As per fresh stats from the British Film Institute, film and TV spend on Brit shores was £2.84B for the year, down a surprisingly slim 21% on the year before. Film bore the brunt of that decline – 31% down for the year in comparison with 11% for high-end TV. - Deadline
Matty Weingast's The First Free Women: Poems of the Early Buddhist Nuns was marketed by America's leading Buddhist publisher — and hailed by many readers — as a translation of the Therigatha, a collection of Pali verse attributed to the very first community of Buddhist nuns. But as scholars familiar with the actual Therigatha got a look, they saw...
With misinformation and disinformation (here’s the difference) flourishing unchecked online, being able to discern fact from fiction is especially crucial. We witnessed the fatal violence and the humiliation on the world stage that ensues when a critical mass of our citizens can’t tell the difference between lies and truth. How can democracy, which relies on an informed citizenry, prevail...
The short answer is that it couldn't work the way it did in the 1930s: the legal and theatrical landscape then was too different. (For a start, there was no such thing as not-for-profit theatre.) But there are certainly possibilities; here are a few of them. - American Theatre
"Two Polish historians are facing a libel trial over a book examining Poles' behaviour during the Second World War, a case whose outcome is expected to determine the future of independent Holocaust research under Poland's nationalist government. … comes in the wake of a 2018 law that makes it a crime to falsely accuse the Polish nation of...
The collection of ornate medieval reliquaries is now held by Berlin's state museums; the American heirs of German Jewish art dealers, claiming that the objects were sold to the state under duress in 1935, sued in U.S. federal courts to recover them under "the international law of genocide." The SCOTUS ruling declares, "We do not look to the law...
" has doubled down on its decision to publish a poem by a convicted sex offender as part of a special edition dedicated to incarcerated poets, telling critics that 'it is not our role to further judge or punish as a result of their criminal convictions'." - The Guardian
Gregg Whiteside, who for 17 years hosted weekday morning programming and the Philadelphia Orchestra concert broadcasts at WRTI, abruptly disappeared from the air last month, with only a brief farewell note about his retirement (as it was termed) several days later on the station's website. The staff had been alerted with a one-sentence memo saying that Whiteside no longer...
The 42"-by'28" bas-relief of a golden eagle, carved from a reddish volcanic rock called tezontle, was found by archaeologists at the Templo Mayor, the Aztecs' main religious site in what was then their capital city, where it was on the floor of an area devoted to the sun god Huitzilopochtli. - Smithsonian Magazine
On Tuesday, Serebrennikov hosted an event at the Gogol Center — which he has directed since its opening in 2012 and which has become one of the Russian capital's hottest theaters — revealing season plans for 2021. On Wednesday, the city of Moscow's culture department announced that Serebrennikov's contract would not be renewed when it expires in 3½ weeks....
The absence of the Shonda Rhymes-produced Regency-era blockbuster proves the Golden Globes isn’t just a popularity contest. Otherwise, the Netflix drama would have cleaned up in all categories this morning and likely on February 28. - Deadline
Two of them, Idagio and Primephonic, have been created specifically for classical music listeners. The other four, Apple Music, Qobuz, Spotify and Tidal, cover all genres. As we’ll see, there are many different aspects to these services: their look and feel on the phone and the desktop, how you search, what audio quality they provide, their different ways of...
Converting "qualities to quantities”, replacing “critical evaluation with economic, technical evaluation”, making “the price system” the ultimate judge, turning institutions into markets and individuals into competing contestants are all hallmarks of the neoliberal vision of a more efficient, productive society. They also characterise quite a lot of what is going on in the art world at the moment. -...
Such quirky, esoteric mash-ups feel less like stylistic innovations and more like branding exercises, reflecting a present in which one’s ability to market oneself is more important than mastering a craft or coming up with fresh ideas. - The Spectator
