Yearly Archives: 2021
Web Streaming and Book Publishing: Two Bright Spots for the Cultural Sector During COVID-19?
Compared with the average annual growth rate of arts and cultural industries as a whole (+3 percent), web streaming and web publishing surged by...
Syracuse Musings: Words of Wisdom (or not) from Panelists at the Deaccession Symposium
Here are some lessons from old-school conference speakers who acknowledged the need for progress, but defended what former Metropolitan Museum director Philippe de Montebello...
Nobel Prize: Sweet!
Lucky in Manhattan to have a Japanese market nearby, and because I’m enticed by anything in a post-Pop package, I fell for Nobel’s Super...
Now Clear: How Brexit Is A Disaster For UK Artists
“It is being slightly masked by Covid, but we are already seeing individuals losing their jobs because they don’t hold an EU passport. People...
Podcasts By Retired Sports Stars Are Becoming Big Business
"If athlete-driven podcasts were once shoestring affairs, they've now been absorbed into the sports-media economy. Last year, The Ringer was acquired by Spotify...
How Big New Money Is Ripping Up The Art Market
The traditional hierarchies of the art market, where values, both monetary and aesthetic, were established and policed by art historians, curators and museums, are...
What If Elena Ferrante Is Really A Man?
Over the past few years, a series of stylometric analyses, employing both human brains and AI software, has found that the true identity of...
London’s National Gallery Creates First Exhibition Designed For Mobile Phones
The mobile experience will allow people to zoom in on the details. It will include six poems in the voice of Balthasar, the black...
Kurt Weill Was Destined For Broadway All Along
Joshua Barone: "Kurt Weill is often described as if he were two composers. One spun quintessential sounds of Weimar-era Berlin in works like The...
How We’ll Know If An AI Develops Consciousness
Clearly, asking questions about consciousness does not prove anything per se. But could an AI zombie formulate such questions by itself, without hearing them...
We’ve Got Robot Artists. Now We May Get Robot Art Critics.
"For human art lovers, learning which style or category a piece of art falls in is a relatively straightforward and objective task. Like the...
Is The Corps De Ballet Going To Become A Relic Of The Past?
In most places, the pandemic has put a stop to large-scale corps dancing. Yet, even when the virus is finally under control, there's reason...
Cooper Union Says It Will Be Tuition-Free Again By 2029
The prestigious, competitive art/architecture/engineering school in Manhattan's East Village charged no fees to students from its opening in 1859 until 2012, when an overambitious...
Smithsonian Holds Off On Reopening Its Museums
"Despite the reopening of most private museums in Washington, the Smithsonian and the National Gallery of Art have no set date to reopen from...
Live-Streamed Stand-Up Comedy Might Just Outlast The Pandemic
"Many are skeptical, including fans who badly miss being surrounded by echoing laughter and stand-ups who are exhausted by performing for screens and who...
Gianluigi Colalucci, Lead Restorer Of Sistine Chapel, Dead At 92
From 1980 to 1994, he led a team of workers who carefully washed away, frequently with plain soap and water, centuries' worth of dust,...
France Gets Another Nationwide Lockdown, But Arts Venues Could Open By Mid-May
With COVID caseloads on the rise again, President Macron announced a new set of restrictions, less strict than the first set introduced last year,...
COVID Is The Great Reset — And The Future Is Grim
What they are being told is this: In order for this economy to thrive, we don’t actually need you. We don’t need your labor,...
Wrecking The V&A Museum?
"The conceptual restructure, if it goes ahead as planned, will make the museum itself look curiously out of time, out of touch with the...
How (And When) Audiobooks Were Born
Fans have been predicting the audiobook’s ascendance ever since it became possible to record books. But when exactly was that? The audiobook’s origins can...
Irreplaceable Mills College Historic Music School To Close?
It has been an astonishing run. The school’s faculty over the years has been practically an index of maverick artists, including Darius Milhaud, at...
The Perfect Summer To Visit UK Museums?
“The visitor experience this year will be phenomenal. It will be culture without crowds. You will be up close and personal with animals or...
How COVID Has Decimated Seattle Arts
As of January, 56% of the organizations surveyed still had staff furloughed or laid off due to the pandemic. That’s a decrease from the...
The Mysterious Glyphs Of Easter Island
The set of symbols known in the Rapa Nui language as rongorongo is the only indigenous system of writing known to have developed among...
Notes on Outsiders: Carl Weissner’s German Essays and Reportage
To get the drift of Aufzeichnungen über Aussenseiter, I’ve been typing pieces of text into Google Translate. It’s a helluva time-consuming job, but it’s...
