Yearly Archives: 2021
Africa’s Film Industries Could Create 20 Million Jobs: UNESCO Study
"Most creative industries in (sub-Saharan) Africa were grossly underserved," — the major exceptions being Nigeria and Senegal — "in part due to the failure...
Hunter Biden, Artist, Opens His Show. Are His Paintings Really Worth $500K?
As has been previously reported, his gallerist, George Bergès, is looking to fetch between $75,000 and $500,000 a piece for Biden’s paintings. And this has...
“Abstraction, I Think, Is Now Over,” Writes David Hockney
"It's run its course. … Its job was to take away the shadows that had dominated European art for centuries. It was only European...
Why Don’t Museums Use Their Leverage?
In the museum world, there’s enormous potential stored in the museum’s permanent art collection – not as a financial asset, but as a lever...
Why Some College Dance Classes That Went Online During The Pandemic May Stay Online...
Some dance departments have found that lecture courses such as dance history and anatomy work perfectly well virtually (and give students some scheduling flexibility...
Fatty Arbuckle And Hollywood’s First Celebrity Scandal
The Arbuckle affair was the most notorious in a string of Hollywood scandals that threatened to kill off the movie industry in its adolescence. -...
What Does A 550-Year-Old Tapestry Look Like After Four Years Of Cleaning? This.
The artwork, the oldest tapestry in the possession of the UK's National Trust, underwent 1,300 hours of conservation. While the colors are brighter and...
The Decline (And Fall?) Of Facebook
What I’m talking about is a kind of slow, steady decline that anyone who has ever seen a dying company up close can recognize....
Here Are The Finalists For The 2021 National Book Awards
"A food memoir that examines a mother's schizophrenia. A novel about an author's book tour, and about growing up as a Black boy in...
Tyshawn Sorey On How His Jazz Drumming And His Classical Compositions Inform Each Other
"Whenever I'm playing drums, I'm always thinking compositionally about how things develop. … Why do certain harmonies accompany the musicians in a particular way?...
Pondering Masks As Theaters Reopen And Theater Workers Meet Their Colleagues Again
Playwright Sarah Ruhl: "To ask 'How are you?' no longer felt like small talk. We relied on our eyes above our masks to make...
The Disappearance Of America’s Midsized Indie Book Publishers
Following Hachette's purchase this past summer of Workman Publishing, "there is a dearth of what can be called midsize publishers that fall between the...
IATSE Members Vote Overwhelmingly To Authorize Hollywood Strike
The vote by the affected members — cinematographers, electricians, video editors, costumers, and the like — was 98.7% in favor of greenlighting what would...
Revival Of Vinyl Records Hobbled By Shortages Of Vinyl
Worldwide sales of the old-style black discs are up 700% in a decade, so the supply chain has no slack to absorb problems caused...
Flash Floods Cause Closure Of Slovenia’s National Theater And Modern Art Museum
A total of nearly five inches of rain fell on Ljubljana on the evening of September 25, and among the many buildings to suffer...
Art Market Soars To Record £2.7 Billion, Driven By Online, NFT Sales
Having seen sales collapse by a third in the previous year because of the initial crisis caused by the pandemic, sales soared between June...
The Strange Saga Of Ozy Media Continues: We’re Not Shutting Down
“Last week was dramatic, it was difficult. At the end of the week we did suspend operations with a plan to wind down,” Carlos...
Is Email The Worst Form Of Communication Ever?
Let’s start with what should be obvious: email is a bad way to communicate. There’s the way it gives license to verbiage, turning simple...
The Novel In A Time Of On-Demand Everything
If what fiction most essentially is for us is a volume of commodified time, one of the most notorious facts of contemporary literary life...
Orchestra Conductors: Old Guys Rule
Orchestra conductors appear to live longer than people in any other profession. Famous conductors of the past, then in an era when life expectancy...
The Privilege Of Making Mediocre Art
It’s a common topic of conversation among creatives of color: Can we afford to make mediocre art? Black, brown, Indigenous, East Asian and South...
The Moms Selling Creepy Pictures Of Teen Ballerinas
She tried to defend herself by saying that she was “creating art,” and insisting that her daughter was “simply taking beautiful sporty poses in...
Afghan Art Is Going Underground
Now the Islamists are back in power, and Afghan artists and filmmakers — many who flourished during the past two decades — are scrambling to...
Philadelphia Public Orchestra: Reinventing How Orchestras Work
Ari Benjamin Meyers explains that part of his inspiration for the public orchestra came from the lesser-known Fellini film Orchestra Rehearsal, in which the orchestra...
How Do We Justify Touring Orchestras When It Worsens Climate Change?
I'm increasingly uncomfortable with attending concerts "interpreted by these internationally-touring orchestras when I realize that at least 80 people took a plane for a...
