“My research finds that a prize’s long-term success actually depends on these kinds of low and embarrassing episodes, which attract public investment into the very market for symbolic capital that makes prizes necessary and keeps them afloat.” James English explains how this phenomenon plays out. — Public Books
How Words Change Their Meaning
Language is a system. Sounds, words and grammar do not exist in isolation: each of these three levels of language constitutes a system in itself. And, extraordinarily, these systems change as systems. If one change threatens disruption, another change compensates, so that the new system, though different from the old, is still an efficient, expressive and useful whole. – Aeon
Twin Cities Theatre Company Fires Director After #MeToo Complaints
Theater Mu, a St. Paul-based company focused on Asian-American work, cut ties with artistic director Randy Reyes after a board investigation “discovered conduct that did not reflect the culture we strive to achieve at Mu.” — The Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
Can Art Help The Families Of Opioid Crisis Victims? This Museum Is Finding Out
“The Currier Museum of Art in New Hampshire has created an unprecedented program that uses art as a healing tool for those affected by the epidemic in a state that’s ranked third in the nation for drug overdoses.” — Hyperallergic
Documenting The Civil War Damage To Yemen’s Cultural Heritage
The good news is that there’s been very little ideologically-based destruction of the kind ISIS perpetrated in Syria and Iraq; the damage is almost entirely “collateral,” the by-product of the warring sides shooting at each other. The bad news is that the worst of the damage has been caused by Saudi Arabia with American and European weapons. — Hyperallergic
City Versus Country: How Much Of The World Is Urban?
The current level of global urbanization is high: It estimates the world to be 84 percent urban already. The EC research team, led by Lewis Dijkstra, used satellite images to assess the share of the world’s population that is urban. While traditional estimates from the United Nations and elsewhere find Asia to be 50 percent urban, the EC team’s analysis of satellite images finds it to be 90 percent; while the UN estimates Africa’s urban population at 40 percent, the EC research team finds it to be 80 percent. – CityLab
Competitive Dance Is Thriving In Colleges, Even At MIT
The co-captain is a senior majoring in electrical engineering and computer science, and he isn’t kidding when he says, “Although we are all MIT students, dance is an outlet for us where we can be carefree and have fun.” – MIT News
The Future Of Television
Binge watching? That’s passé. But what’s next isn’t entirely clear. – The Wall Street Journal
Debt Bubble: Borrowing Against Art
Borrowing against art poses specific problems because of its portability, its heterogeneous nature and difficulty in establishing a reliable price. And yet, according to a report published last year by Deloitte and ArtTactic, in 2017 the global total of loans outstanding against art was eye-popping: between $17bn and $20bn. – The Art Newspaper
I’m Tired Of New Plays! I Want Something More
“In a word: I’m against the New Play. New Plays take many forms and have been around for years, but they seem especially prized lately. They’re plays with budget-friendly cast sizes, simpler stories with watery stakes, forward-slashes to indicate overlapping, a pretty strict adherence to the fourth wall, “ordinary” unaffected language, and an authorial injunction to either “play it fast” or “respect the beats”—or both. Further, all of the matter onstage is matter of the theatre (i.e. no video, film, poetry, live musical interlude, non-diagetic dance, opera, or lip-sync).” – Howlround
The Real Story Behind Elizabeth I’s Chalk-White Makeup
“Her shockingly white face is a deeply woven part of the historical image of this singular queen, and it’s worth unpacking in greater detail.” So that is what Slate history maven Rebecca Onion does. — Slate
New Yale Review Editor On Art And Politics
“To me, there is something thrilling about thinking through the ideas of our time alongside poems and fiction. Literature, with its idiosyncrasies, its heresies, its visions, can provide a kind of subversive push-pull against what the critic Alexandra Schwartz aptly called ‘the rubbery chew’ of op-ed culture.” – Lithub
New York’s “Fame” High School Removes Nazi Symbols From “Sound Of Music” Production
The principal at the elite “Fame” school, Lisa Mars, ordered Nazi flags and symbols removed from the stage set of the beloved tale of the Von Trapp family, who fled the Nazis from their native Austria as Adolf Hitler took power, students told the Daily News. – New York Daily News
For Solzhenitsyn’s Centenary, Bolshoi Presents New Opera Of One Of His Novels, Conducted By His Son
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, adapted by composer Alexander Tchaikovsky (no relation) and led from the podium by Ignat Solzhenitsyn (principal guest conductor of the Moscow Symphony and conductor laureate of the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia), “[is] staged in the round in the Bolshoi’s chamber theatre [and] sees prison guards patrol balconies behind barbed wire and searchlights roam the orchestra pit.” — Yahoo! (AFP)
The Man Who Invented The World Wide Web Has A List Of Principles For Saving It
Tim Berners-Lee: “The World Wide Web Foundation, an organization I founded in 2009 to protect the web as a public good, has drawn up a set of core principles outlining the responsibilities that each party has to protect a web that serves all of humanity. We’re asking everyone to sign on to these principles and join us as we create a formal Contract for the Web in 2019.” — New York Times
Art Handlers At MoMA Satellite PS1 Demand Same Pay As Those At Manhattan Mothership
“When both PS1 and the MoMA [headquarters] staged parts of a Bruce Nauman show, for example, the handlers in Manhattan, full-time members of the museum staff with benefits, were paid as much as $47 an hour. The top rate in Queens was $30 an hour. … The disparity led the art handlers in Queens, who do not receive health insurance or other benefits, to begin demonstrating outside the museum last month.” — New York Times
Smithsonian To Open Its First Gallery Devoted To U.S. Latino Art
“Opening in 2021 on the[National Museum of American History’s] first floor, the Molina Family Latino Gallery will feature bilingual exhibits exploring the history and contributions of American Latinos.” — Washington Post
Sydney Opera House Worth $6.2 Billion To Australia Annually: Study
A report by Deloitte titled Revaluing Our Icon says that the actual financial contribution of the Opera House to the economy is now $1.2 billion annually —up 44% from the last report, five years ago — with its “social asset value,” a combination of factors such as visitor experience, willingness to pay a premium to attend a performance there, the landmark’s importance in tourist’s decision to visit Australia, etc., at $5 billion. — Australian Financial Review
Three Years After Reviving It, Theatre Drops Its Once-Famous Rep Company Because It’s Just Too Expensive
BBC”[Liverpool’s] Everyman became famous in the 1970s for its rep company, which launched the careers of actors like Bill Nighy, Julie Walters, Pete Postlethwaite and Sir Anthony Sher.The theatre was rebuilt at a cost of £27m in 2014, and revived its rep company two years later – decades after the system died out in most venues. … But the Liverpool and Merseyside Theatres Trust, which runs the Everyman and [Liverpool] Playhouse, has now been forced to ditch the idea once more.” — BBC
In The Most Heavily Bombed Country In History, The Art Scene Is At Last Recovering
Which country is this? On a per capita basis, Laos, on which the U.S. dropped 2 million tons of explosives between 1964 and 1973 in an attempt to destroy North Vietnamese military supply lines. “A new generation of artists from the Lao People’s Democratic Republic are emerging, following decades of isolation in the orbit of the Soviet empire. The economy is growing rapidly, and the country is opening up.” — The Guardian
Get Thee to Cleveland For a Great Show
Lucky Cleveland! Since Nov. 18, residents and visitors to the Cleveland Museum of Art have been able to see six tapestries, woven in the mid 1570s, that have been under wraps, locked away, almost ever since then. For some 100 years, at least, they’ve been in the store rooms of the Uffizi Galery and before that in the Palazzo Vecchio Medici store rooms.
This Year’s Golden Globes Nominee List
“Vice,” Adam McKay’s scathing Dick Cheney biopic, walked away with a leading six nominations. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the organization behind the Globes, also awarded “A Star Is Born,” “The Favourite,” and “Green Book” with three nods apiece. On the television front, “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” picked up four nominations. “Barry,” “The Kominsky Method,” and “Homecoming” scored three nominations, as did “Sharp Objects,” “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” and “A Very English Scandal.” – Variety
NRA Settles Lawsuit Brought By Anish Kapoor
“Anish Kapoor reached an out-of-court settlement yesterday in a dispute with the National Rifle Association over its use of an image of his Chicago sculpture Cloud Gate (2004)” — aka “The Bean” — “in a promotional video. An agreement has been reached to remove the image from the video.” — The Art Newspaper
Why Diversity Matters
Roughly speaking, the most common defense of diversity has two parts. The first focuses on the educational and social benefits of diversity. The second attempts to show the inherent value of a diverse environment, one that is in some sense representative of the diversity of the American, or perhaps global, population.
100 Years Later: Debussy’s Legacy
The better we get to know Debussy, the stronger the contrast between the richness of his musical world and the sordidness of his personal life—and yet, in both music and life, he liked things to be beautiful, rich, and sensually pleasing, and he wanted these things without having to work too hard or too regularly. (Debussy admits that he suffered from a “sickness of delay…and this curious need to never finish” his pieces.)