“When artists activate the social imagination and cultural practices bring people together, when new images and events claim or create public space, and when cultural organizing mobilizes people to action, art disrupts and influences social and political dynamics and discourse in the public realm. And, when funders shape programs to support this work, they too are influencers and activists in the public realm. … And, as funders step into the public realm along with the artists they support, they must consider their own implications and risk factors.” – Grantmakers in the Arts
Thanks To Climate Change, The Oregon Shakespeare Festival Considers Changes To Its Outdoor Theatre
Before a grassfire up the Rogue Valley shut down this weekend’s outdoor performances – and moved them inside to a local high school auditorium, as planned in case of smoke – the Oregon Shakespeare Festival held a town hall to announce that it was considering changes to its big outdoor theatre. “Ideas include a retractable roof and a redesign of the seating to encircle the stage so theater-goers are closer to the actors.” – Medford Mail-Tribune (Oregon)
Kirill Serebrennikov Directs His First Play Since Being Freed From House Arrest
Finally released from (repeatedly extended) home confinement on criminal charges many think are trumped up, the director has staged and sent to the Avignon Festival (he himself still can’t leave Moscow) a piece “based on my fantasies” titled Outside. – The Guardian
Why Changing Marijuana Laws Made This Christian Publisher Change Its Name
“Christian Book Distributors, also known as CBD, was started four decades ago by brothers Ray and Stephen Hendrickson, selling Christian books, Bibles, home-schooling materials, toys and games. But the company has announced that the rising popularity of cannabidiol, the legal cannabis-derived chemical known as CBD, has begun to cause some unfortunate customer errors.” – The Guardian
The Great Indian Novel Was Written By A Woman And Published In Pakistan In 1959
Qurratulain Hyder’s River of Fire, written in Urdu and translated by the author into English in 1998, “tells a completist and syncretistic version of 2,500 years of history in modern-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh — beginning with the Nanda Dynasty on the brink of defeat by the founder of the Mauryan Empire (323 to 185 BCE), and ending in post-Partition despair. But the novel, barreling through the ages, leads up to 1947 with great purpose, the deep past used to understand the suddenness and chaos of Partition.” – The Nation
Author George Hodgman Dead At 60 In Apparent Suicide
“[He was] a well-regarded book and magazine editor who had his own moment as a literary cause célèbre in 2015 when he published Bettyville, a memoir about caring for his aging mother that also delved into his growing up gay in a Midwestern town.” – The New York Times
Trying To Get One’s Head Around The Idea Of Math As a “Beautiful Art”
That math is an art, that one of its signature qualities is its beauty—these are ideas that continue to be articulated by mathematicians, even as non-mathematicians may wonder what that could possibly mean. I myself become wary when a mathematician or scientist speaks about the beauty of her discipline, since it can seem vague and high-handed, if not wrong. – The Paris Review
Study: Immigrants Run Nearly Half Of American Fortune 500 Companies
According to a new study by New American Economy, immigrants and their children have founded 45% of the Fortune 500 companies in the United States, generating $6.1 trillion in annual revenue last year. While the organization is admittedly a pro-immigration group, the numbers are pretty convincing. – Fast Company
Observation Without Judgment: The Hidden Perils Of Machine Learning
Because most machine-learning models cannot offer reasons for their ongoing judgments, there is no way to tell when they’ve misfired if one doesn’t already have an independent judgment about the answers they provide. Misfires can be rare in a well-trained system. But they can also be triggered intentionally by someone who knows just what kind of data to feed into that system. – The New Yorker
Rossini goes commando in Teatro Nuovo’s ‘La Gazza Ladra’
I’m a longtime Rossini skeptic, but his rock-star status during his lifetime couldn’t have been a fluke. Could the key to making his operas (beyond the two or three popular comedies) appealing lie in historical performance practice, as happened with Handel? In this case, the answer is yes. – David Patrick Stearns
Ten Years Ago A Neuroscientist Said He Could Build A Human Brain Within Ten Years. It Didn’t Happen
Henry Markram’s goal wasn’t to create a simplified version of the brain, but a gloriously complex facsimile, down to the constituent neurons, the electrical activity coursing along them, and even the genes turning on and off within them. From the outset, the criticism to this approach was very widespread, and to many other neuroscientists, its bottom-up strategy seemed implausible to the point of absurdity. – The Atlantic
Museum Workers Are Beginning To Organize For Better Pay
“Working in a museum can sometimes seem like a service industry for the wealthy. Middle people in museums used to think they were part of the top bracket. Now they’re part of the bottom bracket, or at least don’t have anywhere to go. You have this kind of perfect storm,” he added: “stagnated wages, working within an environment of great wealth inequality, job insecurity.” – The New York Times
L.A. Theatre Fires Director Five Days Before Play’s Opening, Cast Quits, Production Is Cancelled, And Questions Of Race And Privilege Remain
“On the day before the California premiere of Antoinette Nwandu’s Pass Over, a play about the harsh realities facing black men in America, Echo [Theater Company] staff on July 12 sent an email to patrons and posted a notice on its website: ‘Pass Over is not going to open due to internal artistic differences that cannot be reconciled.'” Reporter Makeda Easter looks into the mess. – Los Angeles Times
Allan Ulrich, Longtime San Francisco Chronicle Arts Critic, Dead At 78
“[His] erudite, acerbic and elegantly crafted writing about dance and classical music filled the pages of The Chronicle and countless other local and national periodicals for more than 40 years.” – The San Francisco Chronicle
“Avengers” Edges Out “Avatar” To Become All-Time Movie Box Office Champ
What do all of these films have in common, besides an undying commitment to computer generated aliens? They’re no longer truly competitors now that they’re all owned by Disney, which is slated to continue its monopolistic dominance well into the future, with nearly a decade of theatrical releases and television series planned for Disney’s streaming service Disney+ already planned out. – Slate
Sometimes Our Most Important Architecture Is Ordinary
“Architectural preservation is often an issue of grandeur, both in a sense of size and richness, and decay. When we think of buildings that already been lost, they are almost always imposing structures—cathedrals, skyscrapers, temples. Yet the places where we enact our daily lives, and which reflect them even more than grand architectural statements, are smaller, more seemingly trivial and thus more vulnerable.” – CityLab
Propwatch: the hammock in ‘The Night of the Iguana’
Williams’s stage direction describes it as a canvas hammock, but in Rae Smith’s design it is all rope – knotted, unstable, full of holes, an anchorite’s flail, a nest and a cage. Williams’s characters know how all of those things feel. – David Jays
San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum Was The Victim Of A Ransomeware Attack. Are Other Museums Next?
The museum was able fight back, enlisting the city’s IT security experts to regain control of its computer network. But the incident raises concerns about the vulnerability of cultural institutions when it comes to cyber security. – Artnet