“Palm Springs City Council has agreed to give the “Forever Marilyn” statue a temporary home along Museum Way for three years, but the plan with PS Resorts, which has been working to bring the statue back to Palm Springs for sometime, will contain an option that would allow the city to terminate the agreement before it expires should issues arise.” – Desert Sun
Why American TV Satire Is At A Low Point
TV satire’s lacklustre election reporting is, in part, due to Donald Trump’s immunity to ridicule. Over the last four years, he has embodied many of satire’s central characteristics including exaggeration, irony and stupidity. It has become increasingly difficult for satirists to skewer him. – The Conversation
What Are Our National Arts Support Organizations Doing For Equity?
“We look to service organizations like Americans For The Arts to help support us as we support our communities. However, we can no longer wait for them or organizations like them. These requests are not made to hurt the organization, but to serve the people it exists to serve: the entire national arts community.” – Hyperallergic
Is Baltimore Museum’s Plan To Sell Art Really About Pay Equity?
“The BMA is hardly the only museum with stark pay-equity problems in its lower ranks. But its attention to the issue has set it apart from countless other institutions that have largely ignored the issue. For the sake of the museum’s service workers — and service workers everywhere — here’s hoping they figure it out.” – Los Angeles Times
A New Bot-Based Book Recommendation Service
And it’s called, uh, Booxby. (Seriously, tech bros?) “Its new search portal asks you to input a book you liked, then it provides (fiction-only) recommendations based on the writing style of that book.” – LitHub
Musicians From Mali Offer Some Advice For Getting Through Tough Times
While the shutdowns across the world created some opportunities for musicians to rest, pause in endless touring, and recuperate from years of relentless work, it’s also caused some major challenges. “We just keep surfing on the waves — see what’s gonna happen next day, what’s gonna happen next day, next month.” – NPR
Theatres That Were Already Working On Flexibility Have The Advantage Now
As Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre director of development Jamie Clements notes, “Patrons tend to fall on a continuum between wanting fixed seats and wanting options; providing a flexible membership opened the door to those on the continuum looking for the ability to adjust.” And, obviously, 2020 demands the utmost flexibility from theatres and their patrons. – American Theatre
As A New Potential Lockdown Looms, Canada’s Indie Bookstores Are Doing Surprisingly Well
Personalized book and wine deliveries, a mix of weekly children’s online reading clubs, subscriptions services, and a heavy uptick in the use of the internet – all are helping Canadian independent bookstores survive. But another lockdown may be coming before buyers can get their holiday shopping finished, a make or break proposal for small indies. – CBC
The Washington Ballet’s Plan For Ballet During Covid-19
They went fully digital for 2020-2021, making a deal with Marquee TV for four performances. The dancers were split up into 10-person pods, with tests before rehearsal and before filming. Composers Zoomed into orchestra rehearsals. It wasn’t easy, but: “Dancing in a mask and the restraints of the protocol, I mean, nobody loves it. But in comparison to not dancing, really, it’s nothing.” – Washington Post
Disney+ Now Has 73 Million Subscribers
That marks a leap from the 60.5 million paying subscribers that Disney Plus had when Disney last reported earnings in early August. Hulu now has 36.6 million total paying subscribers, up from 35.5 million in late June, while ESPN Plus has grown to 10.3 million subscribers, up from 8.5 million reported last quarter. – Variety
Sell Tickets Or Raise Money?
People buy tickets because they want to see a performance and rate that transaction by that experience. People donate because they want to manage/share in/support what the company does. Those that choose to donate large amounts to a select few organizations – the right-thinking group described above – gain power in that kind of relationship. – LinkedIn
Why Pianists Know So Little About Their Pianos
“Why are pianists at such a loss when it comes to understanding the mechanics of their own instrument? This lack of knowledge separates them from almost all other instrumentalists. Not only can violinists, clarinetists, harpists or flutists tune their instruments, and even bend pitches in performance, they also, by and large, know much more about how their instruments work.” – The New York Times
A Shortage Of Printed Books This Winter?
Large printing companies in the U.S. are under financial strain, made worse by shutdowns due to the pandemic and subsequent reopenings with fewer employees. Fewer books printed means fewer books going to distributors — who themselves have had pandemic-related issues with staffing their warehouses. Add in a paper shortage, and a publishing schedule in flux because many spring/summer books were pushed to fall, and you have a perfect storm of supply-chain gridlock. – Seattle Times
Despite The Pandemic, Steppenwolf Is Building An Entire New Theater
“In March of last year, Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre officially announced its campus expansion: a new $54 million theater-in-the-round. Back then, theaters still staged live shows and cared not for streaming video. Zoom was a comic-book term.” Chris Jones goes on a hard-hat tour of the building-in-progress and talks with artistic director Anna D. Shapiro about the company’s multimillion-dollar bet that, soon, the show will go on like it did before. – Yahoo! (Chicago Tribune)
How Paris Is Becoming A “15-Minute City”
“The 15-minute city represents the possibility of a decentralized city,” says Carlos Moreno, a scientific director and professor specializing in complex systems and innovation at University of Paris 1. “At its heart is the concept of mixing urban social functions to create a vibrant vicinity”—replicated, like fractals, across an entire urban expanse.” – Bloomberg
Aileen Passloff, An Institution Of New York Dance, Dead At 89
“A former member of the Judson Dance Theater, the experimental 1960s collective that led to postmodern dance, … [her] career as a dancer, choreographer and broadly influential teacher spanned [decades of] ballet, modern dance and postmodern dance.” – The New York Times
Isaac Newton’s ‘Principia’ Wasn’t Just A Scientific Landmark, It Was Surprisingly Widely Read When It Was New
“Historians have discovered that the first, limited edition of the seemingly incomprehensible book in fact achieved a surprisingly wide distribution throughout the educated world. An earlier census of the [1687] book, published in 1953, identified 189 copies worldwide. But a new survey by two scholars has found nearly 200 more — 386 copies in all, including ones far beyond England.” – The New York Times
Stagehand Falls To Death In Mothballed Broadway Theater
“The 54-year-old man fell from [a] narrow, raised platform [with a ladder] alongside the stage around 8:45 a.m. while performing routine maintenance, the police said. … [He] was an employee of the Shubert Organization, which operates the Winter Garden Theater, and was not affiliated with Beetlejuice, the last show to play there.” – The New York Times
Highway Tunnel Under Stonehenge Approved
“The two-mile-long tunnel and its approaches are part of a $2.2 billion package to upgrade the narrow A303 highway that runs startlingly close to the iconic stone circle and has long been notorious for traffic jams and long delays. The approval came despite strong objections from an alliance of archaeologists, environmentalists, and modern-day druids.” – National Geographic
Trying To Understand Indigenous Ways Of Passing On Knowledge
“If knowledges are environmentally embedded, and have to be activated through skilled practices, our orthodox idea that the privileged pathway for knowledge acquisition is cognitive, from one brain to another, is challenged. Think about it: we have never been able to ‘think’ without more-than-human extensions.” –Psyche
You Can’t Make This Stuff Up: Classic Shows Remade For The Trump Era
“SHAMILTON. A rap-inspired musical drawn partly from the pages of The Art of the Deal, this show celebrates the creation of a new nation by a small group of wealthy landowners and hyper-successful businessmen through the adoption of an economic funnel that sucks money out of the pockets of the poor and middle classes and into the bank accounts of the rich. Its hit tunes My Way or the Highway and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break are hailed as chart-toppers, although there are mutterings inside the music industry that the numbers are manipulated and Payola is involved.” – Oregon ArtsWatch
Inside A Treasure Trove Of Wax Cylinder Recordings
Say what you want about the millions of digital songs stored in the cloud and awaiting your Spotify spin. Strolling through the rows of shelving units, each packed with cylinder recordings, overwhelms the imagination. – Los Angeles Times
UK Declines To Prosecute Royal Accused Of Sexual Assault By Curator Of Hay Festival Abu Dhabi
The Crown Prosecution Service won’t pursue the case of Caitlin McNamara, a Briton who was organizing the inaugural version of the Hay book festival’s satellite event in the UAE when, she says, she was summoned to a meeting at the villa of the Emirati official overseeing the festival (the country’s Minister of Tolerance) and he assaulted her. – The Guardian
John Waters Donates His Collection To Baltimore Museum Of Art
Waters’s collection, much of which is installed in his home, features in-depth holdings of works by Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Mike Kelley, Karin Sander and Richard Tuttle, and will fill gaps in the museum’s own collection of work by artists including Catherine Opie and Thomas Demand. An exhibition of works from the gift will be staged at the museum within the next five years, it says in a statement. – The Art Newspaper
Meet The Guardians Of The World’s Oldest Recorded Music
Preserving early recordings — and the lumbering machines that play them — has been an obsession for a small group of Southern California collectors, who have been stealthily wrangling from the wild the essential sounds of the early American acoustic recording era. – Los Angeles Times
Beware “Big Break” Scams For Classical Music
“It’s a psychological phenomenon: When you’ve been chosen for something, you feel flattered. And if you don’t have other options, you think, This is my big chance.“ – Van
European Union Increases Its Culture Rescue Fund To $3.3 Billion
“The European Parliament and the European Council have finally agreed on an ambitious long-term recovery plan for its 27 member nations. The historic €1.8 trillion ($2.1 trillion) agreement, which was announced on November 11, will include a provision of €2.8 billion ($3.3 billion) to support the cultural field.” – Artnet