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Pompeii’s Museum Is Completely Open For First Time In Decades

"The Antiquarium, a museum located on the ruins of the ancient city of Pompeii, fully reopened this week for the first time in more than 40 years. Home to some of the razed settlement's best-preserved artifacts, including protective amulets and plaster casts of Mount Vesuvius's victims, the museum will host a permanent display narrating Pompeii's history. - Smithsonian Magazine

Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museums Ponders A Name Change

After reporting in the Kansas City Star turned up evidence that William Rockhill Nelson, the Nelson in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art was a segregationist, the museum is reassessing being named after the real estate and newspaper magnate who helped found the museum. - Artnet

When Everything Is Seen Through A Screen, What Is Theatre?

"Digital performance has only exacerbated the definitional crises during this year of hard and soft quarantine. At a recent UCLA roundtable on the subject of the future of theater, I came to the conclusion that, even in this pioneering moment in which artists from different time zones can collaborate without ever coming into direct contact, place still matters." -...

Proposed: Why The Art World Needs Populism

"On closer inspection, there is an asymmetric battle between a grassroots struggle to redistribute power, and those who place institutional preservation at the center. Ironically, Trump, by dint of his very nastiness, gave the upper hand to institutional preservationists, and not just by threats to defund sanctuary cities, which cast institutions as victims." - Hyperallergic

The New Elite: Those Who Have Been Vaccinated

"A leisure class of the newly vaccinated will mean that hotels, catering services and other businesses will be scrambling to employ bartenders, servers and other staff who are also vaccinated, the better to ensure the safety of all. A vaccination will begin to represent not only safety from the virus but also, for some, a leg up in the...

Sculptor Barry Le Va Dead At 79

" became part of the New York art scene during the late 1960s and went on to be associated with the Process art and Post-Minimalist movements. Unlike the best known adherents of those movements, including Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, and Robert Morris, Le Va has remained a somewhat obscure figure, no doubt in part because his work is so...

Hollywood Waits With Its Blockbusters. Streaming Is Still A Risky Path

Even as the studio insists that its streaming strategy is a one-off response to the pandemic, it might not be able to rebuild those bridges. Seeing the backlash is just another reason the rest of the industry’s major players continue to hold off from anything so drastic. Patience is hard, but it’s Hollywood’s surest path to profitability. - The...

Native American Languages Could Become Another Casualty Of COVID

Jodi Archambault: "As COVID-19 takes a fearsome toll on our people, it also threatens the progress we have made to save our languages. The average age of our speakers — our treasured elders who have the greatest knowledge and depth of the language — is 70. They are also those who are at most risk of dying from COVID-19."...

How Social Media Has Rewired Our Cultural/Political Discourse

This expanding cornucopia of tech and entertainment has served as a compensatory narrative of progress and advancement for an empire in decline. The future seems more and more constrained, materially, but, on the flip side, you are freer and freer to build your own virtual worlds and get lost in them. - Artnet

Andreas Delfs Named Music Director Of Rochester Philharmonic

The 61-year-old conductor spent a dozen years as music director of the Milwaukee Symphony (1997-2009). "Once reportedly accustomed to a few sellout audiences a year, the orchestra reportedly sold out 30 shows within a year of his arrival." - WXXI (Rochester, NY)

The Case For Simpler Grant-Giving

“Are we giving to organizations that are actually doing the best work? Or are we giving to organizations that are giving us the best grants?” - WestWord

Twenty-One Young Composers For 2021

Michael Andor Brodeur: "There is really no playlist to match this unstable, uncertain moment. And, honestly, right now I'm less interested in rummaging through the past for reference points. I'm just trying to find my way forward. In that spirit — and since we're feeling all inaugural — please find below the first-ever class of 21 for '21." -...

Cable TV Cord-Cutting Accelerates During Pandemic

In the interim, expect a flood of cable programming to start migrating over to streaming in anticipation for the day when cable is no longer a viable platform for networks to reach audiences. - Axios

The Playwright We Need To Snap Us Out Of The Past Four Years Is Brecht

"Telling a lie over and over can make it seem true. It can also remove agency from the viewer, ceding the individual's judgement over to the expectations of the story being told. Brecht refused to let his audience lose themselves in the funhouse mirror of such representations. 'Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer...

André Gregory: What I Learned From Brecht (And His Wife)

"As I was at the beginning of my education as a young director, as well as a nervous, nerdy intellectual, I asked Helene Weigel about the Verfremdungseffekt, Brecht's famous 'alienation effect' theory. … Weigel laughed and said something like, 'Don't pay any attention to Bert's bullshit and theoretical nonsense. Just look at the work. Look at the work, and...

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