“One thing I say in my sometime talk with regular folks who say they hate some art is that that’s good, it’s an authentic response. But maybe linger a little. Have another response. You might hate it even more, but you’ll have learned something about yourself. Resisting a new experience is really a sign of physiological health: we are whole from moment to moment and then we encounter something contradictory, and the proper first instinct is to feel threatened and to fight it.”
Tag: 07.13.15
Never Forget: The Biggest Subsidisers Of The Arts Are Those Who Work In The Arts
Lyn Gardner: “Very little work would ever make it to the stage if it was not for people giving their labour away for free, or being paid very poorly for what they do. … Just because you are doing a job you love, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be properly paid for it.”
They’ve Found The Literary Journal Dickens Edited, With His Own Handwritten Notes
“In a lucky coincidence that would not look out of place in a Charles Dickens novel, an antiquarian book dealer has stumbled across what is believed to be Dickens’s own personally annotated copy of a literary periodical he edited.” Literary Hub calls it “the Rosetta Stone of Victorian studies.”
A Bubble That Can’t Burst (And That’s Okay): Peter Schjeldahl On Today’s Art Market
“Today’s art craze is baked into the global economy – not a local cyclone but a climate change caused by belching emissions of excess money that won’t stop while the carbon of present mega-wealth holds out. That is, art prices can crash only as one piddling consequence of a planetary catastrophe. … Sensing that people will one day look back on this era as a freakish episode in cultural history, why not get a head start on viewing it that way? Detach and marvel.”
Forget ‘Go Set A Watchman’ – ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ Is Overrated, If Not Dishonest
Stephen Goodwin: “One reviewer called To Kill a Mockingbird ‘that rare literary phenomenon, a Southern novel with no mildew on its magnolia leaves. Funny, happy, and written with unspectacular precision.’ In my eyes, that was exactly what was wrong with it.”
Playing Rosalind: Two Actors (One Female, One Male) Explain How They Did It
Michelle Terry (currently playing Rosalind at Shakespeare’s Globe): “Going into the forest of Arden, disguised as a man, means she gets to explore every possible version of herself.” Ronald Pickup (played Rosalind in Olivier’s all-male production at the Old Vic in 1967): “I was watching a rehearsal in the Old Vic when John Dexter … leaned over and said: ‘Get a fucking pair of legs. You’re going to play Rosalind in a year’s time.'”
How A Picasso Got To Be Worth $179 Million
Les Femmes d’Alger (Version “O”) was born out of a rivalry between Picasso and Henri Matisse. But competition can evolve into adoration, and when Matisse died on November 3, 1954, Picasso embarked upon an ambitious form of mourning: He would make a series of 15 works in homage to Eugène Delacroix’s 1834 painting Les Femmes d’Alger, a work held in near-religious regard by the late artist.
How A Fundraising Concert Reinvented Pop Music
“By helping create a new superleague of rock stars, an event conceived purely to raise money for African famine victims ended up generating just as much revenue for the labels to whom the artists were signed. From the industry’s perspective, the timing was perfect. Compact disc players were becoming affordable and the format gave baby boomers the perfect excuse to forego new music in order to re-purchase albums by many of the artists who performed that day.”
Why Authors Should Never Respond To Bad Reviews (It Almost Always Goes Wrong)
“It’s never a good idea to respond to bad reviews, and one tends to hold in high regard those authors — it always seems to be the already canonized ones, doesn’t it? — who meet bad reviews with such poise that you’re tempted to conclude that they didn’t even read them (but you know better).”
What Does It Mean To ‘Sound Gay’?
“I suspect many queer people will identify with being bullied not only for what they say, but how they say it. … Even though sexuality itself is interior, one’s behavior and mannerisms are used to infer with whom they like to go to bed.”