Today’s Stories
Daniel Libeskind To Redesign Pittsburgh’s Tree Of Life Synagogue, Site Of 2018 Shooting
“Libeskind, who designed the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa, has experience responding to traumatic events through architecture. He also served as masterplan architect at New York’s World Trade Center site as the city looked to rebuild following 9/11.” – Artnet
Book Of Antoine De Saint-Exupéry’s Love Letters Marks End Of 18-Year Legal Battle Between His Heirs
The letters were between the French author of The Little Prince and his wife, a Salvadoran artist of whom his family sternly disapproved. The lengthy lawsuits were between his relatives and her heirs over rights to previous books about the couple’s courtship and marriage. – The Guardian
Did Kim Kardashian Traffic A Looted Antiquity?
According to a newly filed lawsuit, in 2016, U.S. Customs seized a fragment of an ancient Roman statue that it believed had been stolen from Italy and illegally sold. The seller was a Brussels gallery; the buyer, “Kim Kardashian dba Noel Roberts Trust.” – ARTnews
Why Broadway Isn’t Restarting Until September
“With as many as eight shows a week to fill, and the tourists who make up an important part of their customer base yet to return, producers need time to advertise and market. They need to reassemble and rehearse casts who have been out of work for more than a year. And they need to sort out and negotiate safety protocols. But the biggest reason is more gut-based.” – The New York Times
Britain’s NHS Tries Prescribing Song Playlists To Alzheimer’s Patients
“A test among people with dementia found an algorithm that ‘prescribes’ songs based on listeners’ personal backgrounds and tastes resulted in reductions in heart rate of up to 22%, lowering agitation and distress in some cases. … The technology operates as a musical ‘drip’, playing songs to patients and monitoring their heart rates as they listen.” – The Guardian
Austin’s Arts Funding Down By A Staggering 93%
“Money for Austin’s municipal arts funding comes from the Hotel Occupancy Tax of which the arts receive 15% of the city’s allocation. Funding levels are set according to tax revenues from the previous fiscal year.” The pandemic wiped out revenue from that tax, so arts funding for the coming fiscal year is projected to be only $1 million, down from $13 million in FY2019. – Sightlines (Austin)
‘Sesame Street’ Was A Radical Experiment
“It’s easy to forget now, given the show’s 52-year ubiquity, that the original program was a shot in the dark – the first show aimed explicitly at childhood education, a combustible attempt to meld learning fundamentals with jingly bits and skits kids enjoyed to watch. … [It] became the longest-running, and arguably most recognizable children’s program in the country, with international co-productions assisted by the Sesame Workshop in 170 more.” – The Guardian
Technology In The Arts After COVID
Rachel Moore: “Performing arts organizations experienced a steep learning curve that dictated a digital competency most probably never aspired to. Whether this new learning is the catalyst for widespread embrace of a technological revolution remains unclear: Was digital production simply a bridge to mitigate a difficult year? Anchoring the digital strategy of many organizations lies an unexamined assumption that digital work exists only until they “return to normal” and are back to the business of traditional live performance.” – C-Suite Quarterly
How Data Science Is Analyzing The Arts
“Computer scientists are writing algorithms to identify the emotional arcs of novels. Sociologists are building statistical models to analyze why certain works of visual art resonate more than others. Electrical engineers have scraped tens of thousands of book reviews from the online website Goodreads.com to parse why some types of stories drive readers to talk to each other, and what they talk about. Evolutionary biologists and cognitive scientists have adapted models from information retrieval to study tens of thousands of popular Western songs in order to understand cultural change and the evolution of cultural taste.” – Cultural Analytics
“Multitasking” Is A Lie
The American Psychological Association has reported that even brief mental blocks created by shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40% in productivity. Why is the cost of multitasking so high? Because our brains were never meant to multitask in the first place. – Fast Company
The Moral Imperative For Releasing The Patents On Vaccines
“The pharmaceutical industry and the governments of several vaccine-producing countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as the European Commission, have been resisting the IP waiver, while 150 public leaders and experts have sent an open letter to US President Joe Biden in support of it. There is no longer any question about who is right. Given the surge of COVID-19 in several regions, most recently in India, the continuing emergence of new and deadly variants of the virus, and the inability of the current vaccine producers to keep pace with global needs, an IP waiver or its equivalent has become a practical urgent need as well as a moral imperative.” – Project Syndicate
Celebrate Napoleon? Well, It Is His 200th Birthday…
This isn’t the first time that commemorating Napoleon or the events of his reign has posed a problem. In 2005, the then president of France, Jacques Chirac, and his prime minister, Dominique de Villepin – also a Napoleonic historian – thought it wise to sidestep the celebrations for the bicentenary of the French victory against the Austrians at Austerlitz. A key part of this decision, in commentators’ eyes, was mounting controversy about Napoleon’s legacy, including accusations of genocide against people in the colonies. – The Conversation
Fifty Years Ago Photography Was Barely Considered Art. Now…
“There are now more galleries showing contemporary art than those devoted to the entire rest of art history, with sales at auction houses following the same trend: in the years since photography entered the art world, contemporary art has replaced impressionist and Old Masters painting as the most sought-after, collected, exhibited, and expensive segment of the market.” – American Scholar
Great Writers On Their Best- And Least-Loved Punctuation Marks
F. Scott Fitzgerald and Tom Wolfe on exclamation points, Garielle Lutz and Toni Morrison on commas, Norman Mailer on hyphens, Cormac McCarthy on periods, and Gertrude Stein on periods, commas, and semicolons: “They are more powerful more imposing more pretentious than a comma but they are a comma all the same. They really have within them deeply within them fundamentally within them the comma nature.” – Literary Hub
Cuomo: Broadway To Reopen Sept. 14
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has announced that Broadway will reopen on Sept. 14, with some tickets going on sale beginning tomorrow. Theaters will be open at 100% capacity, the governor says. – Deadline
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The World’s Longest-Running Play, Coming Back From Its First Closure In 69 Years
The producers of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap in London’s West End have “employed two casts who will rehearse and work completely separately, and appear in alternating runs of three performances. If an actor were to test positive, the other cast – contracted to be available and in reach of the theatre in their time off – will immediately take over for 10 days while the other group recuperates. Quarantine rules would prevent the usual theatre practice of one absentee being replaced by a stand-in.” – The Guardian
The Rage Fueling The New Campus Novels
A life made, or half-made, under conditions of academic precarity is often a paranoid, anxious, stupefying life—stupefying in part because, in some sense, you chose it. – The Nation
New AI System Makes Dubbing Of Films In Foreign Languages Less Awful
“The process begins with recording an actor speaking the dialog in the required language, as one would in a dubbing process, explains co-founder and filmmaker Scott Mann. The new audio and picture would then be delivered to [the company, called] Flawless, which would effectively use its AI-driven system to create a lip-synced picture.” – The Hollywood Reporter
What If The Idea Of “The Tragedy Of The Commons” Is All Wrong?
Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom believed so. “While conservation almost always carries at least some short-term costs, researchers have found that many community-based conservation projects reduce those costs and, over time, deliver significant benefits to their human participants, tangible and intangible alike.” – Aeon
The First Opera Written For And Produced In Virtual Reality
“What is most radical about Current, Rising is not the technology but how the creative process has been flipped. Rather than the composer setting the librettist’s words to music and leaving the music to be interpreted by directors, designers and musicians, it was Annette Mees, head of Covent Garden’s Audio Labs, and [the CEO of Figment Productions] who initially developed the idea of a hyperreal opera and only later brought on board creatives.” – The Guardian
A Mysterious Group Of Ancient Monuments In Saudi Arabia Older Than The Pyramids
Scattered across 77,000 square miles of desert in northwest Arabia, the mustatils (the name comes from the Arabic word for “rectangle”) were built between 8,500 and 4,800 years ago, during the period known as the Middle Holocene, according to a report published last week in the journal Antiquity. – Artnet
UK Threatens To Cut Funds For University-Level Arts Education By 50%
“Under proposals put forward earlier this year by Gavin Williamson, the education secretary, funding from the Office for Students — the independent regulator of higher education — would be cut by half for students of art and design, music, dance, drama and performing arts, media studies and archaeology during the 2021-22 academic year.” – The Art Newspaper
New York Times Dance Critic On Writing About People’s Bodies
Gia Kourlas: “Generally, it doesn’t feel fraught, but at the same time I am aware of the sensitivity it takes to write about the body and how easily something could be misconstrued. I don’t want to hurt someone — and that’s not to say that I haven’t — but I try my best not to be cruel. And while I might love the way a dancer’s leg is shaped or the length of an arm, I don’t like to fetishize the body or dancers. To write about them as creatures or objects is really distasteful to me.” – The New York Times
Meet The Detective Who’s Recovered Half A Billion Dollars’ Worth of Stolen Art
“[Christopher] Marinello is one of a handful of people who track down stolen masterpieces for a living. Operating in the grey area between wealthy collectors, private investigators, and high-value thieves, he has spent three decades going after lost works by the likes of Warhol, Picasso and Van Gogh.” – The Guardian
W. Royal Stokes, Washington Post Jazz Critic, Dead At 90
“A onetime professor of classics who became a major presence in jazz as a Washington-based radio disc jockey, journalist and author known for his oral histories of musicians’ lives, … Mr. Stokes was, by his own admission, an accidental jazz critic with no formal musical training. His instrument was the typewriter.” – The Washington Post