‘Five Minutes of Jazz’ man dies

José Duarte, an unavoidable figure in the dissemination of jazz, also appeared on television, on RTP2, with programs such as “Outras Músicas”, in the 1990s, and “Jazz a Preto e Branco”, in 2001.

Sakharov Prize 2021: Parliament honours Alexei Navalny

Alexei Navalny’s daughter Daria Navalnaya received the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize on behalf of her imprisoned father at a ceremony on 15 December.

Celebrated Brazilian classical pianist Nelson Freire has died

Freire, who is remembered as one of the greatest pianists of the second half of the 20th century, passed away during the night on Sunday 31 October, in Rio de Janeiro

Journalists Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov win Nobel peace prize

Maria Ressa, the chief executive and cofounder of Rappler, and Dmitry Muratov, the editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, were named as this year’s laureates by Berit Reiss-Andersen, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel committee

Sílvio Teixeira (19/11/1928 - 26/7/2016) by KarlOwn

 

Yayoi Kusama’s Colorful, Plant-Filled Creations Capture the Spirit of Summer

Over her nearly 70-year career, Kusama has refined her unique visual language, taking inspiration from the world around her (her signature polka dots motif was supposedly inspired by a hallucination she experienced while staring at a tablecloth as a child). 

“Paula Rego is the kind of artist who paints a soldier in a leopard-print gimp mask, a little girl shaving her pet dog and the devil’s wife in nipple tassels”

"Months later I received a package in the mail, a lithograph of me, hawkish, offering Jane Eyre to be inspected by Mr. Rochester. Six months later, another package arrived, this time much smaller, and in it was a beautifully wrapped set of Jane Eyre postage stamps made by the British government, with my evil profile. In true Paula fashion, she insisted that the women be made into first class stamps, the men, second. In her revolutionary drawings, painting and graphic work, she has always put women first."

Julião Sarmento (1948 - 2021)

Sarmento studied painting and architecture at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts. He began exhibiting film, video, sound, painting, sculpture, installation and multimedia in the early seventies, but also developed several site-specific projects. He has exhibited his work extensively around the world in solo and group shows. Sarmento represented Portugal at the Venice Biennial in 1997. His work is represented in several museums and private collections, including an artist room showing at London's Tate Modern in 2010.

How the Spiraling Installations in Yayoi Kusama’s New Berlin Retrospective Hold Up a Mirror to Our Anxious and Repetitive Modern Lives

The indexical approach sheds light on the enduring complexities that hide in plain sight in Kusama’s obsessively painted and warping world. Though pleasurable for all the senses, a plunge into Kusama’s work offers little reprieve from the anxieties and shifting realities outside. Each decade of her oeuvre is packed with frantic energy and emotion. Boundaries are crossed, one’s psychological stamina is tested. There is a sort of endlessness to each installation that creates a frenzy of seeing as chaotic and constant as a TikTok feed.

Jorge Peixinho: "Sax-blue"

Daniel Kientzy, saxophones

A guide to Iannis Xenakis's music

A Greek man in his early 20s fights for his homeland as part of the Communist resistance at the end of the second world war. Shrapnel from a blast from a British tank causes a horrendous facial injury that means the permanent loss of sight in one eye. He is sentenced to death after his exile to Paris (a sentence that was later commuted to a prison term, with his conviction finally quashed with the end of the junta in 1974). By the time he returns, he has become one of the leading creative figures of the century: an architect who trained, worked, and often transcended the inspiration of his mentor and boss, Le Corbusier; an intellectual whose physical and mathematical understanding of the way individual particles interact with each other and create a larger mass - atoms, birds, people, and musical notes 

Dissenting Artists Around the Globe Were Jailed and Killed at an Alarming Rate Last Year, According to a New Report

The survey found that governments may be using the pandemic as a pretense to crack down on artists.

Conversations About Art and Performance by Charles Rosen and Catherine Temerson

True howlers and misinformation of course abound in all dictionaries, and the Harvard Dictionary of Music is no exception, but they are to be expected and even welcomed; they complement the more serious parts of a work of reference as the satyr-play sets off the tragedy. I am as delighted as the next reader to find Ravel’s Jeux d’eau defined as Water-games, as if it were not the play of fountains but a form of water-polo. To read again that Beethoven introduced the trombone into symphonic music (to say nothing of the triangle and the big drum) should excite more sympathy than censure, and the idea that Schoenberg actually intended his Music for a film sequence as part of the repertoire for silent films, like the pieces labeled “Help, Help,” is too ludicrous to mislead, and too engaging to wish corrected. Charles Rosen, 1970

The Hacker Who Archived Parler Explains How She Did It

donk_enby, who has been researching Parler for months, understood that a litany of important information about America’s most prominent far-right extremist groups was at risk of being permanently hidden from the public eye. In a monumental effort, donk_enby and a few other fellow hackers and researchers managed to capture and archive nearly every post, photo and video on Parler before it was shut down. 

Nadia Boulanger

Boulanger’s family had been associated for two generations with the Paris Conservatory, where her father and first instructor, Ernest Boulanger, was a teacher of voice. She received her formal training there in 1897–1904, studying composition with Gabriel Fauré and organ with Charles-Marie Widor. She later taught composition at the conservatory and privately. She also published a few short works and in 1908 won second place in the Prix de Rome competition with her cantata La Sirène. She ceased composing, rating her works “useless,” after the death in 1918 of her talented sister Lili Boulanger

Barbara Rose, Impassioned Critic Who Reshaped Art History, Has Died at 84

“The only thing anybody knows about me is that I wrote that article with the title I didn’t give it, which was ‘ABC Art,’ and then everybody insisted that I invented Minimal art,” Rose told Artforum in 2016. “Well, that is seriously wrong. I don’t invent art movements. I just notice coincidences, and those coincidences began to make sense to me as a worldview, which the Germans call weltanschauung.”

Agnes Chow: Hong Kong’s 'real Mulan' fighting for democracy

Ms Chow has not been charged yet. For now, she is in custody awaiting sentencing this week on separate charges of unauthorised assembly related to last year's protests, to which she has pleaded guilty. And although she is no stranger to being arrested, she says things have become much more ominous in recent times. She describes how her house was surrounded for an entire day by plainclothes police in August, before they banged on her door many hours later. An infrared camera had also been installed on a nearby hill.

Samuel Paty: a teacher at 'the very heart' of his profession

The father of the family, in his forties, was known for his commitment to his students. "He was very committed to his job," which he "loved very much," says Martial. "He really wanted to teach us things. From time to time, we would have debates, we would talk.”

“I am a Third World artist”

says Doris Salcedo, “from that perspective—from the perspective of the victim, from the perspective of the defeated people—it’s where I’m looking at the world.”

Alondra de la Parra launches The Impossible Orchestra

Keen to play her part in supporting the women and children suffering abuse and hardship in her native Mexico – a situation greatly worsened during the pandemic – the conductor Alondra de la Parra has created The Impossible Orchestra.