Sunday, November 10, 2013

Worth a Look

Here are a few posts from last week's Greenpage that might be worth your time...

Can Art Teach Patience?

Picture This | Big Think: Have you ever noticed how long people look at a painting in a museum or gallery? Surveys have clocked view times anywhere between 10 and 17 seconds. The Louvre estimated that visitors studied the Mona Lisa, the most famous painting in the world, for an astoundingly low average of 15 seconds. Our increasingly online, instantaneous existence accounts for those numbers, obviously. Can we ever again find the patience to look at art as it was meant to be seen?

All the News That Fits the Print: The Failure of Arts Journalism at a Time of Cultural Need

by ICSOM Chairman Bruce Ridge: October 1 was a difficult day for the musicians of the Minnesota Orchestra, a day that marked the one-year point of the managerial imposed lockout that has silenced an orchestra once called “the best in the world.” That morning, their beloved Music Director, Osmo Vanska, delivered his resignation, precisely as he said he would if the lockout did not end. The relationship between Vanska and these musicians had begun to reach the status of legend; a unique pairing of leader and orchestra that had the potential to approach Szell and Cleveland, Ormandy and Philadelphia. So, on this dark morning the Locked Out Musicians of the Minnesota Orchestra did the only thing they knew how, and the only thing their years of dedicated study and training would allow them to do—they went out and served their community.




Is This the Opera of the Future?

Wired Science: At 10:34 PM on a recent evening, passengers at Los Angeles’ Union Station scurried down well-worn linoleum hallways toward departing trains, running to catch the evocatively-named Coast Starlight (Seattle), Pacific Surfliner (San Luis Obispo), or Sunset Limited (New Orleans). Among the crowds was a man carrying a backpack, sauntering between the rows of chairs and singing to himself. The scene was far from unusual given the station’s diverse and colorful clientele, but there was something different about this singer – people were actually paying attention. An entourage of spectators, all wearing matching black headphones, traced the man’s path, hanging on every word.


Show Me The Money

American Theatre – November 2013: It's all there in the photo.

The family’s in black, and the funeral dinner has gone bonkers: Two women are covering their faces, two are being held gingerly for paltry comfort by men. Another woman stands upstage, solitary and indignant, appalled at whatever has just been said.


Monoculture, and Pleasures of The Jungle Book

HowlRound: The sun never sets on the Disney empire. We are told in a program note for Disney Theatrical Productions (DTP),
With 15 productions currently produced or licensed, a Disney musical is being performed professionally somewhere on the planet virtually every hour of the day. Worldwide, its eight Broadway titles have been seen by over 124 million theatergoers and have, cumulatively, run a staggering 195 years.
It is both puzzling and laughable that Disney claims a history of nearly two centuries when its first experiment, Beauty and the Beast (the first experiment) opened on Broadway only in 1994.




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