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How Local Museum Audiences Are Different From The Tourists
“The local audience is really the central audience. It’s an audience that has grown up with the institution and comes to you again and again. They have a much closer connection because they enjoy and notice constant changes within the institution. Their level of expectation is higher,” than, for example, a tourist who comes once every few years. – Artnet
The First Drive-In Book Festival
“The book lovers of Appledore, a picturesque fishing village on the north Devon coast, are a resourceful, determined lot. When their library faced closure 14 years ago, they helped save it by launching a literary festival, which grew and developed year by year into one of the most popular cultural events in the south-west of England. And when the 2020 Appledore book festival was threatened with cancellation because of the COVID crisis, they came up with the bold idea of holding a coronavirus-secure drive-in event, believed to be the first in the UK.” – The Guardian
How To Understand Beliefs In Fake News? How About The Physics Of Phase Transitions
Those holding odd beliefs are not typically less intelligent. An answer may be found in the way modern communication media have restructured society, leading to the process of opinion-formation no longer chiefly taking place at the individual, but at the collective level, largely unmoored from concerns of factuality and appropriateness. This is best understood by studying the physics of phase transitions. – 3 Quarks Daily
How Music Schools Have Adapted Teaching To Deal With COVID
Heather O’Donovan: “Unlike six months ago, however, they’re prepared to face the challenges. I spoke with leadership at conservatories across the country to get a sense of how they’ve adapted to these unprecedented times. What they shared with me was a deeply heartening show of ingenuity, creativity, and resilience.” – WQXR (New York City)
TV Cord-Cutting Has Accelerated During The Pandemic
“Consumers are choosing to cut the cord because of high prices, especially compared with streaming alternatives. The loss of live sports in H1 2020 contributed to further declines. While sports have returned, people will not return to their old cable or satellite plans.” – TechCrunch
Why Do Mixed-Genre Dance Companies Always Do Their Daily Classes In Ballet?
“That disconnect grows wider every year as contemporary choreographers look beyond ballet — if not beyond white Western forms entirely — in search of new inspiration and foundational techniques. Yet dancers at almost all of the world’s leading mixed-rep ensembles take ballet classes before rehearsals and shows. Most companies rarely depart from ballet more than twice a week and some never offer alternative classes.” This has, in fact, been a subject of debate since Diaghilev’s day. – Dance Magazine
Congolese Activist Steals Artifacts From Museums To Protest Colonialism
Mwazulu Diyabanza, the spokesman for a Pan-African movement that seeks reparations for colonialism, slavery and cultural expropriation, is set to stand trial in Paris on Sept. 30. Along with the four associates from the Quai Branly action, he will face a charge of attempted theft, in a case that is also likely to put France on the stand for its colonial track record and for holding so much of sub-Saharan Africa’s cultural heritage — 90,000 or so objects — in its museums. – The New York Times
Director Of ‘Cuties’ Explains Why She Made The Film
Maïmouna Doucouré: “Some people have found certain scenes in my film uncomfortable to watch. But if one really listens to 11-year-old girls, their lives are uncomfortable. We, as adults, have not given children the tools to grow up healthy in our society. I wanted to open people’s eyes to what’s truly happening in schools and on social media, forcing them to confront images of young girls made up, dressed up and dancing suggestively to imitate their favorite pop icon.” – The Washington Post
What Musicians Can Learn From the 1918 Pandemic
Thomas Wolf: “To the extent it was described to us in the younger generation, their travails were recounted as humorous stories with the suffering left out. It was only much later as I began my research about the family that I learned just how treacherous their journey had been.” – Nightingale Sonata
Smithsonian And V&A Call Off Their Joint Museum Plan
“The Smithsonian Institution and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London are abandoning plans to jointly curate a gallery in the planned V&A East museum, slated to open in East London in 2023. The proposed gallery was expected to draw from both institutions’ permanent collections to explore the impact of human life on the natural world.” – Artnet
Jan Reid, One Of Texas’s Leading Writers, Dead At 75
“While best known for his observant, insightful and often hilarious magazine stories about the real Texas — its people and places — [in GQ, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and especially Texas Monthly], Reid authored such works as Let the People In: The Life and Times of Ann Richards and The Bullet Meant for Me, his moving account of being shot and almost killed by a robber in Mexico City in 1998.” – The Dallas Morning News
Playing The Lead In America’s First Musical Staged Since COVID (Nah, No Pressure)
Nicholas Edwards, who took the role of Jesus in the Berkshire Theater Group’s socially distanced staging of Godspell this past summer: “Every day you feel like the whole world is watching you. … Usually the stage is a safe place where we feel most at home and normal, but it became a place where I was anxious all the time.” – The New York Times
RBG’s Death Could Change Intellectual Property Law
“On Oct. 7, the U.S. Supreme Court holds an oral argument in Google LLC v. Oracle America Inc., the most important copyright case in decades. It’ll now happen without the high court’s most fervently pro-copyright voice.” – The Hollywood Reporter
Studios And Unions Reach Agreement On COVID Safety Rules To Restart Shooting
The pact between the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (the studios) and the unions IATSE, SAG-AFTRA, DGA, Basic Crafts, and the Teamsters includes mandatory testing protocols and other safety measures as well as arrangements for paid sick leave and quarantine pay. – Variety
Fired Director Sues Montreal Museum Of Fine Arts
“The ongoing controversy at the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal has erupted into a legal battle as ousted director Nathalie Bondil sues her former employer for C$2 million ($1.5 million). Bondil’s complaint alleges that the museum board ‘orchestrated, led, and continues to lead an intentional campaign of defamation and destruction of her reputation.’ Bondil is seeking moral and punitive damages on the grounds of unfair dismissal and libel.” – Artnet
Explainer: All About Sacking Of Montreal Museum Of Fine Arts Director
Alex Greenberger lays out the background and history: why Nathalie Bondil had been so acclaimed before she was fired; the new curator and accusations of nepotism; counter-accusations of bullying; what the museum’s board is saying (publicly) about the matter; what the employees are saying (which is rather different). – ARTnews
One-Third Of Musicians May Quit Profession Because Of COVID, Says UK Union
“A survey of 2,000 members of the Musicians’ Union found that 34% ‘are considering abandoning the industry completely’, because of the financial difficulties they face during the pandemic, as performance opportunities are severely curtailed. Almost half have already found work outside their industry, and 70% are unable to do more than a quarter of their usual work.” – The Guardian
Audience Shuts Down Madrid Opera Performance Protesting Lack Of Social Distancing
A performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera” at the Teatro Real was canceled after spectators spent more than an hour shouting and clapping to protest against what they said were insufficient social distancing measures in the opera house’s mezzanine levels. Photos and videos shared on social media showed filled rows in the upper sections of the house, in contrast to the orchestra level of the auditorium, where spectators were separated by vacant seats. – The New York Times
Luxembourg’s National Library Uses a Cool Scrabble-Type Signage System
Individual letters or parts of letters are printed on each face of a cube, so cubes can be placed in rows to form words, or cubes with letter fragments can be stacked to create letters at a large scale. They’re then placed on blank wayfinding infrastructure that has a small lip to hold them up. The resulting system is similar to a beautifully considered mega game of Scrabble, and can easily be adapted to meet the needs of the community it serves. – Fast Company
2020 Has Taken A Turn Back To The Existentialist
“One reason we define ourselves and others on the basis of class, religion, race, and nationality, or even childhood influences and subconscious drives, is to gain control over the contingencies of the world and insert ourselves in the myriad ways people have failed and succeeded in human history. But this control is illusory and deceptive, existentialists insisted. It might be an alluring distraction from our own fragility but it eventually yields a pseudo-power that corrodes our ability to live well.” – Boston Review
World’s First Immersive Virtual Museum
The result is a 360-degree, fully immersive experience that lets museumgoers get as close as they want to, say, Manet’s Olympia or Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. Using a computer’s arrow buttons, a visitor can virtually “walk” around the museum, zooming in on different works of art. The user-friendly setup feels much like a computer game. – Smithsonian
Sex And The Definitions Of Sex
Many people assume that if there are only two sexes, that means everyone must fall into one of them. But the biological definition of sex doesn’t imply that at all. – Aeon
How To Survive The Internet? Books!
“On the one hand, we feel that everything is moving so fast, but we simultaneously feel trapped in our social structures and patterns of life, imprisoned, deprived of meaningful choice.” – Harper’s
American Artist Defends Controversial Sculpture Of Melania Trump
Brad Downey, a conceptual artist from Kentucky based in Berlin, said the statue that replaced an earlier wooden carving destroyed in an arson attack in July, was motivated by his “frustrations with the policies of my birth country.” – The Guardian
Uh-Oh! NY Post Is Afraid Beethoven Might Be Canceled
“To woke critics, Beethoven’s music has taken on a new, darker meaning. To musicologist Nate Sloan and songwriter Charlie Harding, stars of the “Switched on Pop” podcast produced in association with the New York Philharmonic, the Fifth Symphony is a stand-in for everything they don’t like about classical music and Western culture. As far as they’re concerned, it’s time to cancel Ludwig.” – New York Post