“In April, the Irish government announced a new strategy: ‘Investing in Our Culture, Language and Heritage 2018–2027’. Astonishingly, although the Irish state has been in existence for almost a century, this is the first long-term plan ever devised for the country’s culture and heritage. For that reason alone, it should be welcomed. Furthermore, the scale of proposed investment in national cultural infrastructure – almost €1.2 billion over the next 10 years – is unprecedented. More money and better planning: it’s not often that either, let alone both, is on offer.”
How ‘Killing Eve’ Made Itself Into Appointment TV (In An Age When There’s No Such Thing)
“If the always-streaming, everything-on-demand state of TV right now has taught viewers anything, it’s that very little about television is urgent. Sure, there are still a few watercooler shows, and events like the Oscars or the Super Bowl require real-time viewing, but everything else can be watched on an I’ll Get to It When I Get to It basis. Short of one’s peer group pressuring them into watching something right now no one feels they have to be caught up on everything. Killing Eve, however, was different.”
The Future Of Libraries? Look To Finland
As well as pushing the envelope in regard to architectural skill and style, Finnish libraries have an impressive record of being at the forefront of cultural progress and new thinking. Some of the first maker libraries (spaces where the public can borrow equipment and tools), for example, were founded in Finland, and today, some facilities offer the use of high-tech equipment such as 3-D printers and musical equipment free of charge.
Phillips Collection Hires Its First Chief Diversity Officer
Investing the resources to hire a senior staffer to focus solely on diversity and accessibility is a growing trend in tech and higher education, but the Phillips is one of the first art museums in the country to do so. Makeba Clay can count on one hand the number of people she knows with similar jobs in the museum world.
My Mother’s Brilliant Career As A Provincial Soviet Culture Worker
Anastasia Edel writes about her mother, a pianist and staffer at the Institute of Culture in the southern Russian city of Krasnodar, where, for a time, she even had a local television show about classical music.
When You’re A Criminal Because You Write Poetry?
PEN International recently issued a statement demanding Dareen Tatour’s unconditional release. PEN’s President, Jennifer Clement, wrote the following: “Dareen Tatour is on trial because she wrote a poem. Dareen Tatour is critical of Israeli policies, but governments that declare themselves as democracies do not curb dissent. Words like those of Dareen Tatour have been used by other revolutionary poets, during the Vietnam war, during other liberation wars, and they can be found in the works of Sufiya Kamal of Bangladesh, of Ernesto Cardenal of Nicaragua, and so on.”
Blackface In Miami Theatre Is Part Of A Bigger Problem…
Blackface, once popular in racist U.S. minstrel shows, is still performed in Spanish-language entertainment. Afro-Latinos in South Florida say the practice, and this latest incident in Miami, is a small window into the racism that persists in Latin American communities stateside and abroad.
How Koranic Chanting Morphed Into Sizzling Afropop
“Across working-class Muslim neighborhoods in Yorubaland, for nearly 50 years, a high-energy sound has been heard on busy street corners and at parties. Fuji, a raw and percussive musical style, was born out of these communities; a cultural cornerstone adapted by a number of players to a backdrop of a continually shifting Nigeria.”
Read Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith’s Lecture, ‘Staying Human: Poetry In The Age Of Technology’
“In April, to mark the beginning of her second term as poet laureate, Smith delivered a lecture at the Library of Congress about what she experienced during that tour and how poetry can defend us from the distractions and degradations of our technological culture. Her remarks are presented here in full with permission from the author and the Library of Congress.”
Did The Hippies Really Contribute Anything To American Culture? Yeah, Man, They Did
“The 1960s marked a coming together of politics and counterculture, reminiscent of earlier modernist movements like dada and fluxus, though on a much larger scale. The hippies and their offshoot groups, more than any other anti-establishment group at the time, integrated art and life in a way in which the two were indistinguishable – an idea that carries through to contemporary art today.”
Publishing Start-Up Will Put Its Novelists On Salary
De Montfort Literature, founded by hedge fund manager and Goldman Sachs alumnus Jonathan De Montfort, will offer authors a monthly salary starting at £2,000 as well as half the profits from their titles (after salary, production, and marketing costs).
US Investigation Into Art Dealer Fell Apart After $450 Million Salvator Mundi Sale
The reasons had been building for months, but the clincher came when the collector, fertilizer magnate Dmitry Rybolovlev, resold the “Salvator Mundi” for $450 million during last year’s fall art auction season, more than triple the amount he paid, one of the people said. Had the case proceeded, Rybolovlev’s windfall could have enabled the defense to claim that he wasn’t a fraud victim because he profited in the end.
The Radical Subversion Of ‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’
“Today, four years after the series initially aired, telling stories about female survivors of sexual violence is more common, yet Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt still explores what it means to be a survivor in ways that are unique. …The explosion of angry women who are ready to shake up the status quo is a testament to a very real cultural mood. Yet the fantastic thing about Kimmy is how the show illustrates the ways that being a kind, feminine, do-gooder is just as badass as being a ball-buster … [and that] warmth, kindness and creativity are actually heroic attributes, rather than the relics of a girlhood that Kimmy never got to entirely experience.”
An Oral History Of The Muppets
“The last season [of The Muppet Show] aired in 1981, and Jim Henson died suddenly in 1990. But the Muppets and many of their human performers are still with us. Still, while they’ve returned to movies and television with various degrees of success since Henson’s death, no one’s yet managed to crack the code and find the success the Muppets once had. … For the latest installment in its Peabody-Award winning American Icons series, Studio 360 … looks at the origins, appeal and future of the Muppets.” (audio with transcript)
An Opera Written For The Space Under Brooklyn’s Most Famous Graveyard
“[David Hertzberg’s] The Rose Elf features a pair of star-crossed lovers who are figuratively torn apart when one of them is literally torn apart by a jealous rival. … Opera-goers will follow a candle-lit pathway through [Green-Wood Cemetery] to the subterranean tombs, and take seats along one wall of the catacomb’s long, narrow hallway, with the performance taking place all along the crypt-lined corridor.”
Expanding Autism-Friendly Children’s Theatre
“As Lincoln Center’s education director, Peg Schuler-Armstrong, put it, everyone has the right to experience the benefits of storytelling and the catharsis of the live performing arts. The result has been innovative, highly personalized performance pieces that can be enjoyed equally by children with disabilities and their neurotypical families, so that the joy can be shared.”
Inside Harlem’s New ‘Foreign Trade Zone’, A ‘Fortress’ Holding Billions’ Worth Of Art
Inside Harlem’s New ‘Foreign Trade Zone’, A ‘Fortress’ Holding Billions’ Worth Of Art
“[The facility] is called Arcis Art Storage. ‘Arcis’ is Latin for ‘fortress’ — a fitting name for what’s essentially a museum-quality bunker, currently insured to store up to $3 billion worth of goods. … Security is tight: Guests at Arcis must have their retinas scanned to go through the first door, then present their bare forearms for a vascular scan at a second door.” Atossa Araxia Abrahamian braves the security gauntlet.
‘The Best View In Europe’: Westminster Abbey Opens Its New Museum
“Westminster Abbey is opening a museum this week in its hidden “attic”, the triforium, which offers a stunning vista of the Gothic nave more than 50ft below. … Until 2015, the abbey had a smaller museum in the 11th-century undercroft off the cloisters, but the new venue has the space for four times as many objects — around 300 in total.”
Does This Small Country Have The World’s Most Radical Libraries?
“As well as pushing the envelope in regard to architectural skill and style, Finnish libraries have an impressive record of being at the forefront of cultural progress and new thinking. Some of the first maker libraries (spaces where the public can borrow equipment and tools), for example, were founded in Finland, and today, some facilities offer the use of high-tech equipment such as 3-D printers and musical equipment free of charge.”
How Music Has Informed Science
In Greek tradition, music ranked equal in status to arithmetic, geometry and spherics (astronomy), which together comprised the quadrivium, the core curriculum of four disciplines that a learned person was expected to master.
Why Classical Music Should Care About Architecture
“Our destinies are very much tethered to the direction of the overall city. Certainly a hall can be an anchor institution, but if nothing is going on inside the hall most of the time, then it is dead space. It is important that as we design these halls they can be used throughout the day. One of the things that I am trying to do is to re-imagine the foyer of the concert hall as a shared workspace. It could be like a public library, where pretty much anyone can go in there. What if we were to merge public libraries and concert halls so that the experience is like going into a learning center that has a concert hall within it?”
The Shed Is NY’s Most-Anticipated New Arts Project. Why Do We Need It?
What does the Shed’s sliding roof get you that the sliding wooden panels don’t? The answer: It gets you bang for your half billion bucks. The Shed wants to be grand. The Shed wants awe. The Shed wants to look like a spaceport. Even in von Hantelmann’s taxonomy of ritual spaces, we have raced backward rather than forward—not to the theater, not to the museum, but all the way back to the reverence-inducing, hugely capitalized cathedral. A thousand essays on inclusivity won’t change that. They won’t erase the Shed’s position in a development scheme that benefits the wealthy.
Praise ABC For Booting Roseanne, But It Had A Reboot Problem Before It Had A Problem
It is not new information that Roseanne Barr makes racist, Islamophobic and misogynistic statements and is happy to peddle all manner of dangerous conspiracy theories. ABC knew this when it greenlighted the “Roseanne” reboot. ABC knew this when it quickly renewed the reboot for a second season, buoyed, no doubt, by the show’s strong ratings.
How A Top Pianist, Toppled By Disease, Became One Of The UK’s Best Teachers
This was the beginning of the end of her performing career. However, far from sinking into despondency and brooding on fate’s cruel hand, Fisher reinvented herself as a piano teacher. And, over the past four decades, she has built up a reputation as one of the best in the business, dedicating herself to the advancement of pianists, many of whom are now enjoying the sort of career for which she herself was once destined.
The Invention Of The Mid-Life Crisis
“The midlife crisis was invented in London in 1957. That’s when a 40-year-old Canadian named Elliott Jaques stood before a meeting of the British Psycho-Analytical Society and read aloud from a paper he’d written. Addressing about a hundred attendees, Jaques claimed that people in their mid-30s typically experience a depressive period lasting several years. … In ordinary people symptoms could include religious awakenings, promiscuity, a sudden inability to enjoy life, ‘hypochondriacal concern over health and appearance,’ and ‘compulsive attempts’ to remain young.”