Art

Class Struggle, Artists, And Changing The World

Struggle without class analysis results in the many empty institutional statements and surface-level concessions we’ve seen across the United States this past year. Class politics is less concerned with pushing for that first Black or female artistic director as it is in asking why we have to constantly fight so hard to include those people in the first place. – Howlround
Tags: Art, World, United States, Issues, 04.19.21

Behold The World’s Largest Collection Of Magazines

“[James] Hyman’s collection now stands at around 150,000 editions of roughly 5,000 titles. They form the bulk of HYMAG, a dedicated magazine library housed in a former factory in Woolwich, south-east London. It’s an overwhelming sight. … It is not just the words that are important, Mr. Hyman stresses, but what surrounds them: the advertisements, the page layouts, the typography and all the other marginalia that have been lost as text has transitioned to the internet.” – The Economist
Tags: Art, London, World, Words, Woolwich, Hyman, 04.06.21, James -RSB- Hyman, HYMAG

What It’s Like Filming ‘The World’s Greatest Love Scene’ When You And Romeo Can’t Touch

Jessie Buckley is playing Juliet, and Josh O’Connor is playing Romeo, but there’s no audience – and there’s a huge audience. “When news first broke that Buckley and O’Connor would appear together in a contemporary version of Romeo & Juliet, there was huge excitement among theatregoers. The idea was for a short autumn run at the Lyttleton theatre, in a stage production directed by Simon Godwin. When Covid put a stop to audiences, Godwin brought his actors together for the dates they’d been booke...
Tags: Art, Theatre, World, Shakespeare, Audience, Lyttleton, Buckley, Juliet, Godwin, O'Connor, Romeo Juliet, Jessie Buckley, Simon Godwin, Josh O Connor, COVID, 03.20.21

Sydney’s Museum Of Contemporary Art Is The Most Visited In The World

And Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, its director of 22 years, is leaving. “When Macgregor took over in 1999, the MCA was just eight years old and already on the verge of bankruptcy. Fewer than 100,000 people each year were visiting the converted Maritime Services Board art deco pile, which commands an imposing presence overlooking Circular Quay. Today more than 1 million visitors – almost half under the age of 35 – pass through the museum each year.” – The Guardian (UK)
Tags: Art, World, Sydney, Visual, MCA, MacGregor, 03.04.21, Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, Maritime Services Board, Circular Quay Today

The World’s Largest Bach Website Brought To You By A Computer Engineer In Tel Aviv

The Bach Cantatas Website, founded 20 years ago by Aryeh Oron, includes texts from Bach’s sacred works in multiple languages, discographies, history and analysis of each piece, and many other resources. It gets 15,000-20,000 hits a day and is used even by the likes of John Eliot Gardiner and Masaaki Suzuki, two of the world’s leading Bach conductors. – Haaretz (Israel)
Tags: Art, Music, Tel Aviv, World, Bach, Masaaki Suzuki, John Eliot Gardiner, 02.24.21, Bach Cantatas Website, Aryeh Oron

The Latest Dance Craze Sweeping The World

Jerusalema is a song by South African house musician Master KG. Friends in Angola filmed themselves dancing to the hit – the moves have since been recreated the world over. From health workers to nuns to children, everyone is getting involved. – ITV
Tags: Art, World, Dance, Angola, 02.13.21

When Yiddish-Speaking Puppets Roamed The World

Puppetry had never been part of the Yiddish theater tradition, but in 1920s America, they were all the rage. So in 1925-26, a pair of writers created a Purim shpiel (the Jewish equivalent of a Christmas panto) with puppets. It was such a smash success that the two men ended up creating a puppet company that put on Yiddish shows nine times a week year-round in New York City and toured the Eastern Seaboard and Midwest, Cuba, Britain, France, Poland, and, ultimately, the Soviet Union. Yet the who...
Tags: Art, New York City, Theatre, America, World, Soviet Union, Eastern Seaboard, 01.12.21, Midwest Cuba Britain France Poland

The Black Photographers Who Changed The World’s Understanding Of Black Life

The Kamoinge Workshop was “a collective of black photographers who formed in 1963 to document black culture in Harlem, and beyond, from live jazz concerts to portraits of Malcolm X, Miles Davis and Grace Jones, as well as the civil rights movement and anti-war protests.” – The Guardian (UK)
Tags: Art, World, Grace Jones, Harlem, Visual, Kamoinge Workshop, 01.07.21, Understanding Of Black Life, Malcolm X Miles Davis

2020 Is The Year TikTok Started Transforming The World

“Now, at the end of 2020, TikTok is the most downloaded app of the year – and it’s changed an awful lot more than just how we consume media online.” Among other things, the app and the brief little videos on it have altered the way online comedy, activism, meme culture, and collaborative art. – BBC
Tags: Art, Media, World, Audience, 12.16.20

In Isolation, Listening To The World

You want to hear Japanese psychedelia from 1971? Johnny Hallyday and Edith Piaf? The indie music of Mexico? The internet, of course, is there for you (and for all of us). – The New York Times
Tags: Art, Music, Mexico, World, Audience, Edith Piaf, Johnny Hallyday, 10.31.20

The World’s Whitest White Is Here, And It Can Help Fight Climate Change

In the past few years we’ve seen the debuts of the world’s blackest black (several times) and pinkest pink. Now comes a white acrylic paint, developed by engineers at Purdue, that reflects 99.5% of light and stays cooler than the ambient temperature even in the brightest sunshine. Meanwhile, artist Stuart Semple (who created that super-hot pink) has developed his own Whitest White, which (he says) reflects 99.6% of light. – Artnet
Tags: Art, World, Visual, Purdue, Stuart Semple, 10.27.20

Restaurant Culture Upended – Michelin, Beard Cancel Awards

The James Beard Foundation has halted its annual restaurant awards for at least another year and is in the midst of a messy foundation-wide reckoning. The World’s 50 Best has shifted its focus from restaurant ranking to industry recovery. And Michelin, the most storied name in the restaurant-awards game, announced that it has indefinitely delayed the release of its 2021 guides in America. – Grub Street
Tags: Art, World, Michelin, Issues, James Beard Foundation, 10.20.20

How The Fear Of Getting Eaten Shapes The World

Ecologists have long known that predators play a key role in ecosystems, shaping whole communities with the knock-on effects of who eats whom. But a new approach is revealing that it’s not just getting eaten, but also the fear of getting eaten, that shapes everything from individual brains and behaviour to whole ecosystems. – Aeon
Tags: Art, World, Ideas, 10.08.20

Jeremy O. Harris, Katori Hall, And Matthew López On How Broadway Must Change And How Theater Can Change The World

Harris: “I’ve always felt this responsibility that if I was going to be in the theater, I had to do theater the way the Greeks did it. The theater of the Greeks was as much about civic responsibility as it was about anything else. It’s about people witnessing the world, responding to that world, and then maybe doing something to change it. That’s why the only people who could see it were people who could vote.” (video or audio) – Variety
Tags: Art, Theatre, World, HARRIS, Matthew Lopez, 09.29.20, Jeremy O Harris Katori Hall

Bill Arnett, Dead At 81, Brought Unknown Southern Black Artists To The World’s Attention

Among the artists whose works he bought, exhibited, and donated to museums (and to some of whom he paid regular stipends) were Thornton Dial Sr., Lonnie Holley, Bessie Harvey, Mose Tolliver, and the quilters of Gee’s Bend, Alabama — and he would compare their art to that of Rauschenberg, Johns and de Kooning. His efforts did not go without criticism, though, including accusations of white paternalism and enthusiasm to the point of pushiness. – The New York Times
Tags: Art, Alabama, People, World, Thornton, 08.27.20, Bill Arnett Dead, Lonnie Holley Bessie Harvey Mose Tolliver, Rauschenberg Johns

The World’s Nightlife On Hold. (And Yet…)

The problem is that urban nightlife — no matter how risky — isn’t something that just allows itself to be canceled. The need to socialize, relax, mingle, hear music and dance is a powerful force, especially among young people in cities. If regulated venues are shuttered, unregulated ones take their place. “In cities where there are no legal alternatives,” the VibeLab report concludes, “dangerous illegal alternatives are found.” – Bloomberg
Tags: Art, World, Issues, 08.05.20

The World’s New Favorite Refugee Writer Tries To Get Comfortable With Freedom And Fame

Far from his native Kurdish village, escaped from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, now released from the Australian internment camp in Papua New Guinea where he wrote his award-winning No Friend but the Mountains on a cell phone, Behrouz Boochani has received asylum in New Zealand and is settled in safe, pretty, tranquil Christchurch, where most Kiwis seem thrilled to have him. It’s driving him a little nuts. – The New York Times Magazine
Tags: Art, Iran, People, World, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Christchurch, Kiwis, Behrouz Boochani, 08.04.20

Not 20 Years After World War II, Modern Design Reintroduced Tokyo To The World

Jason Farago: “Tokyo 2020, its name unchanged, will now take place in July 2021 if it takes place at all. Yet all around the Japanese capital is the legacy of another Olympics: the 1964 Summer Games, which crowned Tokyo’s 20-year transformation from a firebombed ruin to an ultramodern megalopolis.” – The New York Times
Tags: Art, World, Tokyo, Visual, Jason Farago, 07.30.20

How Instagram Changed How We Looked At The World

“Instagram was one of the first apps to fully exploit our relationship with our phones, compelling us to experience life through a camera for the reward of digital validation.” – New Statesman
Tags: Art, World, Visual, 07.08.20

‘He Was More Than One Of The World’s Great Soundtrack Composers — He Was One Of The World’s Great Composers, Period’: John Zorn On Ennio Morricone

“For me, his work stands with Bach, Mozart, Debussy, Ellington and Stravinsky in achieving that rare fusion of heart and mind. … His meticulous craftsmanship and ear for orchestration, harmony, melody and rhythm resulted in music that was perfectly balanced; as with all master composers, every note was there for a reason. Change one note, one rhythm, one rest, and there is diminishment.” – The New York Times
Tags: Art, Music, World, Ennio Morricone, Stravinsky, John Zorn, 07.08.20, Bach Mozart Debussy Ellington

The Metaphors We Use For Illness Shape Our Sense Of Self (And The World)

Part of what illness does is to unsettle both the sense of ourselves that emerges from our patterned and effortless doings, and our capacity to project this sense outwards, into the social world. In illness, the body as it is processed and experienced by others takes over and wholly penetrates the lived-in body, the body as it feels “from the inside.” – The Point
Tags: Art, World, Ideas, 06.12.20

VIDEO: Watch Josh Gad and Asmeret Ghebremichael Discuss Racism in Theater and the World

The Book of Mormon veterans Josh Gad and AsmeretGhebremichael reunite to chat about the state of the world.'What you're seeing everywhere now is the frustration of a group of people who have been trying to speak up for years and years....' [Author: BWW News Desk]
Tags: Theatre, World, Josh Gad, BWW News Desk

An Introduction to the Sublime, Entrepreneurial Art of Christo & Jeanne-Claude (Courtesy of Alain de Botton’s School of Life)

Of all the work that made Christo and Jeanne-Claude the most famous installation artists of the past fifty years, none still exists. If you wanted to see the Reichstag wrapped in silver fabric, you'd have to have been in Berlin in the summer of 1995. If you wanted to see Central Park threaded with Shinto shrine-style gates, you'd have to have been in New York in the winter of 2005. If you wanted to see an enormous Mesopotamian mastaba made out of 7,506 oil barrels, you'd have to have bee...
Tags: Google, Art, Facebook, New York, London, College, Berlin, World, Paris, Seoul, Central Park, Christo, Facebook Twitter, School of Life, Colin Marshall, Beautiful San Francisco

Missy Mazzoli’s ‘Breaking The Waves’ Premiered In 2016. The World’s Pretty Different Now. Does The Piece Hold Up?

Before the coronavirus hit, the Met was going to perform a new co-production of the opera this spring at BAM. David Patrick Stearns went online to revisit the original Opera Philadelphia production, and here’s why he believes that, despite the terrific craft in the score and libretto (and in Kiera Duffy’s performance as Bess), with the cancellation “the Met and Mazzoli dodged a bullet.” – WQXR (New York City)
Tags: Art, Music, World, Philadelphia, Bess, Missy Mazzoli, Kiera Duffy, David Patrick Stearns, Mazzoli, 05.28.20

This May Be The World’s Biggest, Starriest Online Ballet Class

“[Worldwide Ballet Class] stands out for offering dancers of all levels the opportunity to take open company class alongside professional dancers, six days a week … taught by the likes of Julie Kent, Christopher Stowell, SFB ballet master Felipe Diaz and National Ballet of Canada principal Jurgita Dronina.” All for free, no less. Here’s a Q&A with co-founders Diego Cruz and Rubén Martín Cintas. – Pointe Magazine
Tags: Art, World, Dance, National Ballet of Canada, Diego Cruz, 05.07.20, Julie Kent Christopher Stowell, Felipe Diaz, Jurgita Dronina All

BWW Interview: How Brita Werked Her Way from Regional Theatre to Drag Queen of the World

She may not be America's Next Drag Superstar in title, but the Queen of New York is ready to expand her queendom and take on the world. Already an icon in the NYC drag community before entering the workroom, Brita Filter known to RuPaul's Drag Race viewers as simply Brita, has long-used her theatrical roots and Broadway-ready lipsync style to outshine her competition. [Author: Nicole Rosky]
Tags: New York, Theatre, America, World, Broadway, Brita, Rupaul, Nicole Rosky

When Magazines Had Visions Of Changing (And Improving) The World

In 1895 Ladies’ Home Journal began to offer unfrilly, family-friendly architectural plans in its pages. They were mainly colonial, Craftsman, or modern ranch-style houses, and many still stand today. The Cosmopolitan, as it was then known, advertised the Cosmopolitan University, a custom-designed college degree—for free!—by correspondence course. McClure’s magazine, the juggernaut of investigative journalism—home to Ida Tarbell’s landmark investigation of Standard Oil, among many other muckraki...
Tags: Art, World, Standard Oil, Words, McClure, Lapham, Ida Tarbell, 04.20, Cosmopolitan University

The World’s Great Photographers, Many Stuck Inside, Have Snapped

Stephen Shore, Catherine Opie, Todd Hido and others have turned to Instagram to cure ‘corona claustrophobia’ or show how life has changed. They talk about their quarantine pics.
Tags: Art, Photography, News, Instagram, World, Catherine, Stephen, Shore, Opie, Instagram Inc, Cao Fei (1978-, Coronavirus (2019-nCoV, Stephen Shore Catherine Opie Todd Hido

All The World’s Living Rooms Can Be Stages, With The Right Plays

Ben Brantley: “Remember that plays — even those lofty classics that show up on college reading lists — are meant to be spoken and heard. And saying their lines aloud, no matter how clumsily, helps you hear the music and cadences in them. This is true not only of Shakespeare, but also of linguistically rich latter-day writers like August Wilson, Caryl Churchill, Edward Albee, [and] Suzan-Lori Parks.” – The New York Times
Tags: Art, Theatre, World, Shakespeare, Ben Brantley, Suzan Lori Parks, 03.27.20, Wilson Caryl Churchill Edward Albee

Living Room Concerts: COME FROM AWAY's Sankoff & Hein Sing 'Stop The World'

For today's performance we've got COME FROM AWAY's creators Irene Sankoff and David Hein singing 'Stop The World' [Author: BroadwayWorld TV]
Tags: Theatre, World, Hein, BroadwayWorld TV, Irene Sankoff, David Hein, Sankoff