses. “Most of the time these projects are used as a relatively inexpensive and quick way to either make streets safer or to reallocate space away from cars and for people.” – Curbed
How Matthew Lopez Transposed The Edwardians Of ‘Howards End’ Into The Gay New Yorkers Of ‘The Inheritance’ (A Crib Sheet)
“‘I consider this the ultimate in fan-fiction, basically,’ [says] Lopez, … [who] wanted to know, ‘How faithful can you be to the novel while simultaneously blowing it up?’ For those who know Howards End well and need an intro to the gay New York of The Inheritance (or vice versa), the playwright walks a few key lines of comparison between the two.” – New York Magazine
If You Replace The Choreography In “A Chorus Line” Is It Still “A Chorus Line”?
“A Chorus Line” is the ultimate ensemble musical, a compilation of autobiographical material about the emotional travails and aspirations of Broadway dancers, as they audition for spots in the singing and dancing chorus of a new musical. – Washington Post