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Is Talent Starting To Shift Away From Superstar Big Cities?
The big knowledge and tech hubs which once had such a stranglehold on attracting talent seem to be losing their allure. Many places around the country now have bundles of amenities—renovated old buildings, coffee shops and good restaurants, music venues, and not least of all, more affordable homes—that can compete with the biggest cities. In […]
Who Was The World’s First Movie Star? (And Why Haven’t We Heard Of Him Before?)
Until now, the honor had been thought to belong to Florence Lawrence (“the Biograph Girl”), who became famous under her own name following an outrageous publicity stunt by her new studio in 1910. But new research has found that a French slapstick comedian called Max Linder was marketed as “Max” by 1907 and under his […]
A History Of Philosophical Thought
What is real? How should one live? What government is best? Why do the good suffer and the evil prosper? Any answers can only be propositional or tentative, inviting further amplification or rebuttal. – Washington Post
Should We Rethink Plagiarism?
Academia is an honor-culture, in which recognition—in the form of citations—serves as a kind of ersatz currency. In ancient Greek, there is a word “pleonexia,” which means “grasping after more than your share.” Plagiarism norms encourage pleonectic overreach. One can see such overreach in the fact that those with perfect job-security—famous, tenured faculty—do not seem […]
World’s Biggest Secondhand Book Market Could Be In Danger
With a history going back almost 150 years, College Street in Kolkata “has every imaginable type of text, available in Bengali, English, Mandarin, Sanskrit, Dutch, and every dialect in between. Precious first editions and literary classics sit cheek by jowl with medical encyclopedias, religious texts, and pulp fiction, often precariously stacked in uneven piles that […]
Making Theatre (Or Not) During Chile’s Crisis
Chilean playwright and director Guillermo Calderón: “After the curfew was over, a few theatres came back to do shows and a lot of people went to see them. … People were yearning for a sense of community and space to talk and vent and try to find some sort of solidarity … [Even so,] there […]
Do Trigger Warnings Work? Research Says…
As you might have noticed, the use of trigger warnings has since spread beyond US universities to educational institutions around the world, and further: into theatres, festivals and even news stories. The warnings have become another battlefield in the culture wars, with many seeing them as threatening free speech and the latest sign of ‘political […]
How Are European Companies Dealing With The Racial Caricatures In Classic Ballets?
American companies have been looking hard at this problem in the past few years, especially in the annual cash cow that is Nutcracker. With ballet becoming ever more internationalized — “a performance in Moscow can be beamed to a cinema in Massachusetts” — Lyndsey Winship has a look at how dancers and choreographers in London, […]
There’s Now An Artist-In-Residence At The Philadelphia DA’s Office
“It makes perfect sense to DA Larry Krasner, who sees the arts as central to the criminal justice reform movement … ‘the connection between the reforms we’re trying to make in Philadelphia and the people in Philly who are part of that movement are best made in some ways through the arts,’” he said. The […]
In New Orleans, Replacing Removed Confederate Statues With Paper Monuments
“The Paper Monuments project, a participatory imagining of the monuments New Orleanians would like, stepped into that pause [after old statues were removed] to involve New Orleanians in the conversation about what should come next … [and] to challenge the idea that monuments must be in stone or bronze.” – Next City
Black Lives Matter Co-Founder Leads New MFA Program For Artist-Activists
Patrisse Cullors, a performance artist who recently completed a master’s degree at USC with a concentration on performance and activism, designed the new two-year online program, called Social and Environmental Arts Practice, with and for Prescott College in Arizona. – Los Angeles Times
Long-Lost Body Of Michel De Montaigne Has ‘Probably’ Turned Up In Museum Basement
In the years after the man who invented the essay died in 1592, his remains were moved between several sites. One of those places was a convent in Bordeaux whose building now houses the Musée d’Aquitaine, where a tomb was found in the basement last year. When that tomb was opened recently, there was a […]
America’s Hottest Opera Director Heads To Long Beach (For A While)
“Yuval Sharon will serve as Long Beach Opera’s interim artistic director and dream up the 2021 season.” He would seem to be a good fit for a small company known for unusual work. “Any other opera company in America would be completely blindsided by the projects that I’m proposing,” he says, “Every other opera company […]
Jeremy Corbyn Promises £1 Billion For Culture, £160 Million For Arts Education If Labour Wins UK Election
“The Labour Party election manifesto … pledges to establish a £1bn Cultural Capital Fund ‘to transform libraries, museums and galleries across the country’. … The manifesto [also] commits to an ‘arts pupil premium’ to fund arts education for every primary school child. This would provide a £160 million annual boost for schools to ensure that […]
Arguments For Returning The Parthenon Marbles To Greece Are Compelling
Maybe it’s true that if Lord Elgin had not taken the sculptures they would have been destroyed, by the Turks or the Venetians or the pollution in Athens. And it is true that, as stated in the Times article, the Parthenon sculptures are accessible, and free to six million visitors a year. But Athens gets […]
FULL-TIME VISITING FACULTY POSITION IN THE DEPARTMENT OF ARTS ADMINISTRATION & POLICY
The Department of Arts Administration and Policy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) invites applications for a two-year visiting faculty position, beginning August 2020.
Chicago Architecture Biennial Examines How Design Shapes Urban Protest
It’s a study of human behavior. And it’s a study of the ways in which the architecture of public spaces is designed to control the ways humans move, perhaps by funneling people towards an exit or preventing mass gatherings. (Think: Hong Kong.) It also reveals the situations in which the human is no longer at […]
What’s It Like To Be An Audio Book Reader?
Reading books aloud might seem like an easy way to make money – you just sit there and read – “but I can assure you it isn’t. I narrated my own audiobook in 2014, an experience that I described at the time as being akin to an exorcism: three long days in a dark room, […]
Alt-Weekly Chicago Reader Will Try To Survive As A Non-Profit
The Chicago Reader is hitching onto the train of news outlets pivoting to nonprofit life, under the umbrella of the newly-founded Reader Institute for Community Journalism, set to launch in early 2020. This follows a similar pathway of the nonprofit Lenfest Institute owning the for-profit Philadelphia Inquirer. The Reader will pursue nonprofit status. – NiemanLab
Study: Small Theatre Companies Generate $584 Million Economic Impact
A new study, commissioned by the mayor’s office and released on Wednesday, finds that the city is home to 748 Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway theater organizations responsible for 3,000 jobs. But there is also quite a bit of churn: The study reveals that more than 280 theater organizations were established in the city […]
Dublin Is Booming Again. Alas, Making Art Is Again More Difficult
“We hear people saying that the boom is back but that doesn’t seem to be translating into a richer arts and cultural centre. Ireland has a really strange relationship with arts and culture. As a society, we love talking about it. We love owning it. But we don’t fund it very well. We have some […]
Marciano Foundation: The Museum That Wasn’t
“To put it bluntly, the Marciano Art Foundation was never a real museum. Yes, it had access to a collection—some 1,500 pieces acquired primarily by Maurice Marciano, including L.A.’s trendiest artists as well its most talented. Yes, it organised a big show every six months or so—installations by Jim Shaw, Olafur Eliasson, Ai Weiwei and, […]
Using Dance As Therapy And Educational Tool For Children With Autism
“As soon as James Griffin gets off the school bus he tells his mom, ‘Go dance, go dance.’ James is 14 and has autism, and his speech is limited. He’s a participant in a program for children on the autism spectrum at the University of Delaware that is studying how dance affects behavior and verbal, […]
The wealth tax and the museum
At Bloomberg, Tyler Cowen has a short post on some unintended consequences of a wealth tax, and his is (let’s say) an unusual take. – Michael Rushton
Monkman Mischief: How Kent’s “Miss Chief Eagle Testickle” May Prank the Met
For me, the most jaw-dropping instance of curatorial (and directorial) trend-chasing was the Met’s announcement that the Canadian Cree artist Kent Monkman had been commissioned by the museum to create two monumental paintings for the museum’s Great Hall. – Lee Rosenbaum