Vu Le: “Our sector talks a lot about grants. … There are endless articles and workshops on how to increase your chances to get grants. And many foundations, to their credit, have been working to streamline their grant applications. But maybe we are not having the right conversations. Maybe the question is not ‘how do we improve grant applications’ but rather ‘are grant applications the best way for funders to determine who should be funded? Have they ever been? Is this tool broken or even harmful, and if so, can we afford to keep using it?'” – Nonprofit AF
The Entire ‘Creative Industries’ Construct Is Hurting Artists, Not Helping Them
“The accompanying political narrative was that the creative industries would champion the social utility of arts and culture as progressive realms to engage fractured communities, realise progressive values and create a more sustainable economic world. … Now it seems impossible to doubt the economic success story that is the creative industries,” at least in terms of the size of their contribution to the economy. “The trouble is that all this ‘success’ has come at the expense of any cultural, artistic or creative integrity that the sectors once had before they were herded into a single political concept.” – Prospect (UK)
Defining What A Museum Is: More Than Collecting, An Ideology?
After a week of debate in Kyoto, and pushback ahead of the International Council for Museums’s annual conference in the historic Japanese city, delegates voted overwhelmingly against a contentious new definition that its critics argue is “too ideological.” – artnet
Will Artificial Intelligence Change Our Relationship With Religion?
As more religious communities begin to incorporate robotics — in some cases, AI-powered and in others, not —it stands to change how people experience faith. It may also alter how we engage in ethical reasoning and decision-making, which is a big part of religion. – Vox
The Long And Ugly Fight Over Copyright To Emily Dickinson’s Work
“The [story] involves theft, adulterous affairs, a land deal gone wrong, a feud between families, two elite colleges, and some of the most famous poems in American literature.” – Los Angeles Review of Books
Saving Endangered Indigenous Languages By Digitizing Them Is A Tricky Business, And Not Just Technically
“New technology like smartphone keyboards, language-learning apps, and digital databases makes revitalization work easier than ever, but it also requires hard conversations about which parts of a language must be kept offline.” – Slate
A Stage Combat Consultancy Run Entirely By Women
With four RSC plays, three other London shows, and a regional production all this year alone, the company called Rc-Annie is one of the most in-demand firms of its kind. Reporter Nick Smurthwaite talks to Rc-Annie’s two founders, Rachel Bown-Williams and Ruth Cooper-Brown. – The Stage
Neil Montanus, Who Took The Enormous Colorama Photos Displayed At Grand Central Station, Dead At 92
“Every weekday [for four decades], 650,000 commuters and visitors who jostled through the main concourse could gaze up at Kodak’s Coloramas, the giant photographs that measured 18 feet high and 60 feet wide, each backlit by a mile of cold cathode tubing, displaying … the wonders of color film.” Neil Montanus shot more of those photos than anyone else. – The New York Times
Italy Might Keep Its Foreign-Born Museum Directors After All
“Now that a new coalition government has been formed, sidelining the right-wing nationalist League, Dario Franceschini, the center-left politician who was behind the hiring foreign experts in the first place, is back as culture minister—which means the museum directors might be able to keep their jobs after all. And with Franceschini back, the directors of Italy’s state museum may not lose the autonomy that allowed them to modernize as they saw fit, another reform that the previous culture minister had tried to reverse.” – artnet
Scientists Find Anomaly In Dead Sea Scrolls That Casts Doubts On Origin
“This inorganic layer that is really clearly visible on the Temple scroll surprised us and induced us to look more in detail how this scroll was prepared, and it turns out to be quite unique.” – The Guardian
In 1913, Edith Wharton Created An Anti-Heroine For The 21st Century
Jia Tolentino: “More than a century after The Custom of the Country was published, Undine’s habits, given a superficial makeover, could be rebranded not just as aspirational but feminist. Today, she would learn how to defend her life story as that of a woman going after what she wants and getting it — and what could be more progressive than that? This pitch would be bullshit, but plenty of people would believe it. Our twenty-first-century Undine would have a million followers on Instagram. She’d be a Page Six legend.” – The New Yorker
How We Think About Intelligence Warps How We Think About People
The notion that intelligence is a measurable ‘something’ that is possessed by people in varying degrees is one of the ways in which we end up with an education system that fails the majority of those it is supposed to be helping. – 3 Quarks Daily
Can Card Tricks Make The World A Better Place? These Magicians Are Giving It A Try
Reporter Claire Armitstead talks to prestidigitators who use their craft to comfort children in refugee camps, restore movement to hemiplegia patients, assist in research on cognition; treat dyslexia and and symptoms of autism, and teach surgeons how to relate to their patients as human beings. – The Guardian
Are Bots Defining Your Aesthetic? (Of Course They Are)
“The intelligent software agents that you interact with online are ‘intelligent agents’ in the sense that they try to predict your behaviour taking into account what you did in your online past (e.g. what kind of movies you usually watch), and then they structure your options for online behaviour. For example, they offer you a selection of movies to watch next. However, they do not care much for your reasons for action.” – 3 Quarks Daily
Peter Nichols, Playwright Of ‘A Day In The Death Of Joe Egg’ And ‘Privates On Parade’, Dead At 92
“Over a period of 15 years, from 1967 to 1982, [he] wrote some of the most brilliant and distinctive plays on the British stage. Yet he became sour and paranoid about the failure of the artistic establishment to pay him his rightful due.” – The Guardian
The Agreed-Upon Definition Of Museum Will Not Be Changed — For Now
Following “profound and healthy debate” at its Extraordinary General Assembly, the International Council of Museums postponed indefinitely a vote on whether to adopt a new definition of museums as “democratizing, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures … aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing.” – Time
Kansas City Symphony Music Director Michael Stern Renews For Three Years, Will Then Retire
The 59-year-old conductor’s contract was to have expired at the end of this season; he’ll now remain on the job through 2022-23. In his 14 years there so far, he’s brought the KCSO increasing renown beyond Kansas City and enviable success at home: the orchestra’s classical concert series averages 94% of seats sold. – KCUR (Kansas City)
BMI, The Performance Rights Administrator Announces Record Collections For Musicians
BMI announced record revenues this morning, with $1.283 billion, up 7% over the previous year. The performing-rights organization also distributed and administered $1.196 billion to its songwriters, composers and publishers, its highest distributions ever, and a 7% or $78 million increase over last year. – Variety
Performance Art Is Hot Right Now. But There’s A Problem…
While museums have been embracing performance art, the investment-minded commercial art world has been slower to get on board. There is one obvious reason. – The New York Times
Petrenko’s Conservative Debut With Berlin Philharmonic Is Troubling
Alex Ross: “Conservatives in the orchestra and in the audience may be reassured, but this retrenchment is a troubling signal from a historically great orchestra that ought to be assuming a leadership role in global classical music.” – The New Yorker
The Arts’ Funding Model Failure To Pay Living Wages Need To Change
“Our failure to figure out how to pay entry and midlevel people a real wage will ultimately seriously negatively impact our very ability to survive. It’s not a sustainable situation, and it’s not going away.” – Barry’s Blog
Sure, Whitman Self-Published, But That Doesn’t Mean Everyone Should
Editors matter. More to the point, “Those of us who tweet self-publish daily. Our screeds and scowls and sorrows arrive without an editor’s filter. Perhaps I am a purist, but a book is a wondrous object—worthy of more discernment. Does everyone have a book in them? I’m not sure.” – LitHub
The Plan To Turn Spotify Into The Ultimate Podcast Hub
Spotify already has listeners; now it wants to expand its market share through podcasts. But can it compete with the undisputed podcast provider champion, Apple? Says the woman in charge of Spotify’s podcast empire, “The amount of content that we can make is endless.” – Los Angeles Times
Public Statues Aren’t Used To Commemorate History. They’re Used To Craft It. Consider The Age Of Statuomania.
Dozens of statues went up in western European cities in the decades between the revolutions of 1848 and the outbreak of World War I. Nowhere were they used more deliberately to craft a national history and identity than in Belgium, which had become an independent country only in 1830. – History Today