“Parsons added, ‘This is private property.’ It is revealing that a policeman should have imagined, even in a heated moment, that a public library was private property.”
Category: issues
Artists In LA Rise Up Against Influx Of New Galleries In Their Neighborhood
“Activists from a loose coalition called the Boyle Heights Alliance Against Artwashing and Displacement are demanding that the galleries leave… Artists who didn’t grow up in Boyle Heights, they look at Boyle Heights as a blank canvas. They don’t realize they are painting over another work of art.”
New York Armory’s New Director Defines The Immersive Arts Experience
In an age when it has become common to consume entertainment on hand-held devices, Pierre Audi said, the appeal of multisensory immersion in a cultural event is growing: “Nowadays we are attracted to it because we are naturally — and it’s healthy — becoming uncomfortable with the ritual of going to a concert, business as usual.”
How Do You Measure Aesthetic Value? This Researcher Has Some Ideas
“For arts professionals, curators and artists, my research shows that evaluative measures (qualitative or quantitative) are most useful when selected and combined in ways that take into account how people encounter an exhibit in practice, and how they observe each other’s actions and share aesthetic experiences in the course of social interaction.”
UK Decides To Phase Out Art History Exams Over Protests Of Art History Teachers
“Earlier this year, the board sent out a new history of art syllabus for consultation, which received widespread approval – but now it says that it has decided not to develop it for teaching in 2017. Students taking the current course will be unaffected and will be able to take their AS-level exams in 2017 and A-level exams in 2018, says the board. But this news means that once that course is phased out under government rules, they will be the last to take history of art for A-level.”
What The Literary World Is Saying About Bob Dylan Winning The Nobel
“Though Dylan was long rumored to be a contender for the Nobel, the possibility had attained a kind of mythical, some might say comic, status. And after waiting 23 years for an American to win the literature prize — Toni Morrison was our last one — wouldn’t the Swedes finally recognize DeLillo or Philip Roth or Joyce Carol Oates? You know, people who actually write literature? The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.”
A Literature Nobel For Songwriting? Not Quite
Handwringing about “what is literature?” seems inevitable after the announcement that a rock star has taken the global writing community’s biggest award. But no great existential crisis is needed. The Nobel Committee could have decided that with this prize it wanted to expand the definition of “literature” to include recorded music, a hugely influential and relatively young art form that doesn’t have an award of Nobel-like prestige dedicated to it. But it seems to have declined to do so.
The Sentimentality Trap
“Sentimentality offers us the dubious chance to feel while bypassing the messiness of any real human engagement: not too much feeling but too thin an experience.”
Funding Turns Towards Creative Placemaking Experiments
“High-profile funders, be it the NEA, Kresge, Surdna, Knight, and ArtPlace America—just to name a few—agree that, much like the cultivation of wheat, creative placemaking is an art and a science. Trial and error is to be expected. And the larger the body of literature gets around getting creative placemaking right, the better off we’ll all be.”
Ah, Those Merry Days Of Dadaism
Alfred Brendel (yes, the pianist): “Has there ever been a major avant-garde movement that was so closely tied to laughter and the grotesque? Laughter was the Dadaists’ favorite instrument … Traditionalists see Dadaists as silly people. To a degree, they are right. Silliness was liberating from the constraints of reason. Silliness has the potential to be funny, to provoke laughter, and make people realize that laughter is liberating.”