In 2017, according to a new study released by the Australia Council, “nearly half of the eight million visitors to Australia engaged with the arts during their stay (43 percent), which proved more popular than wineries (13 percent), casinos (12 percent) or organised sporting events (six percent). … The report also shows that arts tourists have grown by 47 percent between 2013 and 2017, a higher growth rate than for international tourist numbers overall (37 percent).”
Prison Inmates Talk About How Performing In Plays Helps Their Rehabilitation
“It built all my confidence up, I felt alive again. I felt like there was a future.” Reporter Bruce Munro talks with current and former prisoners in Scotland (including one who’s gone on to study at the Royal Conservatoire) about the changes that prison theatre programs helped them make in their lives.
What Do Amazon Reviews Reveal About Humanity En Masse?
Here’s the theory: “The power of the Amazon review is not what you might think. They’re not really there to help you purchase a clock or a book or even to develop a conspiracy theory about the increasing flimsiness of Ziploc sandwich bags compared to other brands. … I mean, they are there to help you purchase things, but that is secondary. The real reason to read Amazon reviews, and, in particular, to follow the Hansel-and-Gretel breadcrumb trail of those reviews as left by one person from product to product, is to glimpse into a life, strange and whole and utterly unlike your own. This is where the real magic lies.”
These Argentine Arts Workers Have Been Spending A Year Fighting Sexism In Their Industry — Have They Made Progress?
“Calling themselves Nosotras Proponemos (nP), meaning ‘we propose,’ the group [of 100 women] published a manifesto-like list of 37 demands, asking that women receive equal representation in exhibitions, collections, and leadership positions in Argentina’s arts sector. One year later, nP is celebrating the significant changes their activism has made in Argentina’s art world” — even as much work remains to be done.
Study: Does Reading Fiction Increase Your Capacity For Empathy?
Psychologists have begun to explore this question by asking whether reading fiction improves people’s sensitivity to other people’s beliefs or emotions compared to either not reading or to reading nonfiction. A paper by David Dodell-Feder and Diana Tamir in the November 2018 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General looked across 14 studies using a technique called meta-analysis to determine whether there is reason to think that reading fiction improves social abilities.
How Well-Worn Idioms Shape Our Debates
Most of us don’t seek out a new form of language, and if we happen to come across arbitrary sentences or silly paragraphs, we’re less than thrilled about it. The old idioms work just fine. We know what they mean. Even if I store food in cartons in the fridge, I don’t “keep all my eggs in one basket.” Even if you never cook for yourself, you sometimes “put it on the back burner.” Does this mean that old idioms are inevitably clichéd?
Why Jude Kelly Left London’s Southbank Centre To Start A Series Of Festivals About Women’s Achievements And Stories
Kelly stepped down last year from the artistic directorship of one of the world’s largest arts centers to work full-time on the Women of the World (WOW) festivals. “I decided I was going to make a body of work which in every single sense was going to be questioning the place that women’s stories have in art, culture, and in everyday civil life and political life.” (video)
Damien Hirst’s Outdoor Sculptures Of Fetus Unveiled At Qatar Hospital
The series of 14 sculptures, each well over 40 feet tall, depicting the development of a fetus inside a uterus is titled The Miraculous Journey and installed outside a new medical center for women and children. (Yes, of course they’re controversial.)
Last Classical Record Store In Vancouver To Close
Sikora’s Classical Records has been operating for 40 years, but it’s now succumbing to what co-owner Ed Savenye says are “‘the five dirty D’s’: digitization (downloading and streaming), downsizing (people no longer have room for record collections), distribution (getting access to imports is increasingly challenging), desertion (people leaving for Amazon and other online sellers), and the saddest, demise — that is, the deaths of classical music lovers who continued to buy CDs and LPs.”
Esi Edugyan Wins Her Second Giller Prize
Edugyan secured the top prize after a season flush with acclaim for Washington Black, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Writers’ Trust fiction award.
Writers Union: Canadian Writers Earn 27 Percent Less Than Three Years Ago
When the Writers’ Union of Canada recently surveyed its members about their incomes, the results were sobering: an average writer made $9,380 a year from his or her writing. That’s 27 per cent less than what writers made three years ago, and a whopping 78 per cent less than they made in 1998. The report comes in stark contrast to the glossy literary awards season, where champagne flows and prizes that sound lucrative are given out, culminating with the $100,000 Giller Prize.
Poll Suggests That Audiences Would Object To Ads During Live Theatre Intermissions
The online survey was held in response to news that English National Opera is seeking permission to project adverts on to its safety curtain. Of 443 respondents to the poll, which asked: “Would you object to theatres screening adverts during the interval?”, 62% said they would object and 38% said they would not.
Notorious Art Forger Talks About Ethics
Wolfgang Beltracchi, convicted in 2011 of painting and selling a series of 14 forgeries that fetched a total of $45 million. He compares himself favorably to the likes of Jeff Koons: “I painted individual paintings and I never replicated them, they were always unique pieces from a certain context, a certain period, with a certain technique, with a certain narrative. These artists — Jeff Koons, but also Ai Weiwei, and there are many more — are promoted by great dealer and everyone earns a lot of money. It is trade, but it has no originality.”
New Report Commissioned By Macron Urges France To Return Colonial Art To Africa
The French historian Bénédicte Savoy and the Senegalese economist and writer Felwine Sarr will present their 108-page study to President Macron this Friday, 23 November. In it they argue that the complete transfer of property back to Africa and not the long-term loan of objects to African museums should be the general rule for works taken in the colonial period unless it can be proven that these objects were acquired “legitimately”.
MoMA Chairman Gives $40 Million For New Film Center
“In recognition of the gift, MoMA will create the Debra and Leon Black Family Film Center, spanning two floors of the museum’s … Lauder Building, which includes multimedia exhibition galleries and two theaters. The center will present film exhibitions and premieres with directors, actors, and other cinema experts.”
Stolen Picasso Found In Romanian Forest — Whoops! Never Mind, It Was A Hoax
Picasso’s Tete d’Arlequin was one of seven paintings stolen from Rotterdam’s Kunsthal in 2012 by a group of Romanian thieves and thought to have been burned in a stove by the ringleader’s mother. On Monday, news broke that Tete d’Arlequin had been found in rural Romania: later, “it emerged it was totally too good to be true, part of an elaborate and carefully staged piece of performance art by a radical Belgian theatre company.”
After Seven Seasons, Jessica Lang Dance To Shut Down
While Lang’s career as a choreographer has been going well, things (mostly money) for her company have been as difficult as for any small, independent dance troupe. “You have to raise so much money, the smaller companies don’t have enough staff, and Jessica was running the company for the last seven years without a day off,” said Lang’s manager. The group will disband in April, after completing a final tour.
We’re Less Free, Less Creative When Someone Is Watching Us
We know that surveillance has a chilling effect on freedom. People change their behavior when they live their lives under surveillance. They are less likely to speak freely and act individually. They self-censor. They become conformist. This is obviously true for government surveillance, but is true for corporate surveillance as well. We simply aren’t as willing to be our individual selves when others are watching.
Canadian Literary Prize Canceled After Finalists Discover Amazon Is A Sponsor
The CA$5,000 (£3,000) Prix littéraire des collégiens, running since 2003, is intended to promote Québécois literature and is decided by a jury of hundreds of students who select their winner from a selection of five works of fiction written in French by Canadian authors. But after this year’s finalists, the writers Lula Carballo, Dominique Fortier, Karoline Georges, Kevin Lambert and Jean-Christophe Réhel, discovered that Amazon Canada would be the prize’s new principal sponsor, they wrote to Le Devoir urging organisers to reconsider.
Nationalism Is Rearing Up Again And It Needs Hate To Survive. How To Transcend It?
If the cosmopolitan world we unsteadily inhabit is to survive, Hegelian logic would seem to demand that it find itself a new “other”—something which the nations of the world can only face, as they once faced the threat of perpetual conflict, as a cosmopolitan community, in which the self-consuming monster of national sovereignty would, once again, be laid to rest. Climate change, perhaps?
Ford Foundation Uses Its Building To Help Reinvent The 21st Century Foundation
After half a century, the building remained a gem but needed an upgrade. City officials gave the foundation until 2019 to remove asbestos, fix the sprinklers and make the site wheelchair accessible. The foundation’s president, Darren Walker, saw the opportunity to nudge the headquarters, in other ways as well, into the 21st century. And so Ford has now downsized its footprint, making room for other foundations. There’s a new public art gallery, a touch-and-feel garden in the atrium for the blind; and Mr. Walker converted his own office into a pair of conference rooms that can be used by outside nonprofits. The building is rechristened the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice.
Study: Trained Musicians Score Higher On Tests Of Thinking
Combining the results of all the tests, “musicians with extensive experience scored significantly higher than non-musicians and less-trained musicians,” the researchers write in the journal Psychology of Music. Specifically, they did better on four of the five cognitive skills that the tests measured.
Meet Dominique Campbell: Amplifying Detroit Through Music
“Our mission is simple: to serve as an amplifier within the music community, and to advance the music economy through shared learning, collaboration and partnerships. I believe that music is important to the future of Detroit because it captures and elevates the city’s legacy and community voice through song, and it can also serve as a significant economic driver for the city.”
The Things You Find Behind Doors, Like A Velazquez
In recent days, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston has rehung a painting called Kitchen Maid (c. 1620) with a new label, “attributed to Velazquez.” The work used to hang in its decorative arts mansion, Rienzi, partially blocked by a door! At that point, it was labeled “in the style of Diego Velázquez.”
Podcasts Are Now Big Business — And Compelling, Sometimes Slippery Storytelling
Rebecca Mead looks at how Serial changed the medium — opening floodgates of possibility, pressure, and money — and how some of that show’s successors have dealt with issues of narrative form and ethics.