"In an informal poll, members of the Association of Art Museum have voted 91-88 against asking its trustees to explore a controversial change in its deaccessioning policy to permit institutions to sell art to finance direct care of their collections." - The Art Newspaper
"The pact, announced this week, was passed unanimously by the musicians, the SPCO board and the board of the American Federation of Musicians Local 30-73 some 15 months before the current contract was set to expire. It will maintain musicians' pay, benefits and work rules from July 2022 until July 2024." - The Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
Three years after Chris Dercon ended his brief, dissension-plagued tenure at the theatre, his successor as artistic director, Klaus Dörr, quit after it became public that 10 women at the Volksbühne had made formal complaints to the Berlin city government about Dörr's alleged sexual harassment of younger actresses and humiliation of older ones. - The New York Times
Oliver Wainwright: "It is a fitting moment for a prize once reserved for flamboyant sculptors of icons to be awarded to a practice that would prefer you didn't notice their presence at all. … In an age of demolishing public housing and replacing it with shiny new carbon-hungry developments in the name of 'regeneration', Lacaton & Vassal have worked...
More fully stated, the professional creed of Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal is "Never demolish, never remove or replace, always add, transform, and reuse!" The pair are best known for their innovative and economical work renovating public housing projects in France. - NPR
Sebastian Smee: "No painting by Titian or Raphael has ever fetched as much as “Everydays.” So of course this is big news. But it’s also just one more riotous example of high-roller groupthink, market manipulation and the seemingly unstoppable human urge to commodify everything. - Washington Post
"Most music from the past is lost. Written, performed, then fading into obscurity, like the millions of books in our libraries that no one reads, as forgotten as the titles of the lost Library of Alexandria. Lostness is bound up with temporal limits; we cannot maintain an iron grip on the past. The inevitability of time’s erosion of things...
It turns out the NFT craze has many parallels to the art world. After even a few short days in the aftermath of the sale, we can already see that NFTs are creating effects that are hilariously and tragically the opposite of the utopian fantasies so many have placed upon them. - ARTnews
Ivo van Hove at the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, Stéphane Braunschweig at the Odéon in Paris, Thomas Ostermeier at the Schaubühne in Berlin, Kajsa Giertz at the Helsingborg (Sweden) City Theatre, and Saheem Ali and Shanta Thake at the Public Theater in New York talk about government support, programming while their buildings are closed, and reopening plans. - The Observer...
Once data is “on-chain,” it cannot be deleted, and it can be reviewed forevermore by anyone with access privileges and enough technological know-how. This means each NFT’s scarcity and provenance are secure, which in turn amplifies demand, which in turn builds a more confident, more robust market than we’re used to seeing for digital artworks without blockchain backing. -...
Theatres have collectively reported losses of nearly £200 million following a year of closure, according to a survey which also reveals that a quarter of freelancers have gone out of business or ceased trading because of the pandemic. - The Stage
"Over 1,000 cultural figures, including artists and curators, have addressed a letter to President Vladimir Putin and parliamentarians expressing fears that law is so sweeping that it could encompass 'any public activity in the process of which knowledge and expertise are disseminated' including 'exhibitions, festivals, conferences, the activity of popularisers of science and art.' The science community is...
The last thirty years have seen management displace the creators to become the powerful figures of the arts world … Increasingly, even the section of artistic talent has been seen slipping from the hands of the sector towards the marketing and sponsorship departments … Australia needs its artists to initiate change, to rethink the present in the light of...
Helen Shaw: "The pandemic has been a period of getting a lot of 'little did I know' stuff out into the open, including (but hardly limited to) the troubling ethics of the industry and the intense vulnerability of those who make a living in it. … I celebrate that our theaters closed, because it's one of the few ways...
"As it happens, this year’s wide-open mayoral race — a political rarity in Boston — offers the cultural sector a golden opportunity to flex a little political muscle. At this early stage of the race, all of the candidates are looking for a way to stand out, and their agendas are still evolving. The cultural sector needs to ensure...
