Under the plan, Mayor Bill de Blasio promised to hold august institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Carnegie Hall accountable for hiring more members of historically marginalized and underrepresented groups and for making their boards of directors and other leadership ranks more inclusive. But the Department of Cultural Affairs did not set numerical goals for what constituted progress, nor did it require that institutions provide baseline demographic statistics about their staffs. – The New York Times
$550 Million In Losses And Expenses, Finds Report On COVID-19’s Effect On New York City’s Nonprofit Arts Sector
Among the major data points: “Ninety-five percent of organizations canceled programs, 88% modified delivery of their programs, and as of May 8th, 11% were not providing products or services to their communities. Small organizations with budgets under $250,000 have been hardest hit. … 11% of organizations indicated that they do not think they will survive the COVID-19 crisis.” – SMU Data Arts
Silicon Valley Gets A New Professional Dance Company
“San Jose Dance Theatre [has] announced that it [is] launching a professional ballet company, as well as a trainee program and a new pre-professional training division. This is good news for San Jose, which saw Silicon Valley Ballet shut down in 2016.” – Pointe Magazine
Canada’s Internet Use Has Surged 50 Percent Since COVID
Since physical distancing measures were put in place across the country, internet usage on Shaw’s wireline network has increased by as much as 50 percent overall, and peak usage periods have climbed to twelve hours a day, every day of the week, instead of the usual three or four hours in the evening. – The Walrus
Cheap Food Is Good, Right? Well Maybe We’re Not Adding Up The Cost…
In a capitalist society, viewed from the point of view of consumers, cheap food looks like an unequivocal democratic good, because it enables people to feed themselves, even on relatively low incomes… The missing part of the picture, however, is that cheap food is also one of the factors pushing large swathes of the workforce into exploitation and poverty. – Times Literary Supplement
How Can A Full Orchestra Place Itself Onstage Safely While COVID’s Still Here? Tokyo Scientists And Musicians Have Been Figuring That Out
Conductor Kazushi Ono and the players of the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra spent two days at the Bunka Kaikan concert hall in mid-June with researchers from a university and medical school in the Japanese capital. They experimented with various seating schemes, measuring aerosol spray from the musicians’ faces and working out how to balance hearing each other with keeping each other safe. Ono writes about the results. – Maestro Arts
Kirill Serebrennikov Gets Three-Year Suspended Sentence In Controversial Embezzlement Case
“[The decision is] a surprise legal victory in a fraud case his supporters say was politically motivated and a test of artistic freedom in Russia. Suspended sentences are widely seen as the lightest punishment in Russia’s legal system, which rarely issues not-guilty verdicts. The sentencing was met with applause by the hundreds of supporters gathered outside.” – The Moscow Times
Bolsonaro Names A Soap Opera Star (The Second In A Row) Brazil’s Culture Secretary
“Mário Frias … is the fifth person to hold the role in the 17 months since president Jair Bolsonaro was elected and, like most of his predecessors, Frias has no political experience. … Last month, [Frias] participated in an anti-fascist protest in São Paulo and said that demonstrators were taking part in ‘organised crimes’ and should be considered terrorists.” – The Art Newspaper
How To Save American Theatre: Bring It To TV
No, not like the National Theatre Live performances – more like the 1950s style playhouses. “What I’d like to see is both more modest and more ambitious: a TV series that brings together leading nonprofit theatres to stage new plays appropriate to production in studios without audiences. This may discourage broad comedies and musicals, which thrive on laughter and applause, but it would still allow for a wide range of potential material. Protocols are now being established in Hollywood and New York for studio work designed to protect the safety of cast and crew, and these would make production on this scale possible.” – American Theatre
Reconsidering The Art And Life Of Valerie Solanas
Solanas is most famous for having shot Andy Warhol, of course, but she had an artistic life long before that moment. In the beginning, the writer and Warhol Factory superstar Ultra Violet wrote, “beyond her overheated rhetoric, she had a truly revolutionary vision of a better world run by and for the benefit of women.” – The New York Times
How We Started Thinking Of Pandemics As Waves
It started as math, transitioned to both epidemiology and morality, and now holds sway among the public as well. But the idea of a “wave” wasn’t inevitable. – Boston Review
Bands Whose Names Refer To Slavery Are Changing Their Names, And Sometimes More
The band names are a symbol – just a symbol, perhaps, but a strong one. However: “The question is not, “‘hould bands whose names have ties to slavery change them?’ The question is: Are we committed to looking our awful history in the eyes, admitting that it led us to a place in which Black people in America are still systematically mistreated, and doing everything we can to fix that?” – Vice
Fringe Theatres And Pubs Are The Lifeblood Of British Theatre, And The Virus Is Killing It All
Without the small stages, emerging voices in British theatre don’t have much of a chance. One playwright: “Uncertainty is dreadfully demotivating. I intended to use the lockdown to write a new play that’s been nagging at me, but I’ve hardly written a word. For the first time in a decade and a half, I cannot see much prospect of getting it performed.” – The Guardian (UK)
Kenneth Lewes, Whose Takedown Of Homophobia In Psychiatry Changed The Official Take And Many Lives, Has Died At 76
“Lewes’s major work, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Male Homosexuality (1988), traced the evolution of the prevailing view that homosexuality was a curable illness and explored what he called the psychoanalytic establishment’s ‘century-long history of homophobia.'” – The New York Times
What Will Success Mean When Movie Theatres Reopen In The U.S.?
Well, maybe something is salvageable (though very possibly not, as numbers of infections continue to mount): “If audiences show faith in theaters’ revamped safety, social-distancing, and cleaning protocols, this July and August’s remaining ticket returns could help reverse a death spiral that has so far yielded a barely consequential $3 million in ticket sales between April and June, and narrowed the usual field of 25 to 30 potential blockbusters to just 7 or 8 wide-release films.” – Vulture
Ola Mae Spinks, Librarian Who Used Her Own Money To Organize ‘Slave Narratives’ At The Library Of Congress, 106
Spinks was working as a school librarian in Pontiac, Michigan, when “she and a friend, also a librarian, contacted the U.S. Library of Congress and volunteered to visit Washington, D.C., to help organize the ‘Slave Narratives.'”- Detroit Free Press
In Britain, Performing Arts Spaces Say They’ve Been Hung Out To Dry
The government issued a five-step roadmap to reopening … a roadmap that “did not come with dates or monetary help attached.” One theatre executive said the roadmap was “‘as useful a map as a snakes and ladders board,’ adding: ‘We need dates, data and INVESTMENT now!'” – BBC
The Twilight Of The ‘Hero’ Statues
Most of the statues are bad art in any case, with the Confederate ones intended to pave the way toward a white supremacist future. “Even if most of the hero statues remain standing, we should follow the pigeons: Desecrate them, at least. We must activate our skepticism about the ways dubious heroes are foisted on us. And we must build new kinds of memorials.” – Los Angeles Times
Milton Glaser, Master Designer Of I Heart NY Logo, 91
Glaser, a co-founder of New York Magazine and designer of iconic images and styles, “changed the vocabulary of American visual culture in the 1960s and ’70s with his brightly colored, extroverted posters, magazines, book covers and record sleeves, notably his 1967 poster of Bob Dylan with psychedelic hair and his ‘I ♥ NY’ logo.” – The New York Times
Why Does Some Music Have Therapeutic Effects?
And can brainwaves explain it? There’s a place at “the frontiers of biotechnology and experimental music” trying to figure it all out. – Aeon
The Plan For Cinema Reopenings In Britain
Of course, there will be plastic between customers and food workers; there will be spaces between people in the theatres; and … there will be Singing in the Rain, at least until new movies start coming out again at some point in the future. – BBC
Who Gets Fame, And Who Gets Remembered, As Being Part Of Dance Music?
Aluna Francis: “We not only need to give credit to the artists that created the genre, we also need to establish a long-term plan to secure a healthy future for dance music that is culturally and racially inclusive.” – Pitchfork
What ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ Did To Kevin Kwan’s Life
Sudden, massive fame may seem grand – but it’s not so easy to live through. “My life exploded and I’m still trying to put it back together. I jumped on the rollercoaster, it’s been really chaotic for the last seven years.” – The Guardian (UK)
Yet Another Experiment With New York Street Design
Some streets are pedestrian-only now, zoned for restaurants to spread into the middle of the street where cars once crowded. Though this design is new and pandemic-related, research shows “the city has a long history of considering audacious designs to tame urban chaos.” – Fast Company
Conductors On Hold
There’s truly no way to perform the craft of being an orchestra conductor right now. So they, like most of us, are doing other things: “For conductors with steady work before the pandemic — globe-trotting and rarely home — the aftermath of cancellations has amounted to a surprise sabbatical. They have learned new languages, picked up old instruments, and composed. And they have begun to reimagine performances for the coming year.” – The New York Times
Teen Who Threw Child Off Tate Modern Sentenced To 15 Years
The Old Bailey heard how Bravery spent more than 15 minutes stalking possible targets at the art gallery viewing platform before fixing on a young visitor who had briefly left his parents’ side. The teenager, who is from Ealing, was said to have “scooped (the victim) up and, without any hesitation, carried him straight to the railings and threw him over”. – Local Guardian (UK)
Louvre To Reopen With A Fraction Of Its Usual Visitors
When the museum reopens, 70 percent will be accessible, including the large galleries of French and Italian paintings, the sculpture courtyards and the Egyptian antiquities section. But with France’s borders still closed to travelers from outside the European Union, visitor numbers will be a fraction of what they usually are in the peak summer season. – New York Times
American Nursing Homes Have Been Exposed As A Design Catastrophe
Even when there is no pandemic to worry about, most of these places have pared existence for the long-lived back to its grim essentials. These are places nobody would choose to die. More important, they are places nobody would choose to live. “People ask me, ‘After COVID, is anyone going to want to go into a nursing home ever again?’ The answer is: Nobody ever wanted to go to one.” – New York Magazine
COVID-As-Opportunity: Enough With Utopias, We Need Practical Ideas
“Maybe I’ve missed the more nuanced views, but if feels like the only people out there – in my echo chambered world at any rate – who admit that they can’t be sure are those with the most wisdom to express some degree of certainty – our epidemiologists and other medical scientists. Too many other people are using this crisis to justify their own existing view of the world’s dystopia, and already-formed hopes for a future utopia.” – Cultural Learning Alliance
How The Virus Turned This Ballet Master Into A Real-Life Phantom Of The Opera
Curtis Foley, who danced with the Royal Winnipeg ballet and Les Ballets Grandiva, was, until this year, a ballet master at the Polish National Ballet He had just arrived to coach the ballet company at the opera house in the Czech city of Ostrava when the COVID lockdown struck — and he’s ended up spending four months, much of that time alone, living inside the theater. – Dance Magazine