Phil Buchanan, president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, argues that the most important thing that grant makers can do is make sure the nonprofits they fund can attract good staff members and compensate them fairly. – The Chronicle of Philanthropy
The Humanities Are Disappearing From Our Universities. Here’s Why We Should Care
There is, of course, the economic argument. Overall, arts and culture contribute more than $760 billion a year to the US economy—4.2 percent of GDP. But there’s an awful lot of “soft” power too. “They incubate ideas, provide ethical standards, and raise questions about the status quo—functions that are becoming ever more important as the tech world, ridden by scandal and crisis, faces a moment of reckoning.” – New York Review of Books
Beyond ‘The Ring’ And The Machine: High-Tech Opera At The Met And Elsewhere
William Kentridge’s stagings of The Nose and Lulu were, and next season’s Wozzeck will be, packed tight with video imagery. (Yet they’re surprisingly easy for the stage technicians.) The whale boats in Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick couldn’t have existed without 21st-century technology. The animation in Barrie Kosky’s widely-traveled production of The Magic Flute is so intricate that some singers have to be strapped into place. David Patrick Stearns looks into the modern-day wizardry on the opera stage. – WQXR (New York City)
Taylor Mac: How A Misfit Kid From Stockton Grew Into A Macarthur Genius Drag Diva
Sasha Weiss: “When I once made the mistake of calling his drag a ‘persona,’ or a character he plays, he promptly corrected me: ‘I’m just exposing what I look like on the inside.’ Wearing jeans and a T-shirt is his way of hiding; drag is the opposite — it’s revealing, with tremendous confidence and panache, who he really is, and making room for the audience to be as odd and authoritative and mischievous and exposed as he is.” – The New York Times Magazine
‘The Apollo Theater Of The South,’ Long Derelict, Restored To Its Art Deco Glory And Now A Working Arts Center
Before World War II, the Attucks Theater was the center of Norfolk’s thriving historically black business district. Like many such buildings, it fell on hard times in the late 20th century, hitting bottom as a pawn shop and decaying storage space. Now it’s a busy center for the arts for its community and city as well as a presenter of big-ticket performers. – CityLab
Women’s Prize For Fiction Trying To Figure Out Gender Criteria After Controversy Over Trans-Non-Binary Semifinalist
“The Women’s Prize for Fiction has said it is working on a policy around gender fluid, transgender and transgender non-binary writers after featuring non-binary author Akwaeke Emezi on its latest longlist. … Emezi became the first non-binary trans person to be nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction last month, for debut novel Freshwater. – The Bookseller (UK)
Salvador Dalí, Book Illustrator
“Throughout the second half of his life, Dalí had a curious side-project … illustrating the Western canon: Don Quixote and Macbeth in 1946; The Divine Comedy between 1951 and 1964; the Bible between 1963 and 1964; Alice in Wonderland in 1969; Henry V and Henry VI in 1970; The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel in 1973; and Paradise Lost in 1974. Browsing a shelf of the West’s most renowned titles, it’s surprisingly hard to find one for which he didn’t do the pictures.” – Artsy
Grande Dame Of Music: Still Going Strong At 100
Pianist and teacher Thelma Wilson has performed for the Queen, taught thousands of students, and is the mother and wife in a family of illustrious musicians, including one of the founders of the Emerson Quartet. And she can still play a mean Kinderszenen. – Winnipeg Free Press
The Comma Queen Reports From The Big Copy Editors’ Convention
The New Yorker‘s Mary Norris on the American Copy Editors Society annual conference: “But the centerpiece of the weekend is the session at which the A.P. announces changes to its annual style guide. It was standing room only in Narragansett A as Paula Froke, the lead editor of the A.P. Stylebook, ran through her slides. … You could feel the excitement in the room when a slide appeared with the heading ‘HYPHENS!'” – The New Yorker
Is This How Martha Graham Would Celebrate 100 Years Of Women’s Suffrage? (Probably So)
“This season, the Martha Graham Dance Company [starts] its two-year EVE Project, commemorating the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment that gave women the power to vote. Included are two new works: Pam Tanowitz’s Untitled (Souvenir), in which she merges Graham’s steps with her own; and Deo, a collaboration by Maxine Doyle and Bobbi Jene Smith. Inspired by the myth of Demeter and Persephone, Deo explores issues surrounding women and mortality with, aptly, an all-female cast.” – The New York Times
European Parliament Moves To Do Away With ‘Freeport’ Facilities For Art Trans-Shipment And Storage
Freeports were created as duty-free facilities for temporary storage of art and valuables in transit. But with the EU having eliminated banking secrecy, art has become an asset class — and a vehicle for tax evasion and money laundering. So the number of freeports in Europe has mushroomed, with tax evaders and money launderers storing assets there long-term and in secrecy. – The Art Newspaper
Museums Are Having An Existential Moral Crisis
Protests over the sources of money that funds them. Calls for repatriation of plundered artifacts. Demands for cultural diversity and inclusion. Running a museum these days is a never-ending string of moral decisions. – The Economist
New Design Thinking: Accessibility Is A Design Issue
Traditionally, what people get through mass production is something designed for an abstraction of an ideal male body. Customarily, those whose bodies did not fit the standard, who were not spry or male, had to make do. Designers didn’t account for variations of the human body. – Aeon
Do We Need To Rewrite Fairy Tales To Protect Girls From Pernicious Stereotypes? Actually, No
The key is that you don’t read them to young kids: wait until they’re at least 10, then give them a good edition of Grimm to read for themselves. Why? Because, as we tend to forget, these weren’t originally children’s stories. – BBC
Theatre Critic Nancy Pelosi: Broadway’s “Mockingbird” Is A Play For Our Time
“In this play, we learn something so important: decency. In our country right now there’s a craving for decency, and this play is about that,” Pelosi said at an event at the Library of Congress hosted by the Educational Theatre Association. – The Hill
Ralph Rugoff On The Venice Biennale He Has Curated: All About Ambiguity
Why? “We process information in two different styles: we have a very rapid, intuitive style and a more analytical and considered style. Behavioral economists have studied this, and they find that, in contrast to classical economic theory, which talks about a rational homoeconomicus, most decisions are actually made completely irrationally—they are made out of greed and fear.” – Artnet
New Wave Of Young Black Playwrights Bring Jolt Of Energy To American Theater
“An extraordinary new talent convergence is riveting the contemporary American stage. … All in their early 20s to mid-30s, [these playwrights] are newly asserting their ownership of an ongoing American conversation about racial identity, one that has taken on urgency in the race-baiting age of Trumpism.” – The Washington Post
In Minnesota, The First-Ever Opera About The Hmong
For its young people’s training program, Minnesota Opera has commissioned an adaptation of Hmong-American author Kao Kalia Yang’s The Song Poet. Hmong-American playwright/performer composer Nkeiru Okoye will write the libretto, composer Nkeiru Okoye the score; Rick Shiomi, co-founder of the Twin Cities company Theater Mu will direct the production, planned for 2021. – The Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
The Difference Between Audience Engagement And Community Engagement
“The term [‘community engagement’], and more importantly the idea, is something that funders and other decision makers are looking for — and we know it. … With the increased use of this term, there has been some confusion as to what community engagement actually is. One of the most common points of confusion has come around differentiating the terms ‘community engagement’ and ‘audience engagement.’ Let’s start by defining what each of these terms is individually.” – Americans for the Arts
Walt Disney Co. Sued For Systematically Underpaying Women
“The firm of Andrus Anderson LLP, based in San Francisco, seeks to represent all women employed by the Walt Disney Studios in California since 2015. The suit claims that corporate policies — including setting a new hire’s salary based on her salary at previous employers — has a discriminatory effect on women.” – Variety
After 25 Years, Rebecca Rimel Steps Down As Chief Of Pew Charitable Trusts
“During her [time] at Pew, the organization has evolved from a foundation focused on grant-making [mostly in and around Philadelphia] to a nonprofit with national scope and its own operations, including the oft-quoted public-opinion surveys from the Pew Research Center in Washington.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer
This Playwright’s Subjects Are So Explosive That His Plays Are Regularly Banned And He Fends Off Death Threats With Ice Cream
Abhishek Majumdar has written a trilogy of dramas about the decades-long cycle of violence in Kashmir, another about Hindu nationalism, and one about the 2008 riots in Tibet’s capital. That last is the one that got him the death threat, and London’s Royal Court Theatre cancelled a production of it last year under apparent pressure from the Chinese government. (The Royal Court was shamed into reversing that decision, and the play is about to open there.) – The Guardian
Director Kirill Serebrennikov’s House Arrest Extended Yet Again
His confinement, pending trial on embezzlement charges that many observers contend are politically motivated, has now been extended to July 4. Nevertheless, he continues to work remotely, directing several opera productions abroad, and Russia’s film academy just gave him a Best Director award for his movie Leto (Summer). – Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
“La Forza Del Destino,” “Alice in Wonderland,” And A World-Gone-Mad Brexit
“Everything is in confusion,” sings Fra Melitone. That was also true for the world outside of the opera house during Brexit week. As many have commented, English political life is hurtling “down the rabbit hole,” and it’s perhaps worth noting that “La Forza del Destino,” in 1862, was an unlikely cultural sibling of that quintessentially British masterpiece “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” which Lewis Carroll began writing in that same year and was published soon after, in 1865. Brexit is the maddest of mad tea parties, and, if, somewhere, the Cheshire Cat is grinning at the confusion, we are unlikely to enjoy the humor anytime soon. – The New Yorker
Hirshhorn Museum: On A Roll
Continuing its good tidings, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., just announced a special acquisition: Yayoi Kusama’s very first Infinity Room, called Phalli’s Field, which she made in 1965. – Judith H. Dobrzynski