A COVID stabilization reserve fund set up by the orchestra's board has covered that budget hole, but with government pandemic aid over and attendance not all the way back, difficult times do lie ahead. Said the executive director, "We've known this was coming." - CBC
The social-media Web as we knew it, a place where we consumed the posts of our fellow-humans and posted in return, appears to be over. The precipitous decline of X is the bellwether for a new era of the Internet that simply feels less fun than it used to be. - The New Yorker
Under your nose, the Internet of real people has gradually shifted into a digital world of shadow puppets. They look like people, they act like people, but there are no people left. Well, there’s you and maybe a few others, but you can’t tell the difference, because the bots wear a million masks. - New Atlantis
Literary fiction might be dead. More precisely, what might have died is literary fiction as a meaningful category in publishing and bookselling. - The Nation
“An average audience-goer saw 40 or 50 shows or other cultural arts experiences over the course of a year, prior to 2020, going weekly to a play or museum or dance production each week. We sensed that change fundamentally." - Chicago Sun-Times
"Today culture remains capable of endless production, but it’s far less capable of change. Intellectual property has swallowed the cinema; the Hollywood studios that once proposed a slate of big, medium and small pictures have hedged their bets, and even independent directors have stuck with narrative and visual techniques born in the 1960s." - The New York Times
"He wakes up every day at 6 a.m., … checks his emails, and reads (several) newspapers before beginning his writing at 8 a.m. on the dot. He also jots down his daily schedule on a file card, crosses off each of his tasks when completed and then stores the card away." - CNN
A recent study "found that 27.8% of musicians have had no work in Europe since Brexit. Nearly half of respondents had seen their work in Europe decline, 40% had work cancelled and almost as many said they had to turn down work due to costs and logistics." - The New European
"On the one hand, there’s never been more of it — more specials, podcasts, comedy-generated discussions and debate and cultural flare-ups. … On the other hand, comedy, like everything else, is in bits. Online, it has shattered into memes and trolls and culture warlords and goats singing Bon Jovi." - MSN (The Atlantic)
“We need to protect the cultural spaces we already have. Everybody knows a pub theatre which is about to close down, or a local gallery or music venue which can’t pay its bills. If we lose those spaces, we lose the pipeline for young and emerging talent.” - The Art Newspaper
Epic Games (maker of Fortnite) purchased the streaming site for independent musicians 18 months ago. In late September, Epic announced the sale of Bandcamp to audio licensing company Songtradr. That day, most Bandcamp employees lost access to the site; that includes engineers who keep it running. - Wired
On a windy spring day on 20 October 1973, Queen Elizabeth II officially opened the venue, drawing an estimated 1 million people to the city’s streets. On 13 March 2006, she returned to open a colonnade, calling the Opera House “the symbol of the nation itself.” - The Guardian
Just as streaming isolates and aggregates its users, so it dissolves movies into content. They don’t appear on the platforms so much as disappear into them, flickering in a silent space beyond the reach of conversation. We can watch them whenever we want. We can watch something else. It doesn’t matter. - The New York Times
"An oddly simple new £200m scheme will, for the first time," rather than funding only individual projects, "focus on clusters of heritage sites, including ancient monuments, protected landscapes, museums and an abbey, in specifically targeted, poorer areas of Britain." - The Observer (UK)
