Most of us believe we’re working smarter not harder. The fact is though, we’re caught in scarcity’s flywheel and it’s cascading a fire fighting, scarcity mindset throughout our organizations, magnifying the problem as things become worse for everyone. We’ll never “catch up.” Worst of all, we’re often oblivious to what will help us out of the bind as we focus on the fires, or assume if we just score that big grant — come onnnnn, lucky major foundation grant! — or sell out our season, we’ll finally be able to get ahead.
Archives for December 2017
Why The Library Of Congress Is Stopping Archiving All Of Twitter
“From the get-go, the project was a behemoth. The Library of Congress was essentially vacuuming up every tweet, archiving it, and attempting to turn it into a public searchable destination. In 2013, the data already represented hundreds of terabytes. Even back then, creating this archive was an immense task, and as Twitter has grown and changed, it became more and more unfeasible. According to the U.S.’s oldest federal cultural institution, the decision to not archive every tweet was brought on by the platform’s growing volume.”
How Private Equity Firms Are Killing Local Newspapers (And Making Wild Profits Doing It)
“The malign genius of the private equity business model, of which more in a moment, is that it allows the absentee owner to drive a paper into the ground, but extract exorbitant profits along the way from management fees, dividends, and tax breaks. By the time the paper is a hollow shell, the private equity company can exit and move on, having more than made back its investment. Whether private equity is contained and driven from ownership of newspapers could well determine whether local newspapers as priceless civic resources survive to make it across the digital divide.”
Has Atlanta Become A National Center For Dance?
People used to say Atlanta has the “potential” to be a destination city for the nation’s great dancers and choreographers. Like a L.A. with Southern hospitality or a New York City with affordable housing and better weather. I would argue that the sophistication and quality of the work puts us in a world class. The work is here.
On Cultivating A Sense Of “Aliveness”
“Think of the way that life really can become lifeless. You know what it’s like: rise, commute, work, lunch, work some more, maybe have a beer or go to the gym, watch TV. For a while the routine is nurturing and stabilizing; it is comfortable in its predictability. But soon the days seem to stretch out in an infinite line behind and before you. And eventually you are withering away inside them. They are not just devoid of meaning but ruthless in their insistence that they are that way. The life you are living announces it is no longer alive. There are at least two natural, but equally flawed, responses to this announcement: constantly seek out newness or look for a stable, deeper meaning to your existing routine.”
Growing Concern From Movie Theatres About MoviePass
The blistering growth has prompted new criticism from theaters and studio owners — namely that MoviePass will never be able to make money by charging $9.95 a month when a single ticket can cost almost twice that amount. They say that will cause MoviePass to either raise prices or go out of business, disappointing audiences and ultimately hurting the fragile multiplex business.
Z’ev, Percussionist And Pioneer Of Industrial Music, Dead At 66
“Performing solo and with others, Z’ev improvised surrounded by homemade percussion instruments. He delved into attacks and resonances, propulsion and meditation. He worked with found objects and later with digital processing. He was intrigued by the properties of materials and by the paths linking sounds, images, the body, nature and spirituality. In a globe-spanning career, he collaborated with musicians, dancers, poets, performance artists and visual artists. His discography includes more than 70 albums as well as multimedia work.”
This Year’s Movie Box Office Is Down 2.5 Percent
“As of Christmas Day, the domestic total for the year was $10.68 billion, or 2.7% behind the same time frame a year ago. The final six days of 2017 are likely to generate somewhere between last year’s six-day total of $408 million and 2015’s six-day haul of $431 million, according to box office tracker comScore.”
How Billy Crudup Plays 19 People In A One-Man Show
In a New York Times Acting Class video, “[the actor] explains how he becomes 19 characters in David Cale’s play Harry Clarke, which follows a shy Midwesterner as he reinvents himself as a Cockney Englishman.”
The Killer-Nanny Novel That Slayed All France And Won The Prix Goncourt
“Chanson Douce, [Leïla Slimani’s] second novel, sold six hundred thousand copies in its first year of publication, making Slimani, who lives in Paris, the most-read author in France in 2016. Elle put her on the cover, in red lipstick and a jumpsuit: ‘leïla slimani superstar.’ Politicians of varying persuasions clambered to reheat themselves in her glow. … Emmanuel Macron, now France’s President, reportedly invited her to be his minister of culture. ‘I love my freedom too much,’ she told me when I asked about it.”
The Problems With ‘Little Women’ (It’s Not Exactly A Feminist Milestone)
Samantha Ellis argues that the March sisters end up squelching themselves as they marry (except, of course, for the one who ends up dead), and each of the sequels, starting with the immediate one (Good Wives) is harder than the last. And this could all be quite deliberate on the part of Louisa May Alcott, who never wanted to write Little Women in the first place.
Rescue-Takeover Plan For San Antonio Symphony Collapses
“The group of donors set to take over operations of the San Antonio symphony has backed out of the deal after discovering a potential $8.9 million pension liability, leaving the future of the orchestra in doubt. … The Symphony Society of San Antonio has been running the orchestra since 1939 and was supposed to relinquish control to the new group earlier this year.”
Turns Out ‘Salvator Mundi’ Was Not The Last Leonardo Da Vinci In Private Hands
“It turns out there is another – even two – out there. And at least one dealer thinks they could be worth as much as $200 million each. Both are smaller-scale, devotional paintings depicting the same image: the Virgin Mary with the Christ child in her lap. The baby is holding a cross-shaped stick used to wind yarn, which has inspired the shared name, The Madonna of the Yarnwinder.”
Art Is ‘Not A Luxury Good,’ Says Larry Gagosian, ‘It’s Not A Hermes Bag’
“It’s not a luxury product. I mean it may appear to people who buy Hermes bags, but it’s not a Hermes bag. Sometimes people try to categorize it as a luxury. It’s a disservice to art in my opinion. And it really distorts the nature of the market.” (Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?) (video)
‘Relentless’ Playwriting Prize Goes To Script Whose Title The Times Won’t Print
The American Playwriting Foundation’s $45,000 Relentless Award, funded by a libel settlement from The National Enquirer for a false story about Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death and given for an unproduced script judged blind, was won by Gracie Gardner for a play whose title — well, we’re too squeamish to print it, too. (Cool fact: all eight semifinalists were written by women.)
The Year’s Top Ten Battlefronts In The Culture Wars
“Here’s a selective, not-so-nostalgic look back at some of the fiercest fights from a year when just about every cultural event and artifact became an arena for asking not just ‘Which side are you on?’ but ‘Do you really have my back?'”
Why The Culture Wars Of 2017 Are Not Like The Culture Wars Of The 1990s
For a start, unlike the battles over the “NEA Four” and Chris Ofili’s painting The Holy Virgin Mary (the one that incorporated elephant dung), the censoring impulse this time is coming from the left at least as much as the right (as with Dana Schutz’s painting of the murdered Emmett Till). However, argues Isaac Kaplan, the key difference between then and now isn’t the political identification of those objecting to the art – it’s how much actual power they have.
Guerrilla Penis Mural Appears In Manhattan’s Chinatown On Christmas Eve
“The painting, on an apartment building on Broome Street in the Lower East Side, was commissioned by a local street art foundation and made by a Swedish artist, Carolina Falkholt, as a companion to a similarly vast if more abstract vagina, further east on Pike Street.” The landlord has now had it painted over.
Pakistani Film About Rape, Politics, And Impunity Sparks Unlikely National Conversation
“In the film, Verna, Pakistan’s most popular and highest-paid actress, Mahira Khan, plays a teacher who is abducted and raped repeatedly by the son of a regional governor. After failing to get justice from the police or the courts, the teacher takes matters into her own hands. Pakistan’s Central Board of Film Censors banned the film for its ‘edgy content,’ which the board said was ‘maligning state institutions.’ But a public outcry, fueled by extensive news coverage and a social media campaign, #UnbanVerna, bore fruit when an appellate board lifted the ban.”
Dissident Tibetan Filmmaker Gets U.S. Asylum After ‘Arduous And Risky Escape’ From China
Dhondup Wangchen, who interviewed Tibetans about life under Chinese rule for his documentary Leaving Fear Behind – and was jailed after the smuggled film was shown at festivals abroad – was reunited with his family in San Francisco on Christmas Day.
Zentropa, Lars Von Trier’s Film Studio, Had A Very Creepy Workplace Culture (In Denmark, No Less)
“The image of Denmark that travels around the world is that of a peaceful, progressive, liberal, educated country on the cutting edge of feminism,” writes Danish journalist Anne Mette Lundtofte. And Zentropa, founded by Lars von Trier, is Denmark’s international flagship in the media world. Lyndtofte was initially “captivated” by Zentropa’s “militant transparency” – open plan offices, glass walls, outdoor swimming pool. “But, the more I visited Zentropa, the more I saw behavior that made me feel uncomfortable – both as a woman and as a Dane.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 12.27.17
The Year in CultureGrrl: Kicking the “*!%&@” Out of Plan B (for “Blog”)
Once again, art-lings, allow me to offer you my Best Wishes for an Art-Full New Year, along with CultureGrrl’s Top 20 Stories for 2017, in chronological order, with an emphasis on the controversies that we’ve been following and exhibitions that caught my eye. … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2017-12-27
A Book That Brings Her Back Alive
Mary Beach’s Electric Bananas, the brilliant posthumous collection put together by her daughter Pam Plymell, uncovers a writer who has the kind of … read more
AJBlog: Straight|Up Published 2017-12-27
Credo
I’m not nearly as good as I should be about answering my reader mail, especially during stretches of time when my life becomes more complicated than usual. So I spent an hour on Christmas afternoon … read more
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2017-12-27
Has The Tide Turned On Fortunes For Britain’s Independent Bookstores?
According to new figures from the Booksellers Association, in 2017 the number of independent bookshops in the UK and Ireland grew, rather than shrank, for the first time since 1995. The growth is minuscule – this year, the total number of independent bookshops in the UK and Ireland increased to 868 stores, up one on 2016 – but the BA believes that independent booksellers’ “fortunes are reversing”, ending the yearly decline recorded since 1995, when numbers stood at 1,894.
Why Were This Year’s Pop Music Charts So Scrambled?
“The most obvious explanation was that the newfound dominance of digital streaming scrambled the entrenched hierarchies, elevating voices that had long puzzled or offended gatekeepers. With physical and digital album sales as well as track downloads all in free fall, and hip-hop and R&B setting the pace for streaming, major labels and major stars alike were often left scrambling to earn the honors that once came so easily. Because the rules and norms of this era are still coalescing, the systems could also be gamed and manipulated.”
How Gender-Swapping Is Improving Our Appreciation Of Shakespeare
“We are going to be interested in the dynamic changes in how a play resonates by having this kind of diversity in the casting; we’re going to find there are more flavours, more experience.”