“It really was the title that persuaded me to do it. ‘Nixon in China’ struck my ear as a perfect title. It sounded right, it sounded clean, it sounded new, and it sounded like it belonged in the canon.”
Tag: 02.10.11
Australia’s Biggest Arts Festival – Not So Fringe Anymore
The Adelaide Fringe is now so large and mainstream that the term fringe seems faintly ridiculous. With 759 events in 325 venues across the small capital this year, it’s more an arts invasion than anything on the margins. It’s not a small, alternative event any more, it’s the biggest event in Adelaide and the biggest arts event in the country.”
Arts Council England Chair: Budget Cuts Will Fundamentally Change Us
“I do tell you frankly that I am worried about the latest target the government has set us – to slice another 50% from our running cuts over the coming three years. A cut of that size has to mean drastic change. It will seriously affect the scope and nature of the job we can do. It will mean a fundamental rethink.”
The New Innovation – Individuals Rather Than Companies
Pathbreaking research by a group of scholars suggests that the traditional division of labor between innovators and customers is breaking down. “What the team discovered… was that the amount of money individual consumers spent making and improving products was more than twice as large as the amount spent by all British firms combined on product research and development over a three-year period.”
When Things Go Really Wrong In A Performance
“When something goes so wrong – usually a result of human error, but sometimes an act of fate – that the illusion of the specific, self-contained reality that has been created so carefully on stage falls apart before your eyes. And regardless of what the actors on stage are wearing, you feel as if they’ve all been caught in public dressed in nothing but their shabbiest underwear.”
Will Million-Book Giveaway Hurt Writes, Booksellers?
“Three weeks ahead of the inaugural World Book Night book-giving event on 5 March, a row has broken out over whether the event will damage independent booksellers and harm authors.”
Freelance Book Editors – A Good Idea?
Is “professional” editing something like a medical diagnosis? Will there be a consensus among experts about what any given manuscript requires? And in an age of instant books, easy self-publishing and editorless publishers, are we going to start thinking about doing without editors altogether?
Book-Banning Takes To The Internet
“Websites like PABBIS.org and Safelibraries.org have become the vanguard for a recent increase in organized attempts to ban books from public libraries and school curricula.”
Why Egypt Is Fading From American TV News
“Most telling of all, the reporting stars of U.S. TV news have long since fled Cairo. You have to ask why the stars flee and the story fades? Is Egypt suddenly insignificant? Inconsequential? Or is it an inconvenience? Is it the media or is it the audience?”
The Earliest Portrait In History?
An Egyptian family sit proudly for the artist – I nearly wrote, for the camera. But the lifelike portrayal of the Dwarf Seneb and his Family, one of the most captivating things in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, right at the heart of the revolution on Tahrir Square, was carved and painted at least 4,000 years before the invention of photography. It is one of the earliest works of art in history to which it seems fitting to give the title “portrait.”