“When I saw QAnon, I knew exactly what it was and what it was doing. I had seen it before. I had almost built it before. It was gaming’s evil twin. A game that plays people. (cue ominous music)” – Medium
Tokyo’s Transparent Public Toilets Were Designed By A Pritzker Prize Winner
“Yes, these colorful, see-through stalls turn opaque when occupied. When not, you can literally see right through them. … The architect behind these one-of-a-kind Tokyo toilets is Shigeru Ban, winner of none other than the Pritzker Prize, the world’s most prestigious architectural prize. And when you take a deeper look into the work of the architects behind these transparent restrooms, the source of such creativity becomes more than obvious.” – Metropolis (Tokyo)
Yes, Reading Is Important, But It’s Not A Moral Good In Itself
Katherine Gaudet on trying to make children into lifelong readers: “I teach humanities courses to undergraduates; I facilitate reading groups at public libraries; I have seen over and over how engagement with literature leads to understanding, empathy, and exploration. What I don’t believe in anymore is the moral undertone of reading promotion: that people who read for pleasure are more good and more deserving than those who don’t.” – Literary Hub
Music Has A Philosophical Language All Its Own
Music is a Socratic teacher. Its melodies and call-and-response mechanisms, together with the subsequent variations in modulations and rhythms, steer us away from linear thinking and towards nuance. – Psyche
Words We Can Grab From Elsewhere
“I’m really against translating or editing foreign speakers’ texts into seamless English. Not only because I know this disadvantage as a second language speaker (and writer) who has a hard time expressing the same ideas in a different medium. But also because any meaning carried by a given text is strongly nuanced by the author’s linguistic choices.” – Eurozine
The Ethics Of Euphemism In News Reporting
“What some studies have found is that people are actually more likely to use euphemisms to save face socially than in consideration of the feelings of others. This, coupled with the desire to sound neutral, objective, and authoritative, can lead journalists to use euphemistic language to reframe a story obliquely, even when the facts themselves are indisputable.” (For instance, collateral damage or officer-involved shooting or misrepresentation.) “Such tentative reporting not only reveals hidden biases and value judgments, it also can fall into ethical traps that have real-world and legal repercussions.” – JSTOR Daily
Taking The ‘Ology” Out Of Musicology: A Dozen Scholars Talk About Where The Field Is Headed
“Ever since the 1980s, and the 1985 release of Joseph Kerman’s hallmark Contemplating Music, the traditionally separate fields of musicology and ethnomusicology have been undergoing a reinvention. Today, music scholars (note the conspicuous absence of terminology) are grappling with the field’s complex, colonial history, its purpose and articulation, and even its name in novel ways. Their work is a reflection of the field’s proverbial coming of age.” – WQXR (New York City)
NPR Wants To Broaden Its Audience. What Could It Learn From The BBC?
“The BBC eventually had to succumb to the public’s demands to hear what it wanted, not what [BBC founder John] Reith wanted them to hear. … In the United States, public radio never attracted an audience near as diverse as NPR’s founding purposes hoped. Public radio sincerely welcomed all, but those who chose to listen represented such a narrow type that ‘NPR listener’ became a meaningful term.” – Current
Hollywood Says Movie Theatres Won’t Survive Without Federal Help
“Absent a solution designed for their circumstances, theaters may not survive the impact of the pandemic,” the industry groups said in the letter. “Cinemas are an essential industry that represent the best that American talent and creativity have to offer. But now we fear for their future.” – Los Angeles Times
UK Government Warns Cultural Institutions Not To Remove Statues
In a letter sent September 22 to several public bodies, the secretary of state for digital, culture, media, and sport, Oliver Dowden, set out the government’s position on contested heritage: “The Government does not support the removal of statues or other similar objects.” – Artnet
Peter Marks: What I Learned Watching An Experiment Unfold
“Rex Daugherty — whose work I’ve reviewed several times — and I were both interested in how artists and critics could learn more about each other’s functions, could demystify our roles in some small way. Social media has brought many reviewers into far closer proximity with theater artists than ever before. It occurred to us that exploring how the mistrust that often develops between critics and artists might be mitigated was worthwhile, especially when live theater has been sidelined and many theater events are occurring in the digital space. I ended up learning far more than I contributed.” – Washington Post
Why This Social Practice Arts Organization Decided To Hibernate
Deborah Fisher, A Blade of Grass’s executive director, had to make an unenviable decision. She could retrofit the organization’s model to a pandemic-shaped world, continuing to employ her full-time staff, and ask an increasingly depleted pool of cultural funders for more and more money. Or she could make changes—big, fundamental, tough changes that would necessitate the sacrifice of people’s jobs for the prospect of a brighter future. – Artnet
Think Of A Debate As A Public Space. This Is What Happens When You Litter It
The beach or the park succeeds based on the willingness of everyone who enters to uphold commonly accepted expectations. Maintenance of the space becomes reflexive, a civic habit that is self-reinforcing: When you enter a beautiful space, you are inclined to keep it beautiful, no public shaming required. Unfortunately, the inverse is also true. If it isn’t a beautiful space, then most people aren’t inclined to keep it beautiful. And when these conditions begin to prevail, public spaces fail, often precipitously. – Washington Post
Washington State Sues Brown Paper Tickets
The ticketseller, which took on giant Ticketmaster, has been a favorite of thousands of arts organizations for selling tickets. But since March, the company has failed to pay event organizers for the tickets they sold. – Seattle Times
Open Letter From Hollywood Begs Congress To Save U.S. Cinemas
“Dozens of established filmmakers joined with the Directors Guild of America, the National Association of Theatre Owners and the Motion Picture Association to urge Congress to come to the aid of movie theaters devastated by COVID-19. ‘Absent a solution designed for their circumstances, theaters may not survive the impact of the pandemic,’ the letter warns.” (full text included) – Deadline
How Did Humans Fumble Their Stewardship Of The Planet?
In the latter half of the 19th century, when small-scale artisanal methods were giving way to larger-scale industrialization in many areas of resource extraction and use, Homo sapiens was not, in fact, just another species, an organism like any other. To the contrary, H. sapiens was just embarking on a period of more sudden environmental transformation than any single species had ever achieved. Homo sapiens was, in fact, quite special. – Nautilus
100 Prominent Artists Sign Letter Protesting Postponement Of Guston Show
An A-list cadre of contemporary artists and intellectuals have similarly decried the museums’ decision in an open letter that asks them to reinstate the exhibition as planned. – Artnet
Only A Fifth Of Major NYC Productions In 2017-18 Were By Nonwhite Theatermakers: Study
“A new report has found stark disparities in racial representation and pay gaps on the New York stage – the vast majority of writers and directors remain white, while some theater non-profits spent up to six times as much on white actors as actors of color.” – The Guardian
Defendants In Trial For Theft Of African Art Turn Spotlight Back On French Colonizers
“[Mwazulu] Diyabanza, along with four associates, stood accused of attempting to steal a 19th-century African funeral pole from the Quai Branly Museum in Paris in mid-June, as part of an action to protest colonial-era cultural theft and seek reparations. But it was Wednesday’s emotionally charged trial that gave real resonance to Mr. Diyabanza’s struggle, as a symbolic defendant was called to the stand: France, and its colonial track record.” – The New York Times
How Convincing AI-Written Text Could Screw Up The Entire News Ecosystem
“With A.I.-generated writing able to fool many readers, disinformation-as-a-service will become possible, eliminating the need for human-staffed ‘troll farms.’ … [Software like GPT-3] could enable what sociologist Zeynep Tufekci calls ‘modern censorship’ — information campaigns that harass, confuse, and sow mistrust with the goal of undermining individual agency and political action.” – Slate
Six Months Into Pandemic, Performing Arts Orgs Reeling As Revenue Keeps Shrinking
Among the findings in “COVID-19 and the Performing Arts – Six Months After Closure,” the fourth report from TRG Arts on the effects of the coronavirus shutdown, are that ticket revenues are down more than 80% from last year in North America and the UK and that individual donations have fallen by a quarter in North America but by almost two-thirds in Britain. – TRG Arts
Baritone Mariusz Kwiecień, 47, Retires From Singing Effective Immediately
For more than 20 years he sang the lyric baritone repertory at the world’s top opera companies, with Mozart’s Don Giovanni a specialty. But, before the lockdown, he had been canceling appearances frequently, and he continued to do so as opera production restarted in Europe this summer and fall. Now he has revealed that, due to persistent back problems, he has ended his performing career and been named artistic director at the opera house in Wrocław, Poland. – OperaWire
Frick Will Show Its Collection In The Old Whitney Museum
The Frick’s two-year tenure in the Breuer — the 1966 Brutalist building owned by the Whitney Museum of American Art and recently occupied by the Metropolitan Museum of Art — will allow the Frick to continue exhibitions while its 1914 Gilded Age mansion on Fifth Avenue undergoes renovation. – The New York Times
A Manifesto To Activate Creative Workers
Americans for the Arts: “The next Administration must boldly activate the nation’s 5.1 million arts and cultural workers to address critical infrastructure, community development, innovation, and public health needs. Creative workers, and the hundreds of thousands of creative businesses they drive, have been devastated by Coronavirus more than almost any other sector —one study pegs the creative worker unemployment rate at 63% and a collective income loss of over $60 billion but stand ready to heal, strengthen, rebuild, and reimagine our communities.” – Americans for the Arts
A Justification For A New LACMA?
LACMA’s buildings from the 1960s were pedestrian, vertical, confining, the mid-1980s addition looking from Wilshire Boulevard like a giant mausoleum. Zumthor and Govan are clearly attempting to place the art-going experience on a higher, newer plane, one that forsakes the normal strategies. Yes, the risks are great, but so are the possibilities. – Los Angeles Times