Roughly nine minutes. In famously low-crime Japan, no less. Organizer Tota Hasegawa, owner of the Same Gallery in Tokyo, had expected the “Stealable Art Exhibition” to run for ten days, but so many aspiring thieves showed up for the midnight start time last weekend that he had to open the doors half an hour early. (The cooperative Japanese crowd did obey the requests to take only one artwork per person and to steal quietly.) – Yahoo! (AFP)
Seattle Singer Lady A Sticks Up For The Right To Keep Her Name
The black Seattle blues singer has been in talks with the band [formerly known as Lady Antebellum] for weeks about using the name, maintaining that she doesn’t want to share the Lady A brand and that she shouldn’t have to fight to keep a name she’s used for more for 20 years. With a newly filed lawsuit from the band, she now may have to fight in court for it. – Rolling Stone
LACMA’s Plans For Its New Home Seems To Be Deeply Unpopular. Can Anything Be Done?
COVID-19, unfortunately, has given the nation pause, but for LACMA it may be a blessing, a reason to apply the brakes: the pandemic has opened up time, offering the museum board, the LA County supervisors, and the public the chance to reconsider what everyone already knows is a mistake. According to a recent survey (conducted by a group with which I am involved), only a shocking five percent of 2,750 people polled want the Zumthor design. LACMA’s stubbornly entrenched board of directors steadfastly refuses to acknowledge that this is the most unpopular public project ever to have been proposed for a major cultural institution in Los Angeles. – Los Angeles Review of Books
Britain’s Choirs Are Conducting Tests To See If It’s Safe To Sing
This week, in an operating theatre at the government’s science facility at Porton Down, a small group of guinea-pig choral singers, some professional and some amateur, are taking part in experiments to measure what happens to those aerosols — droplets measuring five-thousandths of a millimetre or less — when they are emitted by the singing voice. – Spectator
Olympic Ideals Are Great – The Reality Much Less. Is It Time To End The Games?
For the first time, anti-Olympics activists from around the globe are now joining to stand against the Games. Their slogan is “No Olympics anywhere,” and after 200 of them met last summer in Tokyo, one attendee — American Jules Boykoff, who teaches politics and government at Pacific University in Oregon — summed up the ills of the Olympics in a neat list: “overspending, militarization of police, citizen displacement, greenwashing and corruption.” – Washington Post
NYC Nightlife Shut Down And It’s Hard To See It Coming Back Any Time Soon
“Even if you had a hundred people in a space that’s supposed to be 200, are they really going to keep six feet apart? A lot of people expect a nightclub to feel a certain way and have a certain kind of energy. If we are going to reopen at a reduced capacity it will have a different feeling, it will have a different vibe to it.” – Politico
Walt Disney World Reopening Gets Mixed Reviews
Some social media users took aim at the cheery “Welcome Back” videos Disney put out ahead of its world resort’s reopening. Remixing the park footage with eerie music, including the opening theme from horror classic The Shining, they reimagined Disney’s reopening as a sign of a dystopian present. – Deadline
Washington Ballet Artistic Director Julie Kent Says She’s Recovering From Covid-19
The former American Ballet Theatre star didn’t elaborate, but “at least three ballet employees became sick after the Washington Ballet’s online gala June 18, according to several people.” The gala was mostly online, and ballet officials say they followed CDC guidelines in filming the preparation for the gala. In her Instagram post, Kent wrote, “I have joined hundreds of thousands of people around the world that took every precaution, and still contracted this virus. No matter how careful we all are, this can happen to anyone. There is no stigma.” – The Washington Post
When You Can Actually Be What You Can’t See, But Then You Finally See Yourself Onscreen
Author Candice Carty-Williams (she of the hilarious, sexy, sad, and moving 2019 novel Queenie) says that Michaela Coel’s new series is the first (and perhaps only) screen depiction of what it truly means to be a writer in today’s world. – The Guardian (UK)
USC Will Remove John Wayne Exhibit
The actor, who attended USC on a football scholarship in the 1920s, said some intensely racist things in a 1971 interview. So why did an exhibit honoring him go up at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts … in 2012? In any case: “School officials first responded to the protests in December by expanding the exhibit to include Indigenous filmmakers as well as feminist and critical race theory” – but now it’s coming down entirely. – Variety
This Weekend, The Box Office Hit Is ‘The Empire Strikes Back’
The movie, which also topped the box office 40 years ago, is a big hit with the drive-in crowd. “Empire’s dominance follows Ghostbusters’s success over the July 4 weekend and Jurassic Park and Jaws’ victories the weekend before. Black Panther and Inside Out also made this weekend’s box-office list, with drive-ins being the main venue for moviegoers to enjoy anything on a big screen during the coronavirus pandemic as big theater chains like AMC wisely keep pushing back their reopenings.” – The AV Club
When A Hindu God Shows Up In A K-Pop Video
It wasn’t a great look for the massively popular K-Pop band Blackpink, and their Hindu fans let them know immediately. They weren’t “cancelled” or anything like that, but they listened, or their management did. “The swift re-editing of the Blackpink video illustrated how K-pop fans, who are deeply invested in the mythmaking of their musical idols, use the internet to spread their messages, reach the artists (and their management) almost instantly and get quick results.” – The New York Times
If Working From Home Is So Great, Why Are People Longing For Their Workplaces?
Well sure, when you’re working at the office, you think you might prefer working from home. And then a global pandemic hits. “We adjusted to being, in Laurence Scott’s phrase, ‘four-dimensional humans.’ We learned that this fourth dimension, online, bears only a deceptive resemblance to the three-dimensional world. They do things differently there. In this world of seemingly limitless connectivity, life feels both too sociable and too solitary. Online, we are constantly available to others but they remain tantalisingly unreachable to us.” – The Guardian (UK)
Surely, Skyscrapers Are Over Now
Rowan Moore: “It has been deemed acceptable – by the building regulations, by architects, by the professional media – to rip untold tonnes of matter from the earth and to pump similar tonnes of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, in order to produce magical architectural devices that might, if all their wizardry were to function as promised, pay back some of their carbon debt some time in the next century. By when it might be too late.” – The Observer (UK)
Will Movie Theatres Survive The Pandemic – At All?
Without new movies, it will be hard – but without any trust in safety, it will be much harder. “The vast majority of the country’s nearly 5,550 indoor theaters remain shuttered, and the recent surge in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations in multiple states has postponed what was already expected to be a slow recovery.” – Los Angeles Times
Advertisers Need To Follow Through On Their Facebook Ad Boycott
And here’s why: “Pulling Facebook ads in July, as they slash their ad budgets anyway, was for many a win-win of saved money and boosted image. But now? Given the response from civil rights leaders and the results of the two-year audit, how can a brand return to the platform until real, measurable change is actually made?” (Also, Zuckerberg thinks the boycott means nothing – and advertisers could change that.) – Fast Company
The Met Is Going To Livestream Star Singer Recitals
Since the Covid-19 numbers are looking worse, not better (not by a long shot) in the US, Peter Gelb says that the Met has to push the envelope with new content, even if it mostly employs those who are already stars. “If there’s no Met to come back to, the jobs of our furloughed artists will be lost. … I have to ensure that the Met can earn revenue.” – The New York Times
Explaining That Eliza Hamilton Gasp
Thomas Kail, Hamilton director (both on stage and screen): “I remember it was important for me to have a moment at the end of the show where the music and lyrics are resolving that extended past, that reached somewhere else. Pippa is so thorough and so intelligent and so precise, that it was a really fun conversation to have.” – Los Angeles Times