“As she likes to say herself, there are three Marina Abramovićs: Warrior Marina (who can endure any pain and scream louder than anybody else), Spiritual Marina (who can endure any amount of stillness and remain silent longer than anybody else) and Bullshit Marina (who adores celebrity and likes to talk about fickle men and why she sometimes feels fat and ugly).”
Tag: 10.22.16
Nostalgia For Cursive – It Conveyed So Much
“The sight of my father’s or mother’s script on a small white envelope was what I anticipated right until mail call, after lunch, and what kept me going for the long afternoon hours afterward. I liked letters on which their handwriting was rushed and slightly illegible, because if I had trouble deciphering the handwriting the letter lasted longer. When my grandmother wrote, I had difficulty deciphering her elegant, Palmer Method hand, but I enjoyed the antique nature of the challenge. It felt as if I were playing tennis with a wooden racquet.”
Texas Couple Gives $380M Art Collection To Musée d’Orsay In Paris
Marlene and Spencer Hays’s collection of roughly 600 works from late-19th- and early-20th-century France includes works by, among others, Matisse, Modigliani, Bonnard, and Degas.
Diversity Might Be Good For Canada. But Will It Translate To The Theatre Box Office?
In a much-shared speech last year, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said: “We know that Canada has succeeded – culturally, politically, economically – because of our diversity, not in spite of it.” But it’s still not known whether greater diversity and inclusion are good for the bottom line in the arts.
How The UK’s Video Game Industry Demonstrated Its Impact To Policy-Makers
“For many, feeling forced to demonstrate evidence of the impact of something as personal as art can be more than unsettling. Concerns that any attempt to measure impacts may not sufficiently capture the work’s full effects is understandable. But with art there is always an impact.”
Turns Out Our Brains Are Wired To Light Up When We See Something Cute
“Cute judgments might be fundamental to human perception. Examining magnetic brain activity in subjects presented with infant and adult faces, Kringelbach and his colleagues at Oxford have found that the brain starts recognising faces as cute or infantile in less than a seventh of a second after the face is presented to subjects. His group has concluded that cuteness is a key that unlocks the brain’s fast attentional resources before also influencing slower brain networks responsible for compassion and empathy.”
Canada Will Be 150 Years Old Next Year And There Will Be Big Celebrations. But What Culture Are We Celebrating?
“What effect will all this well-meaning cultural, environmental and athletic activity produce? As the optimistic descriptions washed over me, I had to remind myself that public celebrations of a national birthday can indeed be transformative: just look at centennial year. To author and historian Pierre Berton, it may have been “the last good year,” as he would subtitle his history of 1967 published in 1997, but to those of us who were very young in the Summer of Love, the centennial celebrations shone a warm light into our childhoods that we have carried with us through life.”
Hillary Hahn’s Search For Creativity Outside The Box Of Violin-Playing
“Working with composers, I was realizing that there was a whole part of the musical creative process that I didn’t have firsthand experience with. So I started kind of entering that realm, from different directions, just to understand a little bit more of how a composer gets to the final point of the piece that they write.”
The Man Who Convinced Ballet Shoe Companies To (Finally) Make ‘Nude’ Ballet Shoes In All Skin Tones
“Underwood’s pre-show ritual used to include a laborious 45 minutes spent caking his ‘nude’ ballet pumps with dark makeup. Once, in Italy, he failed to find the right makeup and struggled to cover his shoes for a performance. ‘I posted an Instagram to some companies, suggesting there should be different coloured shoes. A Russian ballet company replied, saying, ‘You’re black. You should wear black shoes.’ But one major manufacturer, Bloch, responded by creating a line in darker tones.”
So AT&T Just Bought HBO, CNN, And Possibly Your Cable Company
Oh: “AT&T has reached a deal to buy Time Warner Inc. for $85.4 billion — a blockbuster marriage that would transform the telephone company into the nation’s largest entertainment company and a major force in Hollywood.”