“We live in a single global village with numerous shared problems crying out for collective action, from emergencies like COVID-19 to longer-term existential challenges, such as global climate change and nuclear weapons. What harbinger is it for the future when one of the principal means we have to communicate with one another is so heavily distorted in ways that propel confusion and chaos?” – The Walrus
Blockbuster Philip Guston Show Postponed Over Concerns About KKK Imagery
On Monday, the National Gallery quietly posted a joint statement signed by directors of all four museums set to host the show: Kaywin Feldman (National Gallery), Frances Morris (Tate Modern), Matthew Teitelbaum (MFA Boston), and Gary Tinterow (MFA Houston). The statement said the exhibition was being pushed “until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted.” – ARTnews
Not Some Vow Of Poverty – Getting Paid In The Arts
The money being made in the cultural sector isn’t being made by artists. It is being made by digital platforms and corporate conglomerates. These are deliberate transfers of wealth, not unintended consequences. – ArtsFuse
At 86, Sophia Loren Is Returning To The Screen
“[She] stars in upcoming Netflix drama The Life Ahead, which is directed by her son, Edoardo Ponti. In the film, Loren plays Madame Rosa, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who helps raise the children of deceased sex workers with whom she once walked the streets. She then strikes up an enduring friendship with Momo, a 12-year-old Senegalese orphan who tries to steal her candlesticks.” – The Guardian
This Fall’s University Enrollments Are Down
Although the enrollment declines were steepest at community colleges (-7.5 percent), undergraduate enrollment fell at all types of colleges, including private nonprofit four-year colleges (-3.8 percent) and private for-profit four-year colleges (-1.9 percent). The decline was more modest at public four-year colleges (-0.4 percent), although there were differences across public four-year institutions according to location, with rural institutions seeing the biggest decline (-4 percent) and urban institutions seeing slight gains (+0.5 percent). – Inside Higher Ed
Christgau: Remembering The Volatile Stanley Crouch
“Crouch was a fervent American who was an even more fervent African American. He loved to perturb all comers by arguing that in the end the Middle Passage was good for Africans, but nowhere near as much as he loved to praise the richness and diversity of the Black cultures that the horrors of slavery made possible. For him, the peak of these cultures was jazz — from Armstrong to bebop, please, post-’60s not so much.” – Los Angeles Times
Behind Americans’ Addiction To Crap
It’s not just that these goods are shoddily constructed and add to the world’s clutter. Often, they’re actively harmful. The labor exploitation crap relies on dates back as far as crap itself. Many of the “decorative knickknacks” we consumed in the nineteenth century, for example, were produced in British factories where thousands of people, including young boys, worked with materials that contained lead and arsenic for a couple of shillings a week. – The Baffler
The Hidden Environmental Costs Of Streaming Music
Kyle Devine writes, “The environmental cost of music is now greater than at any time during recorded music’s previous eras.” He supports that claim with a chart of his own devising, using data culled from various sources, which suggests that, in 2016, streaming and downloading music generated around a hundred and ninety-four million kilograms of greenhouse-gas emissions—some forty million more than the emissions associated with all music formats in 2000.” – The New Yorker
The Census Is Seriously Undercounting. How Artists Can Help
Artists, designers, filmmakers, and writers and the organizations that serve them have a unique power to craft and circulate art and stories that illustrate what is at stake — schools, hospitals, infrastructure, and more — and inspire people to respond. They can adapt quickly and touch people in our new digital reality. The census and organizers in the civic engagement space need them right now. – Hyperallergic
TikTok Asks Judge To Nullify Trump’s Threat Of A Ban
TikTok contends that Trump has exceeded his presidential power in ordering the ban, which it says amounts to impermissible regulation of users’ “personal communications” and was not “motivated by a genuine national security concern, but rather by political considerations relating to the upcoming general election.” – The Hollywood Reporter
We Thought Phone Calls Were Over. Then The Pandemic Came And People Rediscovered Talking
“Verizon said it was now handling an average of 800 million wireless calls a day during the week, more than double the number made on Mother’s Day, historically one of the busiest call days of the year,” reported The New York Times back in April. “Verizon added that the length of voice calls was up 33 percent from an average day before the outbreak. AT&T said that the number of cellular calls had risen 35 percent and that Wi-Fi-based calls had nearly doubled from averages in normal times.” – Nautilus
How A Viral Video About Math Ignited A Philosophical Debate
Cunningham had unwittingly re-ignited a very ancient and unresolved debate in the philosophy of science. What, exactly, is math? Is it invented, or discovered? And are the things that mathematicians work with—numbers, algebraic equations, geometry, theorems and so on—real? – Smithsonian
Caravaggio As Therapy (Caravaggio?? Yes.)
Teju Cole: “He was a murderer, a slaveholder, a terror and a pest. But I don’t go to Caravaggio to be reminded of how good people are and certainly not because of how good he was. To the contrary: I seek him out for a certain kind of otherwise unbearable knowledge. … I don’t have to love him to know that I need to know what he knows, the knowledge that hums, centuries later, on the surface of his paintings, knowledge of all the pain, loneliness, beauty, fear and awful vulnerability our bodies have in common.” – The New York Times Magazine
An AI Scientist Explains Why The GPT-3 Bot Is So Good At ‘Writing’ Original Text
“It’s far and away the most ‘knowledgeable’ natural language generation program to date, and it has a range of potential uses in professions ranging from teaching to journalism to customer service. GPT-3 confirms what computer scientists have known for decades: Size matters.” – The Conversation
Arts Fundraising Needs To Be Fully Professionalized As A Field
“As many as 44% of fundraisers fell in the profession by accident, with only 5% gravitating to fundraising as an intentional career choice. … We wouldn’t, for example, find a surgeon, accountant or lawyer who said they had got into their role by accident. All those roles would require a set period of study, with key milestones for passing training and competency-based testing. Yet in careers such as fundraising, there is no such pathway.” – Arts Professional
American Museum Of Natural History Fires Curator For Sexual Harassment
Mark E. Siddall, an invertebrate zoologist whose expertise is in leeches, “was fired this month … after the museum found that he had sexually harassed and bullied a graduate student who was doing research under his supervision.” – The New York Times
Juliette Gréco, Legend Of Chanson Française, Dead At 93
“An acclaimed French chanteuse whose sensual stage mystique and doleful voice bewitched audiences for more than six decades and made her an international recording and concert star, … [Gréco] was one of the last links to Jean-Paul Sartre and other existentialist intellectuals who made her their raven-haired, black-clad muse in the post-World War II bohemia of Paris’s Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood.” – The Washington Post
What Virtual Theatre Is Lacking
“When I tune into a play or a devised theater piece, I’m not looking to be dazzled by computer graphics. Clever Zoom backdrops don’t seize my imagination. I want what I always want from the stage: a confrontation with what it means to be human.” – Los Angeles Times
Metropolitan Opera Decides To Cancel Entire 20/21 Season
The decision is likely to send ripples of concern through New York and the rest of the country, as Broadway theaters, symphony halls, rock venues, comedy clubs, dance spaces and other live arts institutions grapple with the question of when it will be safe again to perform indoors. Far from being a gilded outlier, the Met, the nation’s largest performing arts organization, may well prove to be a bellwether. – The New York Times
$40-Million Collection-Care Goal: Brooklyn Museum’s 1st Round of Art Sales Under AAMD’s Relaxed Rules
The American Alliance of Museums’ Code of Ethics for collections, which states that sale proceeds can be used only for “acquisition or direct care of collections” [emphasis added]. Brooklyn’s disposals may serve as a role model for other financially pressed art museums, because it’s a pioneer on this new trail. – Lee Rosenbaum
100 Dancers To Perform In Royal Ballet’s Post-Lockdown Comeback
“The company has revealed ambitious details of its ‘comeback’ after a seven-month break from full performances on the Covent Garden stage. The plan is for a celebration performance with 100 dancers and a full orchestra on 9 October, livestreamed around the world. … And while it will be socially distanced, there will be dance duets thanks to couples in bubbles.” – The Guardian
As Coronavirus Stalks Its Ranks, Bolshoi Theater Sings And Dances On
“Plans were announced over summer for something approaching a full season of opera and ballet across its three stages, and on 6 September, the theatre started the season with an all-star cast performing Verdi’s Don Carlo” — which was canceled after two performances because two of those stars contracted COVID. “‘Said the Bolshoi’s general director, Vladimir Urin, ‘Unfortunately, in the current situation, it can become part of our everyday lives that at short notice we can no longer put things on.’ He said the theatre was working to ensure there were always understudies available to avoid cancellations happening too often.” – The Guardian