“When the technology of the home was more like a tool to augment human muscle power – a place for the washing machine, the fridge, the boiler – the home was as a private, bounded space. Now technology is breaking down those boundaries. When parents worry about where their children are going (metaphorically) and to whom they’re talking on social media, they’re acknowledging that people can be at home, in their bedrooms, and yet somewhere else simultaneously. Young people seem to be most at home when they are on – or perhaps ‘in’ – their phones, flicking between apps, surfing their social networks.”
Tag: 11.30.16
What Lessons Should Artists Learn From The Trump Election?
“History and our own recent experience suggest that some soul-searching assessment of the limits of our own gestures, and some clear-eyed analysis of what rhetoric is effective and what is not, is going to be very, very important in the years to come. It will not be enough to languish in mythological beliefs about art’s value as a humanistic salve, or even to fly the flag for “political art” as a genre. We have to debate strategy. Otherwise, we will delude ourselves with endless anti-Trump symbolic theater, applauding our own virtues and confirming our own righteousness within our prescribed sphere, but not advancing one step in the battle of ideas.”
Another Big City Newspaper Decimates Its Arts Coverage
It’s the Edmonton Journal: “Theatre writer Liz Nicholls and music writer Sandra Sperounes and have both taken buyouts and will leave the paper on Dec. 2. The owners PostMedia announced in October it was going to cut staff across the board by 20%, voluntary buyouts first, layoffs if there aren’t enough volunteers.”
I Am On The Professor Watchlist (Which Is Now A Thing)
“Honestly, being a black man, I had thought that I had been marked enough,” writes George Yancy, a philosophy professor at Emory who is one of a couple hundred individuals that “advance leftist propaganda in the classroom,” according to a website launched by conservative youth group Turning Point USA.
Sexual Assault Alleged In Lawsuit Against Royal Winnipeg Ballet
“The 35-year-old [plaintiff] accuses former dance instructor and photographer Bruce Monk of sexual assault, child exploitation and human trafficking, among other offences.” Monk allegedly pressured the young woman to pose for nude photos when she was 16.
Off-Broadway’s New Latino Theater Project In Action
In May, Jacob Padrón launched The Sol Project to help develop Latino/a theater artists and get their work produced at major Off-Broadway and regional companies. Laura Collins-Hughes looks at how, now that it’s up and running (the first of Sol’s 12 plays is already in previews), the Project works.
Choreographer Nancy Meehan Dead At 85
“[Her] evocative, plotless works on nature themes found a special place amid opposing trends in experimental dance after the 1960s … Unlike [other modern dance choreographers [of the time], who initially rejected dance technique, Ms. Meehan insisted that highly trained dancers execute her own nonballetic idiom with refined precision.”
Van Gogh Museum In Amsterdam Doubles Down On Rejection Of That Sketchbook
A statement this week from this museum (which declared the sketches to be clumsy copies back in 2008) criticizes the experts who are caliming that the sketchbook is real van Gogh for an “excessively easygoing attitude … towards questions of authenticity.” (They’re not the only ones who think so.)
Robert Lepage Explains The 28,000 LEDs He’s Using In The Met’s ‘L’Amour De Loin’ (And He Fesses Up About ‘The Machine’)
The director says that Kaija Saariaho’s opera is very much about water, “but when you take it literally and say, ‘I’ll put water onstage,’ water … will do what it wants, and you don’t have any control over it.” (LEDs – we hope – will do what they’re told.) (includes video)
Guggenheim Helsinki Plan Killed By City Council For Second Time (At Least)
Many ordinary Helsinkians have been ambivalent at best about this project (especially the part that involves spending public money), and at this point it has been rejected, restarted, put out to competition and designed, rejected by the full city council, rejiggered and re-approved, and now rejected again. Is this the end of it, or is this a Rasputin project?