MOST RECENT AJBLOGS

Silas Farley talks about the unique role of dance in society

- Aaron Dworkin

Material Confusion: Anachronistic Pigments in Botticelli’s “Man of Sorrows” Are Explained as “Restorations”

- CultureGrrl

Sade Lythcott of National Black Theatre and Radical Storytelling

- Josephine Reed

A Documentation by Florian Vetsch The Garden by Paul Bowles

- Jan Herman

Happy 90th to electronic music pioneer Herb Deutsch

- Howard Mandel


 

DANCE

Will Dance Companies Keep Experimenting With Film And Video After They’re Performing Live Again?

- Dance Magazine

Remember Ski Ballet?

- The New York Times

Space Choreography: Redefining Movement For Extremely Low Gravity

- Dance Magazine

Well, The Super Bowl “Volunteer” Halftime Dancers Won’t Be Working For Free This Year …

- Yahoo! (Los Angeles Times)

The Kirov Academy Ballet School Is Closing (Note: This Is Not In Russia)

- The New York Times

The Most Dancerly Skater At The 2022 Winter Olympics

- Dance Magazine

IDEAS

How Fringe Theories Multiply

- Aeon

The End Of Mass Market Products

- Shelly Palmer

Artificial Intelligence Is Being Misused… Now

- MIT Sloan Review

Ideas Worth… Wait, What Did TED Talks Accomplish?

- The Drift

Why Some Of Us Seek Out Painful Experiences

- The Wall Street Journal

That Line Between Work And Play

- 3 Quarks Daily

A Harvard Student Has Created An Entire Musical For A Korean Disney Princess

- MSN (Boston Globe)

When We Compare Schools To Factories, We’re Ignoring History

- Hack Education



 

ISSUES

Australia Arts Groups Feel The Freeze

- ArtsHub

Defining Afrofuturism (Can It Be Done?)

- Playbill

What Happens When You Teach School Kids About Racism

- Slate

Native Hawaiians Are Traveling Europe, Retrieving Their Ancestors’ Bones From Museums

- The New York Times

Polish Government’s Holocaust Revisionism Is Scaring Some Historians

- PRI's The World

Brooklyn Academy Of Music Gets A New Leader

- The New York Times

The Former President Of The Brooklyn Academy Of Music Remembers 36 Years In The Trenches

- The New York Times

Unesco: A Worldwide Cultural Crisis Because Of The Pandemic – 10 Million Culture Jobs Lost

- The Guardian

A New Guaranteed-Income-For-Artists Program In New York State

- Hyperallergic

Along With COVID Disinformation, Turns Out Joe Rogan Was Peddling The N-Word An Awful Lot

- Washington Post

Spotify’s Joe Rogan Problem Is So Much Bigger Than Rogan

- Slate



 

MEDIA

MoviePass Is Back

- The Verge

An Oral History Of One Of The Best, And Most Meta, “Simpsons” Episodes Ever

- The Hollywood Reporter

Immersive Art Experiences Are Taking Over

- The New Yorker

Disney+ Adds Huge Number Of Subscribers, Now Growing Faster Than Netflix

- CNBC

2021 Wasn’t Supposed To Have Been The Year Of The Movie Musical, But …

- Vulture

What This Year’s Oscar Best Picture Nominations Say About The Movie Audience

- Washington Post

How Streaming Platforms Are Transforming Bollywood

- DW

Captive Audience: Why Mazdas In The Pacific Northwest Only Tune This NPR Station

- Seattle Times

Did This Year’s Oscar Nominations Show The Usual Art-Versus-Popularity Divide? It’s Not That Simple Anymore

- MSN (The Washington Post)

Maybe Ridicule Works: The Original Ending Of “Fight Club” Has Been Restored For Streaming In China

- The Hollywood Reporter



 

MUSIC

Finding A Balance In Opera Performance

- The New York Times

The Rwandan Women’s Percussion Group Bringing Hutu And Tutsi Together

- The Christian Science Monitor

Marin Alsop Extends Contract At Ravinia, Where She Will Launch A New Mini-Festival

- WFMT (Chicago)

I Used To Sing Opera (It Didn’t Go Well)

- Granta

Sting Sells His Back Catalogue For An Enormous Sum

- The Guardian

At 90, John Williams Says He Is Giving Up Composing Film Music

- The New York Times

Survey: How Canadian Orchestras Are Approaching Streaming

- Ludwig Van

The Two Pieces By George Crumb That Changed American Contemporary Classical Music

- Yahoo! (Los Angeles Times)

The Real Problem With Spotify (And It’s Not Rogan)

- The Atlantic

Why It’s Important To Listen To Old Recordings

- Nightingale Sonata

Did COVID-19 Change American Opera? It Was Changing Already.

- San Francisco Classical Voice

Thomas Dausgaard Is Out Of Another Job, And BBC Scottish Symphony Has A New Chief Conductor

- The Scotsman

Superstar Concert Ticket Prices Soar, Pricing Out Many

- The Guardian

Spotify’s Real Problem: Unrealistic Ambition

- Los Angeles Times

How Physics Shape Opera, And The Rest Of Reality

- Wired

What Could Possibly Account For The Popularity Of The Mediocre Movie Encanto And Its Soundtrack?

- The Atlantic

The Week When Not Only Spotify But A New NFT ‘Scam’ Infuriated Musicians

- Los Angeles Times



 

PEOPLE

Peter Jackson Tops Highest-Paid Entertainer List

- The Guardian

“What If John Lennon Was A World-Class Intellectual With An Insatiable Curiosity For Third World Literature?”

- The New Yorker

King Tut Was Not A Significant Pharaoh, Yet The Modern World Remains Fascinated By Him

- The New Yorker

A Childhood Friend Of Charlie Chaplin Remembers His “Always Hungry”, “Ragged” Early Years

- The Guardian

Why Joe Rogan Matters

- Post Alley

One Of The Most Recorded Singers In History Has Died Of COVID At Age 92

- The Guardian

Cellist Leslie Parnas, 90

- The Violin Channel

Composer George Crumb, 92

- The New York Times

Jason Epstein’s Influence On American Publishing Was Massive, And Continued For Decades

- The New York Times



 

THEATRE

Harper Lee Estate Loses $2.5 Million Case Over “To Kill A Mockingbird” Stage Adaptations

- The New York Times

New York State Is Dropping Mask Requirements, But Broadway Is Not

- Playbill

Royal Shakespeare Co. To Use TikTok To Market Low-Price Tickets To Young People

- BBC

How “Sleep No More” Has Changed New York Theater — And Itself

- The New York Times

For The First Time, The RSC Casts A Disabled Actor As Richard III

- The Guardian

Tracking Broadway’s Uneven Reopening: Winners And Losers

- Forbes

One Way Singapore’s Theatre Actors Have Kept Busy During The Pandemic

- BBC

What To Do On Broadway When Your Leads And Nearly A Third Of The Rest Of Your Cast Test Positive

- The New York Times



 

VISUAL

A Warning That The Bamiyan Valley Will Collapse Within Ten Years

- The Art Newspaper

Belgian Museum Returns Nazi-Stolen Painting After 80 Years

- The Guardian

The Extravagantly Painted Chapels Of Michoacán

- T — The New York Times Style Magazine

The “Most Important Archaeological Find In The UK” In A Century

- The Guardian

How Three Canadian Museums Are Dealing With Having Mishandled Indigenous History

- The Globe and Mail (Canada)

National Gallery of Canada Establishes New Decolonization Department

- ARTnews

Italy Creates Underwater Sculpture Museum To Thwart Illegal Fishing

- National Geographic

On His First Day On The Job, A Museum Guard Vandalized A Painting With A Ballpoint Pen

- The Guardian

SFMoMA Names A New Director

- San Francisco Chronicle

The Real Story Behind The Famous Bust Of Nefertiti (It’s Not What You Probably Think)

- Aeon

Restitution Of Cultural Artifacts Is Gaining Momentum

- The Art Newspaper

Oh, Great — Even More Damage To What’s Left Of The Bamiyan Buddhas

- Artnet

What Makes The Architecture Of LA’s New Stadium (and Home Of This Week’s Superbowl) So Interesting

- Los Angeles Times

Archaeologists Discovered An 800-Year-Old Imperial Palace Where One Of The Winter Olympic Villages Was Being Built

- Artnet

The Picasso “Guernica” Tapestry Was Taken From The UN Last Year. Now It’s Back.

- Forbes

US Treasury Department Warns Of Money Laundering Through Fine Art

- Toronto Star (AP)

Henry Darger’s Landlords Inherited The Rights To His Art, But Should They Have?

- The New York Times

Artist Damien Hirst Faces His 16th Accusation Of Plagiarism

- The Observer (UK)



 

WORDS

Why Does A C Look Like A C?

- Vice

No Shock That In-Person Library Use Plummeted In Early 2021

- The Guardian (UK)

The Case For Translators As Collaborators

- The New York Times

The Case Against The Contemporary American Essay

- The Drift

Are Small Literary Magazines Going Extinct?

- CNN

Attempted Book Bans Are Soaring In The U.S., Thanks To The “Outrage Ecosystem”

- The Christian Science Monitor

UK Library Use Plummeted Last Year

- The Guardian

Six Big Magazines — Including Entertainment Weekly — To Quit Print Publication

- The New York Times

The Index At The Back Of The Book Deserves More Respect

- The New York Times

The Language Police Are Threatening Education

- The Atlantic

One Of Ukraine’s Strongest Defenses Against Russian Aggression Is The Ukrainian Language

- MSN (The Washington Post)

There’s A Whole Body Of Women’s Novels In Yiddish That Are Finally Reaching English-Speakers

- The New York Times

21st-Century London Is Developing A New Dialect Of English

- The New Yorker

Meet The Teenagers Who Started A Bookclub To Read Banned Books

- The Guardian