There’s an idea in vogue that if an artist or writer can just talk to enough different people about their experiences in the city, they can give us a clear vision of San Francisco as it is now, as it was, and perhaps even as it will be. We may approach something like the Platonic ideal of the city’s so-called “soul.” – The Baffler
America’s First Poster Museum Is Opening
How is it then that the US has never had its own poster museum? “We have a lot of cultural institutions in New York, and there’s a lot of competition between them,” Knight said. “Many of them have poster collections, but they use them as supplemental material. They don’t look at posters first. We think it’s really important to do that because it’s the bottom-up view of history as opposed to the top-down upper-echelon fancy art looking down.” – Hyperallergic
Questions About The Future Of The Vancouver Art Gallery After Its Longtime Director Leaves
The museum has been trying to raise money for a new building for the past ten years and is still a long way from its goal. Kathleen Bartels, who was director for 18 years until last week, had been laboring to get the project done without success. So now what? – CBC
Hartford Stage Gets New Director
Cynthia Rider, who was executive director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival from 2013 to 2018, will begin her new job at Hartford Stage July 1, the theater announced Wednesday. – Hartford Courant
Study: In 18th,19th Century Clusterings Of Writers Made Them More Prolific
Belonging to the London cluster made writers substantially more productive. The study found that “the average writer in London saw their productivity go up by 12 percent. By comparison, writers in smaller clusters, in Dublin, Edinburgh, Oxford, and Cambridge, saw no such gains. Furthermore, being part of the London cluster increased the likelihood of an author having their work published in any given year by 24 percent.” – CityLab
An Explosion Of Concerts And Music Venues In America
The concert business, according to Pollstar, set records in 2018 with more than 152 million tickets moved and $10.4 billion in sales nationally. The live industry’s growth was necessary to offset lost record sales. Those peaked in 1999 at $40 billion and were less than half that last year at $19.1 billion, with just under $9 billion coming through streaming. – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Attacking The Financial Industry: These Artists Bought Debt With Art And Blew It Up (Literally)
They sold money they printed themselves as art works, and used the funds to buy up £1.2 million of debt on the secondary market, where lenders sell bad debts. – The New York Times
Neuroscience: How Using GPS Is Shrinking Our Brains
“When people are told which way to turn, it relieves them of the need to create their own routes and remember them. They pay less attention to their surroundings. And neuroscientists can now see that brain behavior changes when people rely on turn-by-turn directions.” – Washington Post
What If Hollywood Pulls Out Of Georgia? There’s Lots Of Money At Stake, But…
“Although entertainment-industry protests have previously helped derail socially conservative legislation in Georgia, studios didn’t voice significant opposition to the new abortion law while it was being considered by the state legislature. Now, according to the University of Georgia political scientist Charles Bullock, it’s unlikely they can meaningfully impact the law’s future, which is up to the courts.” – The Atlantic
Mona Lisa’s Smile? She Was Faking It, Say Researchers
“Our results indicate that happiness is expressed only on the left side. According to some influential theories of emotion neuropsychology, we here interpreted the Mona Lisa asymmetric smile as a non-genuine smile, also thought to occur when the subject lies,” the authors write in their study published recently in the April 2019 issue of the journal Cortex. – EurekAlert
How ‘The Cat In The Hat’ Chased Away Dick And Jane And Transformed American Education
“As the baby boom was hitting its peak and Sputnik was prompting much hand-wringing about the state of American education, a vigorous debate over literacy was beginning to take shape, and [Theodor Seuss] Geisel found himself thrust to the forefront of the battle.” – The New Yorker
The Man Who Made The Ojai Music Festival Cool
Before Thomas W. Morris became artistic director in 2004, the Southern California contemporary music event was respected but somewhat, as Zachary Woolfe puts it, “insular and Eurocentric … If high modernism could be cozy, this was it.” Morris opened Ojai up to the ever-more-lively American new music scene and brought in as visiting music directors (a new one each year) a range of starry, even hip artists such as Mark Morris, Eighth Blackbird, Vijay Iyer, and (this year) Barbara Hannigan. – The New York Times
Terese Hayden, Who Aided The Careers Of Untold Thousands Of Actors, Dead At 98
In addition to a five-decade career an an actor, director, producer, and teacher (among her students at Circle in the Square were Kevin Bacon, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Lady Gaga), she created The Players’ Guide: A Pictorial Directory for the Legitimate Theater, the first-ever organized and bound listing for casting directors of Equity actors, complete with photos and résumés. – The New York Times
More, More, More At Edinburgh Fringe — More Shows, More Venues, More Countries Represented Than Ever Before
“The 2019 programme … includes 3,841 shows, up from 3,548 in 2018, and 59,600 performances, up from 56,796. The programme has a record 63 countries represented, and more than 700 free shows, with more than 400 ‘pay what you want’ shows, an increase from 260 last year.” – The Herald (Scotland)
New Illinois Governor’s Capital Construction Budget Has Loads Of Money For The Arts
Gov. Jay Pritzker’s infrastructure spending bill, the state’s first major public works program in more than ten years, just passed the state legislature, and it includes over $60 million in money for capital projects at various arts institutions. And there’s another $50 million for capital projects to be allocated by the Illinois Arts Council. – Chicago Tribune
YouTube Announces New Crackdown On Hate Speech Videos
“[The company] said content that alleges a group is superior in order to justify discrimination on characteristics like age, race, caste, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or veteran status would be prohibited under its new hate speech policy. It’ll also remove some conspiracy theory videos that deny well-documented violent events, like the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting and the Holocaust.” – Slate
Artist Joe Overstreet, 85
“Over the course of a six-decade career that cut across artistic movements and unflinchingly addressed issues of racism and inequality, Overstreet established himself not only as one of the signal painters of postwar American art, but also as a vital organizer. … He helped to create exhibiting opportunities for numerous artists of diverse backgrounds at Kenkeleba House, the arts space he cofounded in Manhattan’s East Village in 1974.” – ARTnews
‘An American Marriage’ By Tayari Jones Win UK’s Women’s Prize For Fiction
“Jones’s portrait of a young African-American’s wrongful incarceration and its devastating impact on his marriage … [won over] last year’s Booker winner, Anna Burns’s Milkman, and former Booker winner Pat Barker’s new novel, The Silence of the Girls.” – The Guardian
San Francisco Ballet’s New Executive Director Comes From Orchestra/Opera World
Kelly Tweeddale, who trained as a dancer when young, has spent the past five seasons as president of the Vancouver Symphony; before that, she was for 12 years executive director of Seattle Opera, and she worked previously at the Cleveland Orchestra and Seattle Symphony. She begins work in San Francisco after Labor Day. – San Francisco Chronicle
Goodbye to the commercial music industry, hello to the rock stars next door
The New York City subway is not, on any given day, the place to hear the music you need. It’s public in the extreme — in one of the world’s most public cities. And yet that’s where music ambushed me, a few months ago … – David Patrick Stearns