Man Attacks Art At The Denver Art Museum
“Artworks were compromised,” museum spokesperson Shadia Lemus told Westword. “The individual was arrested at the museum and taken into police custody.” Whether the destruction of the works was some sort of artistic statement or just “a teenager on drugs,” as one museum visitor suggested, has not been determined. – Westword
Protesters Rally At The Whitney Museum Over Board Member
The protest, organized by a group called Decolonize This Place, was to demand the resignation of the museum’s vice chairman, Warren B. Kanders, 12 days after it was revealed by the website Hyperallergic that he is also the owner, chairman, and CEO of the company Safariland, which manufactures law enforcement gear—including the tear gas reportedly being used on migrants at the southern border. – The Daily Beast
City Versus Country: How Much Of The World Is Urban?
The current level of global urbanization is high: It estimates the world to be 84 percent urban already. The EC research team, led by Lewis Dijkstra, used satellite images to assess the share of the world’s population that is urban. While traditional estimates from the United Nations and elsewhere find Asia to be 50 percent urban, the EC team’s analysis of satellite images finds it to be 90 percent; while the UN estimates Africa’s urban population at 40 percent, the EC research team finds it to be 80 percent. – CityLab
Can You Be A Successful Artist Without Being On Instagram?
If an artist is supposed to propose new ways of seeing and creating, it’s worrying when social media platforms feel like they’re turning us all into sycophantic clones. – New York Magazine
Movie Special Effects Are So Astonishing We’re Bored. So What’s Next?
How have we gotten to the point where we somehow feel like we’ve seen it all before, even as movies desperately keep trying to show us things that we’ve never seen before? – New York Magazine
Does Becoming A More Expert Reader Increase Pleasure Of Reading?
Does one kind of literature afford a more refined pleasure than another kind? Can we compare the pleasure induced by Virginia Woolf with, say, that induced by Agatha Christie? Is “Casey at the Bat” potentially less (more) enjoyable than Keats’s “Ode to Autumn”? Is the pleasure of reading Henry James similar to that of reading George Eliot? At what point does a story’s eloquence or lack of it begin to affect people in the same way? – American Scholar
Making Art: Bacchanal Or Fierce Discipline?
The process of giving artistic birth is said to court a kind of violence that the maker must reckon with. Recent books have wondered about the tension between varieties of addiction and creativity, often by writers who themselves had been alcoholics, booze being a way to blunt or redirect the violence of making. – The New York Times
A Trillion Photos – How You Gonna Organize Your Personal History?
Kodak once touted 2000 as a landmark year, when the number of photos taken worldwide first eclipsed 80 billion. Fast forward to 2017, when just about everyone has a cellphone camera in their back pocket, and that figure jumped to a staggering 1.2 trillion digital photos. – The Atlantic
Can A Rapper Own A Dance Move Built Into A Video Game?
This case touches on more than potential damages or royalties for 2 Milly. It goes to how our brains process meaning. What is the smallest bit of information that tags a person? What fragment of our motor vocabulary — a walk, a hair flip — equals identity? What sliver of movement, what gesture of the hand, or even, what gesture plus time and circumstance? – Washington Post
Why Our Meritocracy Has Failed Us
“First, meritocracy segregates talent rather than dispersing it. By plucking the highest achievers from all over the country and encouraging them to cluster together in the same few cities, it robs localities of their potential leaders — so that instead of an Eastern establishment negotiating with overlapping groups of regional elites (or with working-class or ethnic leaders), you have a mass upper class segregated from demoralized peripheries.” – The New York Times
French Cultural Venues Close As Protest Riots Grow
The Arc de Triomphe on the Champs-Elysées was graffitied by rioters; TV footage showed its interior ransacked and a smashed statue of Marianne, symbol of the French republic. French President Emmanuel Macron visited the Arc de Triomphe on Sunday, after returning from a trip to Argentina the day before, in order to inspect the damage. – The Art Newspaper
The Nutcracker Industry: By The Numbers
Dance/USA’s most recent Annual Financial Survey (2017), shows that Nutcracker/holiday revenue now represents an average of 48 percent of the surveyed dance companies’ overall season revenues and a median of 55 percent. As a percentage of total revenues, it represents an average and median of 15 percent. – Dance/USA
What’s It Like To Direct A Historic Black Theatre Company In The 21st Century?
Just after Jamil Jude was announced as the incoming artistic director of the True Colors Theatre Company in Atlanta, he talks with Sarah Bellamy, who is the artistic director of St. Paul’s historic Penumbra Theatre. Jude: “When speaking about the work or having the work evaluated, do you feel like you need people in certain cultural contexts in order to better understand it? I feel like whenever I’m talking about True Colors, there’s an immediate lane some people want to put the work into.” – HowlRound
Bestselling British Author Says He Wants To ‘Safeguard’ Libraries
Even as hundreds of libraries have closed and thousands of professional library staff been laid off, there are still libraries in Britain left to safeguard. And comedian turned bestselling children’s author David Walliams wants to save them. – The Guardian (UK)
Inside The Obsessive, Weird Fandom Of A Murder Podcast
The podcast “My Favorite Murder” started two years ago, and “unleashed the Murderino fandom community onto the internet. Facebook is the space where the murder-minded come out to play; take any hobby, profession or pop culture touchstone and add ‘erino’ to find the niche, murder-minded community you never knew you needed. There are Teacherinos and Bakerinos, Weight Watcherinos and Brooklyn 99erinos. I typed ‘Pooperino’ into my Facebook search bar just to see if it would yield a result. It did.” – HuffPost
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If The World Is On Fire, Is It OK To Talk About Books?
Rebecca Makkai, author of The Great Believers, has some questions – and some answers. “No one I know is unaware that this is a particularly weird time to make art, rather than to spend every moment calling your senators. But art has always had to exist alongside history.” – Electric Literature
Uh, CNBC? It’s 2018 And Maybe Your Game Show Model Posse Needs To Go
Sooooo, CNBC brought back the game show Deal or No Deal?, and along with it, “26 female models in matching high heels and short, skintight dresses.” Game shows might just need a bit of a rethink. – The New York Times
Is A Culture’s Music A Human Right?
When refugees flee, or when groups migrate en masse, they (at least try to) take their music with them. But the modern world isn’t kind to public performances of music. Some musicians say that “music, song and dance are vital areas of empowerment, they are part of the foundation of personhood, and should be included among internationally recognised human rights.” – Le Monde
Making Art, And Aesthetically Pleasing Satellites, Out Of Government Surveillance
MacArthur Fellow Trevor Paglen’s work shows the gaps “between what we can see and what is actively being hidden from us. Often by governments or military forces. And that edge is where we as citizens can try to investigate what governments want to hide from us.” – NPR
When Israel’s Holocaust Museum Plays Host To Autocrats
Hungary’s right-wing nationalist prime minister and the president of the Philippines, who compared himself to Hitler and meant it as a compliment to both Hitler and himself, and other right-wing autocratic leaders have visited Yad Vashem in the past six months. Some staff members are highly distressed, but none of them is allowed to speak publicly about the issue. – The New York Times
It Wasn’t Easy For Barry Jenkins To Bring James Baldwin To The Big Screen
The director of Best Picture-winner Moonlight has loved Baldwin’s work for decades – and his new movie, If Beale Street Could Talk, is the first Hollywood big-screen production of Baldwin’s fiction. How did he do it? Persistence and delicacy (and winning an Oscar or two). – The Atlantic
What In The Heck Is NPR Doing To Its Freelancers And Temps?
The story at Washington, DC, headquarters is not super great. “Temps do almost every important job in NPR’s newsroom: they pitch ideas, assign stories, edit them, report and produce them. Temps not only book the guests heard in interviews, they often write the questions the hosts ask the guests.” – The Washington Post
Activists Protest At Whitney, Demanding The Exit of Board Member Who Owns A Tear Gas Manufacturer
Board Vice Chair Warren B. Kanders is the owner of the tear gas manufacturer whose products were fired at the asylum seekers on the U.S./Mexico border. The protesters, who filled the lobby, brought banners, drums, and a cowbell, and burned sage, were “in solidarity with but separate from the nearly 100 Whitney staff members who signed a letter expressing their dismay at Kanders’s presence on the board and requesting a new policy around trustee participation in exhibitions.” – Hyperallergic
Competitive Dance Is Thriving In Colleges, Even At MIT
The co-captain is a senior majoring in electrical engineering and computer science, and he isn’t kidding when he says, “Although we are all MIT students, dance is an outlet for us where we can be carefree and have fun.” – MIT News
The Belfast Photographer Who Tries To Find New Ways Of Seeing Women
Hannah Starkey didn’t start out with a feminist agenda, but she did go to art school when photography, especially portraiture, was dominated by men. “Though her photographs appear at first glance to be traditional observational documentary, they are deftly choreographed. Often she reimagines what she has observed on the street or in cafes, clubs and bars, using women she has hired to meticulously create stilled moments of female reverie, togetherness or fleeting interaction.” – The Observer (UK)