New York-based artist Cai Guo-Qiang, known for his gunpowder drawings and explosion events, is one of five recipients, along with composer Philip Glass, who have received the Praemium Imperiale, a global arts prize worth $192,600, awarded each year by the Japan Art Association, according to Bloomberg. Read More
“The Art of Video Games” at the Smithsonian, which features 80 video games from the last few decades, isn’t so much an argument for video games as art form as it is “a sanitized, uncontroversial and rigorously unprovocative introduction to the basic concepts of video games.” [NYT]
A bust of Michelangelo purchased at a New York auction for $2,000, is now in TEFAF Maastricht, and worth €250,000 ($327,000). [The Art Newspaper] Read More
Music in Twelve Parts is, along with the opera Einstein on the Beach, the most famous of Philip Glass’s compositions, but he began it with modest intentions. In 1971, he composed Part I, which was originally meant as its own stand-alone work. Roughly 20 minutes’ worth of layered ostinati comprising 12 polyphonic lines, it is one of the most expressive—and surprisingly slow—pieces of music in Mr. Glass’s repertoire.
“I played it for a friend of mine,” he recalled in the liner notes to his 1993 Nonesuch recording of Music in Twelve Parts, “and, when it was through, she said, ‘That’s very beautiful; what are the other eleven parts going to be like?’” He liked the misunderstanding and took it as a challenge. Read More
Rebecca Robertson, president of the Park Avenue Armory, was sitting in one of that massive building’s newly renovated rooms, which used to be the locker room of the Seventh Regiment’s Company E, when a booming bass reverberated from the Armory’s drill hall, sounding a little paradoxical in the room’s gaudy late-Victorian interior. Tommy Hilfiger was having his Fashion Week runway show there. A crew was busy building a catwalk and testing the sound. Ms. Robertson said what she liked about fashion crowds taking over the drill hall was that they were “fantasy people and we’re all about fantasies here.” Read More
The organizers of the Occupy Wall Street protests will hold a General Assembly at Lincoln Center on Thursday to protest the cultural hub’s corporate sponsors, among them David H. Koch, for whom one of its theaters is named. Philip Glass, whose opera Satyagraha about the life of Mahatma Gandhi will be performed at Lincoln Center that evening, will be on hand at the 10:30 p.m. protest to read a statement. Read More
At the last minute yesterday we heard Philip Glass was playing in the atrium at the Museum of Modern Art as part of Carlito Carvalhosa’s exhibition “Sum of Days.” For that show, a large, white, somewhat translucent sheet of fabric hangs from the ceiling, rigged up with a system of microphones that records the day’s noise in the atrium, and then plays it back the following day through speakers. The fabric dangles in a kind of coil and guests walk inside it, following its curve to the center and then back out again. Read More
For all of you Philip Glass fans at there looking to skip out on work this lovely Thursday afternoon (we imagine that’s just about all of you), the composer will be performing at 3 p.m. at the Museum of Modern Art with violinist Tim Fain inside Carlito Carvalhosa’s “Sum of Days” installation in the museum’s atrium. This, according to MoMA’s Twitter feed. Read More
