Music
Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival takes place this week in Indio, Calif. This year marks the 15th year of the festival. The cheapest tickets this year were $375. Performers included CHVRCHES, Broken Bells, Ellie Goulding, the 1975, Neutral Milk Hotel, Bastille and Duck Sauce. The festival also featured large scale art installations by artists including Robert Bose, the Do LaB, Festo, Charles Gadeken, Keith Greco and Teale Hatheway.
Film
The Tribeca Film Festival begins on April 16 in New York City. The films were chosen from over 5,000 submissions and originate all over the world. Every film is a North American, international or world premiere. This year, the festival brought back their 2013 Six Second Film (#6secfilms) because the initiative was so successful and well received the year before. This year also featured a crowd-sourced “Tribeca Challenge” to make innovative, interactive music films for artists like Aloe Blacc or Ellie Goulding. The challenge came from Tribeca’s desire to “reimagine storytelling for the digital age.”
“The Anthem,” a science fiction musical inspired by Ayn Rand’s novella “Anthem,” will make its world premiere this May. The premiere will be off-Broadway at Culture Project’s Lynn Redgrave Theatre. Performances will begin May 20, and the show’s official opening is set for May 29. The show is set in a futuristic society where social media has run rampant and individuality has become illegal. The main character’s name is Prometheus, and finds eventually finds solace in this dystopian world by reading a copy of Rand’s “Anthem.”
Performance Art
Since April, Abraham Poincheval, a French performance artist, has been living inside a dead bear. Poincheval’s stint in the taxidermied bear is meant to be performance art and is part of an interactive exhibition at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature. He has been surviving on sparse amounts of food and water. The space inside the bear is equipped with light, a cushion, a kettle and a toilet. The project is intended to test Poincheval’s physical limits and draw out his animal instincts. Further, the project is meant to evoke an “inside out” version of a bear during hibernation.
Art
An auction house in Paris canceled its plans to sell a swastika-covered box that, at one time, belonged to Adolf Hitler. The auction house had also intended to sell dozens of other objects previously owned by Nazis that had been collected as war spoils from World War II. The auction house, Vermot de Pas, canceled its April 26 sale of around 40 Nazi-related items, citing “political pressure.” The sale was originally going to include Hermann Goering’s passports, pictures of Hitler and other items that had been seized from Hitler’s home in Bavaria. Laudine de Pas, co-manager of the auction house, said that the sale was canceled after the house received “insulting” calls. France has an official ban on the public display of objects related to Nazi ideology.
Street Art
Banksy, the renowned street artist, has reappeared for the first time since October. His last project was a month-long residency in New York City with a new project every day, but his newest pieces have appeared in England. The new works feature scenes of invasive surveillance and young lovers engrossed in the world of technology. The first work, which depicts government officials holding retro recording devices outside a phone booth, appeared in Cheltenham, England, near the Government Communications Headquarters.
