Yearly Archives: 2021
V&A Museum Union Warns Job Cuts Would Cost “1,000 Years Of Expertise”
The museum, which plans to reopen only five days a week at first, is looking to save £10 million a year after its visitor...
Using Public Domain Songs As Fodder For Something New
With support from a wide cast of collaborators, Angry and Katherine McMahon are taking songs from the public domain — a class of creative...
Regulators Eye Warner/Discovery Merger With Skepticism
“That deal was sold to the Department of Justice and to the public on the basis of an efficiencies claim, which apparently has not...
Dick Van Dyke Is 95, And He Really Wants To Get Back On Stage
"His last singing gig took place on a Saturday night 15 months ago at the Catalina Jazz Club. He packed the house. They even...
Newark’s Old Works Offloaded: NJ’s Most Prominent Art Museum Sells “Outdated” Outcasts Tomorrow
As part of her reinvention and rebranding of the Newark Museum (which, in 2019, added “of Art” to its name, even though it also...
Words to live by: Don’t shoehorn grand opera
The return to the stage (though not their own) of the Met and of Opera Philadelphia, along with a streamed Aïda from the Paris...
The Year Of Singing Dangerously
The wildfire-like spread of the coronavirus over a couple of hours of choral singing inside a Washington church was enough to send shockwaves throughout...
What James Whiteside Has Been Doing With (Or To?) Dance Through The Lockdown
"As theaters went dark during the pandemic, the New York-based Whiteside" — best known as a prinmcipal at ABT — "began putting out a...
Jeopardy Contestant’s Innocent Hand Gesture Sends Conspiracists Wild
Kelly Donohue’s three fingers, Snopes pointed out, symbolize the number “three.” After his first victory, he waved one finger. After his second victory, he...
London’s West End Reopens Yet Again, Hoping This Time Will Stick
There were two attempts in the second half of 2020 to start British theatres up after the pandemic lockdown, and both were quickly ended...
Britain’s Stages Are Not Reopening With Theatrical Comfort Food
"There has been a fear that the large-scale redundancies during the pandemic – an estimated 40% of theatre workers lost their jobs – could...
UK Culture Minister: I Won’t Allow Our History To Be Cancelled
"Confident nations face up to their history. They don’t airbrush it. Instead, they protect their heritage and use it to educate the public about...
On The Rediscovery Of Black Composers Of The Past
"Black composers have been emerging over the past year at a dramatically accelerated pace that's particularly rare amid the normally glacial progression of the...
Diversity Means Teaching How To Think Rather Than What To Think
"Teaching kids what to think instead of how to think is dangerous. Advocacy-based teaching deprives them of the skills to reach their own...
Uffizi Gallery Is Making Up Its Pandemic Cash Shortfall By Releasing NFTs Of Its...
"And it's starting off with a bang: an encrypted Michelangelo painting of the holy family, Doni Tondo (1505-06), just sold for €140,000 ($170,000). The...
Blake Bailey’s Philip Roth Biography, Withdrawn By W.W. Norton, Picked Up By New Publisher
The acclaimed but controversial bio was dropped by its original publisher after several women came forward with serious allegations of sexual misconduct on Bailey's...
Co-Host Bob Garfield Fired From Public Radio’s ‘On The Media’
The longtime co-anchor was dismissed by New York Public Radio "after two separate investigations found he had violated an anti-bullying policy. … Mr. Garfield...
World’s Oldest Cave Art Is Being Damaged By Climate Change
"Researchers examined 11 caves and rock-shelters , which feature art dating from 45,000 to 20,000 years old. … The scientists found that the art,...
Amazon In Talks To Buy MGM For $9 Billion: Report
"Chatter that Amazon (and other tech giants) have been sniffing around MGM has circulated for some time. But sources indicated that Amazon's interest in...
It’s Official: AT&T Is Spinning Off WarnerMedia To Merge With Discovery
"Under the terms of the deal, AT&T will spin off entertainment arm WarnerMedia and combine it with Discovery, creating a TV, film and streaming...
Radio City Music Hall Set To Reopen At 100% Capacity, No Masks Required
The first scheduled event is the finale of this year's Tribeca Film Festival on June 19. Only vaccinated people will be admitted. And how...
A Design Challenge To Densify Los Angeles
"The challenge is a conversation starter and design exercise. It’s also a needed counter to commercial real estate developers, whose ideas of density tend...
Despite Best Efforts, We’re Still Terrible At Predicting The Future
"When you aggregate hundreds of predictions, the result is a special, concentrated kind of wrong. Everyone was trying their best, and everyone missed. And...
Can The Golden Ratio Predict Hit Musicals?
You can imagine my astonishment when, early one morning, my calculations revealed that within Les Miserables, the principal characters of Fantine, Eponine, Gavrosche and...
The Guardian Newspaper Was Founded The Year Napoleon Died. It’s Been A Singular Enterprise...
Its history is peppered with financial crises and near-death experiences. Perhaps it was placed on earth to make “righteousness readable” (in the centenary words...
