ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

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Making The Case For Art: It Can’t Be About Words

 If you are presenting art because you enjoy art and only because you enjoy art, you are not respecting your charter as a nonprofit. That’s vanity, not service. Vanity has weighed down this portion of the sector with 16 tons of irrelevance. - Medium

How The Pandemic Has Warped Seattle Arts’ Return To Work

“All the houses are trying to open up at the same time, and they all need the same people,” Terry Podgorski said, noting that they have great actors, but they’re lacking people in “the infrastructure, the management and the tech.” - Seattle Times

Philadelphia Is Getting A Big New Performance Hall

"On Monday, the University of Pennsylvania announced it will build a new 3,100 square-foot theater to adjoin the Annenberg Center, a glitzy venue with a glimmering glass facade, towering ceilings and walls that open up onto Annenberg Center plaza for both indoor and outdoor shows." - The Philadelphia Inquirer

What The Arts Learned About Digital Engagement

Digital events can reduce geographic inequalities, and lessen the costs associated with attending a festival. Digital delivery of a festival also provides something of a ‘safe space’ for those who lack the confidence to engage with arts and culture. It also allows for the use of accessibility features such as closed captioning. - RTE

A First: University Offers Degree In Chess

Webster University in St. Louis is renowned for attracting top-notch chess talent to its school, and now its School of Education is offering a minor degree focused on the game. Core courses range from chess in history to the psychology and strategy of the game. - The Globe & Mail (Canada)

Putin Stifles Artists As War Goes Badly

The number of banned theater directors, filmmakers, playwrights and musicians had been growing by the day. “I look around and I cannot find anything left of my favorite free theater,” Kogut told The Daily Beast. “There is not a single acute play left in the repertoires of Moscow theaters." - The Daily Beast

The Lawsuit That Is Threatening The Entire Internet Archive

Early in the pandemic, "the Internet Archive made a decision that pissed off a lot of writers—and embroiled it in a lawsuit that many netizens fear could weaken the archive, its finances, and its services long into the future." - Slate

Let’s Talk About That NC-17 Rating For The Netflix Marilyn Monroe Biopic

The history of the rating is, one might say, fraught. But Netflix isn't a movie theatre; why does it have an NC-17 rating on its film? The answer: The streaming service is reaching for an Oscar. - Salon

The Not So Comfortable Discussions About Sidney Poitier

Poitier was "a man who both aspired and inspired just as much as he frustrated and disappointed. We rarely ever really talk about that last part. Sidney implores us anyway." - HuffPost

Russia’s War On Wikipedia Editors Ramps Up

Editors have been doxxed, threatened, and arrested. "Doronina of the Wikimedia Foundation’s board of trustees said that Russia’s state agencies could target one of those editors any day. 'You cannot predict who is going to attack. It’s not a bear, it’s a pack of bears,' she said." - Nieman Lab

Director Gianni Amello Says Italy Is Still Plagued By Homophobia

He says the ideal audience for his new film is an elementary school teacher afraid of coming out, and "parents of kids who are gay and will have to deal with the day when their kids have the courage to come out to them." - Variety

Can An Artificial Intelligence Truly Make Great Art?

Talking with a man who won a photography contest with an AI-produced image, "you definitely get this feeling of almost resentment toward human artists, too, where he’s saying, like, you know, you all think you’re so special. And I just proved that you’re not." - Slate

The Tangled Strings Around Freedom Of Speech

Free speech requires a robust exchange of views without the coercion of threats and violence, and self-censorship in response to social pressure is a genuine risk. Yet by definition, there is no free speech if one person is allowed to make an argument and another is not allowed to object to it. - The Atlantic

How Today’s Billionaires Distort And Impede Things We Care About

The great fortunes of today's robber-barons have a vast, distorting influence on our society, bending our most urgent projects away from evidence-based policy and towards the pet theories of billionaire dilettantes. - Pluralistic

When Goethe’s House Was Destroyed In WWII, Rebuilding Became Controversial

As Goethe later recalled in his autobiography, it was to the house that he owed his literary awakening. It was there, gazing at his family’s prints, that he had learned to love Italy, antiquity and nature; there that his passion for drama was first fired; and there that he wrote some of his most famous works. - History Today

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