The Academy just looooves movies about Hollywood. (Exhibit A: The Artist) (What, you don’t remember The Artist?)
Tag: 01.04.17
Motion Capture, The High-Tech Cinema Process, Comes To Live Theatre – To Shakespeare, No Less
For a new staging of The Tempest starring Simon Russell Beale at Stratford-upon-Avon, the Royal Shakespeare Company is using the same techniques and equipment, including a costume filled with digital sensors, for the character of Ariel that Hollywood has used for Gollum and King Kong.
One Of The Last Of The Shakers Has Died – Only Two Remain
Sister Frances Carr, a resident of the sole remaining Shaker community, at Sabbathday Lake in Maine, passed on Monday at age 89. “Carr apparently didn’t like when people called her, 60-year-old [Brother Arnold] Hadd and 78-year-old Sister June Carpenter the ‘last’ Shakers – she was convinced others would eventually convert to the religious sect, something Hadd still hopes for.”
A Virtual-Reality Paintbrush That Lets You Make Art On Empty Space (Google Bought It Up, Of Course)
“[Drew Skillman and Patrick Hackett] were trying to build a 3-D chess application one night a couple of years ago when they discovered it had an unexpected side effect: As you moved the chess pieces around in virtual space, they left trails of light behind.”
Barnes Foundation Does Its First-Ever Sound Installation
“In Unbounded Histories, which can be streamed on any web-enabled phone as you enter the collection, [Andrea] Hornick creates soundscapes and recites poems keyed to individual artworks, all to encourage viewers and listeners to reconsider each work through her series of provocations.”
What Happened To Berkeley Symphony’s Music Director?
Joana Carneiro has just withdrawn from her third straight program there in four months – and for the previous two, no reason was given. Now we know why – and, fortunately, it’s good news.
Conductor Georges Prêtre Dead At 92
“[He] led many of the world’s leading orchestras during a remarkable 70-year career that lasted through October when, visibly frail, he gave an emotional farewell concert with the Vienna Symphony, of which he was honorary conductor. At the end of the concert, he blew kisses to the musicians.”
Writers Guild Screenplay Nominations (All Three Of Them) Are Out
“The Writers Guild of America hands out only three movie awards – a paltry number compared to the guild’s 26 TV categories – but this year’s list of nominees is complete with an interesting split from the Academy.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 01.04.17
12 Plays of Xmas: 8. Ecstasy by Mike Leigh
A friend points out that this hasn’t been the cheeriest of series. Few hugs and no sign at all of puppies. This may say something about me, or my bookshelves. … read more
AJBlog: Performance Monkey Published 2017-01-04
Sure Criticism Tells You Whether to Pay Attention. But Once It Was So Much More…
The death of critic John Berger, who is best known for his four-part BBC series called “Ways of Seeing,” has prompted a number of reflections on what it means to be a critic, what makes a great critic, and whether or not the current age values such criticism. Berger wrote often about being skeptical about perceptions of art and hardened wisdom about what it meant. He suggested a way of looking at art that was fresh and personal and questioned the generic.
Today, criticism is often seen as old-fashioned – why rely on some old fart at a newspaper to tell you what’s what when you can bloody well make up your own mind? We usually have immediate access to the music, films, art and books under discussion, so we can just see for ourselves. This is a reasonable position; why peruse a dozen 150-word album reviews if you’re just looking for something new to listen to? Spotify can do that for you. In a world where culture is merely entertainment, criticism has no function.
It’s tempting to think that criticism has been reduced to a Consumer Reports function that gets straight to the point about whether or not the art in question is worth engaging with or not. But
we have to believe that people – ordinary people, sitting at home at night – are interested in nuanced, complex and even difficult art. Only through that will we find someone like Berger, who might help us learn how to look at it.