Showing a courage and candor that’s been in short supply among museum officials navigating the choppy waters of racial tensions, political unrest and economic difficulty, Salvador Salort-Pons has publicly engaged with a Change.org petition calling for his removal. – Lee Rosenbaum
Facebook’s New Content Oversight Board Could End Up Overseeing A Lot More Than Facebook
“In designing this new organization, Facebook’s leaders … formed a separate legal trust with an initial $130 million investment from Facebook. But they also empowered that trust to both accept funding from sources outside Facebook and to form companies of its own. That structure would ensure Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg couldn’t just shut down the board if he didn’t like its decisions. But it also opens up the possibility that the trust might some day spin off additional oversight boards for, say, YouTube, Twitter or any other platform that makes content moderation decisions.” – Protocol
85 Years Ago FDR Created The Federal Writers Project. Could We Do Another One?
The Writers Project had a huge impact on writers in America. Now, as writers and publishers are struggling, is it time for another FWP? Short answer: not likely, but a guy can dream… – Los Angeles Times
The Semantics Of Cooties (Speaking Of Contagion) And Other Children’s Semi-Nonsense Words
“In a kid’s world, cooties and other similar contagions may not be real — but they’re deadly serious. The North American children’s lore of cooties is ‘a social contaminant that pass[es] from one child to another, a form of interpersonal pollution.’ … Children who play this game learn and absorb concepts familiar to a public health emergency” (such as immunization — remember cooties shots?), “but on their own strange terms. … [The] search for a satisfactory meaning might not mean much when it comes to children. Because nonsense makes a lot of sense in a kid’s world.” – JSTOR Daily
Jean Erdman, Dancer/Choreographer/Stage Director, Dead At 104
“A former principal dancer for Martha Graham, Ms. Erdman first came to wide notice as a choreographer in the 1940s, and she remained in the vanguard of the field for decades. She later created performance pieces for the Theater of the Open Eye, an avant-garde New York stage she founded in 1972 with her husband, Joseph Campbell, the scholar of literature and myth.” – The New York Times
Facebook’s New Independent Oversight Board ‘Has All The Hallmarks Of The UN, Except Potentially Much Less Effective’
Kara Swisher: “I am not trying to be glib here, because solving the problem of how to deal with speech across the largest and most unwieldy communications platform in human history … may be beyond the capabilities of anyone .. given that Facebook and [Mark] Zuckerberg have purposefully created a system that is ungovernable.” – The New York Times
Two California Galleries Defy Lockdown Orders And Reopen Because ‘Art Is So Important’
One gallery owner said, “Art is so important. We’re more important than other businesses. I want to be taken seriously.” Another said, “We refuse to die here in the tunnel. We’re pushing through to the light.” Her husband tweeted a quote from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. – Artnet
It Wasn’t Just A Once-In-A-Lifetime Exhibition, It Was A Once-In-History Show. COVID Sank It For Good
Years of preparation — conservation, research and catalog writing, loan negotiations, insurance, shipping arrangements, and more — went into the big Van Eyck show that opened in February in Ghent. And that city’s famous altarpiece, newly restored, was at the heart of the event, the largest-ever assemblage of the artist’s work. The pandemic shut the exhibit down, and journalist Sophie Haigney explains why there’s no hope of postponing or rescheduling it. – The New York Times
What Will Concert Life Look Like When Things Reopen?
In New York—and likely everywhere—the venues best able to answer these questions are the smallest ones. They are so because they present music often at the edge of economic and cultural viability, and are geared to survive with limited audiences. Reopening for tiny, restricted crowds would be pretty much par for the course. – Van
Spain’s First Movie With Sound To Be Directed By A Woman Discovered In Archive
“[Maria Forteza’s documentary] Mallorca, an eight-minute, black-and-white sweep across the Balearic island inspired by the music of the Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz, was donated to the national film archive in 1982 … For 38 years, Mallorca languished in the collection, wrongly identified as a silent 1926 film made by a male director.” – The Guardian
Is This The First Ballet To Be Choreographed Entirely Over The Internet?
Durante Verzola, isolating with his family in Kansas City, has set on four dancers in Miami City Ballet a new piece titled A Dance for Heroes, commissioned by MCB artistic director Lourdes Lopez (out of her own pocket) to honor the front-line workers in the corona-crisis. – The Palm Beach Post
What Are The Implications Of Offering Free Dance Online?
“As dancers, we are taught to problem solve in real-time, so it came as no surprise when,” once the coronavirus pandemic led to the cancellation of almost all live dance, “streamed performances and classes began popping up almost immediately. Dance Magazine asked six voices from our national dance community to share their thoughts regarding the swift distribution of online content.” – Dance Magazine
Hay Festival Director Explains How He Moved This Year’s Entire Event Online
Peter Florence: “In the last three weeks we’ve reshaped the programme we’d been planning for the last 18 months into just 80 online events and we’ve been experimenting with tech platforms to keep that conversation going. I doubt we could ever have assembled the cast who’ll launch our Wordsworth 250 celebrations in real life.” – The Guardian
Florian Schneider, Co-Founder Of Kraftwerk, Dead At 73
“Formed in 1970 by Mr. Schneider and Ralf Hütter, Kraftwerk was credited with bringing synthesizers, drum machines, preprogrammed tapes and sequences to the fore, developing a sonic template that was used in genres as varied as rock, pop, hip-hop and disco. Kraftwerk’s music, techno pioneer Juan Atkins once said, ‘sounded like the future.'” – The Washington Post
Tony Awards May Not Happen At All This Year, Even Online
On top of the obvious difficulties of staging a televised ceremony to promote Broadway shows when theaters are closed until god-knows-when, there may be no fair way, at this point, to vote for winners. – Variety
French President Announces Emergency Rescue Plans For Arts And Culture Workers
Among the key elements of the proposal outlined by President Macron are a full-year extension of unemployment insurance for gig workers in the performing arts (known as “intermittents du spectacle“), allowing authors to receive the monthly support payments available to small business owners and the self-employed, and indemnification and loan guarantees for cancelled film productions and small festivals. – The Local (France)
Pandemic Is Spurring Operatic Innovation
The covid-19 crisis has forced a sacrifice of so much of what makes opera so powerful — the massive casts, booming orchestras, elaborate staging and singular thrill of being present to experience it all. But it also presents an unlikely opportunity for the form itself to get more intimate and accessible, reach new audiences and evolve in different directions. It’s an art form in survival mode, and it may well come back stronger. – Washington Post
Movie Theatres Can’t Reopen Yet, So They’re Finding Novel Ways To Connect
“The Music Box in Chicago has a kind of tip-line where people can call in and describe what streaming services they have and their programmers will recommend what to watch. It’s been wildly popular and it’s so funny,” she says. “The Brattle in Cambridge, Mass., had a movie trivia night to support them, which became an opportunity for people from all over the country to join each other. Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington, N.Y., has been working with their audience to care for them. Calling them on the phone just to make sure they’re doing all right.” – NPR
Broadway Ponders The Scope Of Issues Before Shows Can Reopen
Actors’ Equity Association is rethinking almost every direction: How can more space be added to dressing rooms? Which costume fabrics resist the virus better? How many people need to touch a prop in a 10-minute period and how can that prop be cleaned? They’ve hired David Michaels, who ran the Occupational Safety and Health Administration under President Barack Obama, to advise. – AP
Martin Lovett, Cellist Of Amadeus String Quartet, Dead Of COVID At 93
“When the playing of his three colleagues – all Austrian exiles – threatened to become too sweet, Lovett could be relied on to bring them back to the right side of good taste with a finely drawn phrase from his Stradivarius instrument.” – The Guardian
What Comes Next?
I fear that the rampaging growth of income (and most other) inequality is going to be a raw wound on the other side of this crisis and that the nonprofit arts industry could be caught up in a widespread reaction against it. This post and others that follow will explain the fear. – Doug Borwick
Viewing from Home
What has interested me right now are online videos in which dancers, sequestered in their homes, keep in shape. Their charm lies in how the dedicated, witty performers interact with their locations. When did you last see a crackerjack dancer toss off a high kick between her refrigerator and her stove? – Deborah Jowitt
Crisis Engagement: Offering a Webinar for Surviving the “Raw Normal”
Difficult times are a form of truth serum. They force clear priorities. For me, that’s meant reaching out nationally to offer, at no charge, a webinar for nonprofit leaders: “CRISIS ENGAGEMENT: 12 Tasks to Sustain Donors in Turbulent Times.” – Matt Lehrman
‘Darkness Residencies’: Four Writers Spend Hours In Completely Blacked-Out Rooms
Artist Sam Winston, as part of his project A Delicate Sight, invited Bernardine Evaristo (co-winner of last year’s Booker Prize), Raymond Antrobus (winner of last year’s Folio Prize for poetry), Don Paterson, and Max Porter, “to spend hours in blackout before writing something inspired by heightened senses, identity, imagination, sensory reduction and rest.” – The Guardian
How Did The Last Pandemic Affect Music In The U.S.? Not That Much
“The [Spanish] flu did not transform the American cultural scene, as the new coronavirus threatens to; when the outbreak eased, in 1919, musical life returned swiftly to normal. A columnist … estimated that the financial damage to music from the influenza outbreak amounted to around $5 million nationwide, the equivalent of approximately $85.5 million today. In 2020, the Met alone stands to lose that much, or more.” – The New York Times