“Jane Austen wrote romantic comedies about middle-class girls looking for a good husband among the landed gentry. … But Austen was also a brilliant moral philosopher who analysed and taught a virtue ethics for middle-class life that is surprisingly contemporary.”
Tag: 02.21.12
Battle Won In Fort Worth Over Including Gun In Public Sculpture
“The statue Vaquero de Fort Worth is finally coming to the north side, and it will be packing heat. Work on the long-awaited 10-foot bronze sculpture … stopped abruptly last year when it was learned that its two Dallas sculptors added a bullet belt and holstered pistol to the design. Now the statue will be installed exactly as the artists intended with a Remington .44-caliber revolver intact.”
Art Meets Agriculture In Rural California
“Yolo County’s ‘Art & Ag Project’ … has artists interacting with farmers at their farms and creating artwork. [The National Endowment for the Arts program] ArtPlace has given YoloArts $63,000 this year, as part of the first year of the project in which $11.5 million was doled out to 34 locally initiated projects.”
Marina Abramovic Will Teach People How To Watch Performance Art
“How do you watch long performance art? There are many things they have to understand about concentration and contemplation. How do you see something when nothing is happening? It’s really difficult. I will make work and exercises for the public, and I call it the Abramovic method. You hear of Stanislavski method for theatre? This is the time for Abramovic method.”
African American Museum Breaks Ground In DC
“An ordinary sales slip consigning a young woman to slavery is among the chilling items that will be displayed at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.”
Rethinking The Suburb
“Today’s suburb has little to do with the outwardly tidy, seething, monochrome world of Updike or Revolutionary Road. It’s got its own new set of dysfunctions: boarded windows and weedy lawns, acres of sparsely used parking lots flanking clogged roads, immigrant workers jamming by the dozen into houses conceived for the Cleavers, household food budgets eaten up at the gas pump. Then there are all the old urban ills of poverty, violence, drugs, and racial friction, which have migrated to places that were designed for escaping them.”
The Case For A New York City Opera
We remember the “old, scrappy, ambitious days of City Opera, when there was nowhere else in New York to hear standard-repertory operas with young American singers at low prices. Now, American singers work in houses all over the U.S. and Europe, and you can hear a better cast at a Met HD transmission for $25. As for staging new and unusual work, if it’s “Prima Donna,” then why bother? City Opera will have to come up with a more compelling artistic profile if it is going to survive.”
Mike Daisey Makes His Apple Monologue Free
“Mike Daisey has made his critically acclaimed monologue “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” available free of charge under an open license. The move means that anyone who wants to perform or adapt the play for performance can do so without paying royalties.”
Osvaldo Golijov Accused Of Plagiarism In Second Work
Last week critic Tom Manoff said that the composer’s Sidereus incorporated large chunks of music from Michael Ward-Bergeman’s score Barbeich; Ward-Bergeman says the borrowings were made with his cooperation. Now a Brazilian journalist says Golijov used, without attribution, a Brazilian pop sing for the second movement of his string quartet Kohelet.
L’Affaire Golijov: Is It Plagiarism When The Plagiarizee Says It’s Okay?
Anne Midgette: “That people are getting outraged about this simply means that they are unfamiliar with Golijov’s modus operandi. Golijov works this way with other composers all the time, folding their work into his pieces with their approval.”