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Hunter Biden, Artist, Opens His Show. Are His Paintings Really Worth $500K?

As has been previously reported, his gallerist, George Bergès, is looking to fetch between $75,000 and $500,000 a piece for Biden’s paintings. And this has raised ethical issues the White House has not fully addressed. - Mother Jones

“Abstraction, I Think, Is Now Over,” Writes David Hockney

"It's run its course. … Its job was to take away the shadows that had dominated European art for centuries. It was only European art that used them. … The arts of China, Japan, India and Persia never use shadows or reflections." - The Art Newspaper

Why Don’t Museums Use Their Leverage?

In the museum world, there’s enormous potential stored in the museum’s permanent art collection – not as a financial asset, but as a lever for amplifying impact. Unfortunately, museums too often consider their collections to be exclusive. - MuseumNext

Why Some College Dance Classes That Went Online During The Pandemic May Stay Online For Good

Some dance departments have found that lecture courses such as dance history and anatomy work perfectly well virtually (and give students some scheduling flexibility as well). Others say that video conferencing opens new possibilities for artist residencies. - Dance Magazine

Fatty Arbuckle And Hollywood’s First Celebrity Scandal

The Arbuckle affair was the most notorious in a string of Hollywood scandals that threatened to kill off the movie industry in its adolescence. - The New Yorker

What Does A 550-Year-Old Tapestry Look Like After Four Years Of Cleaning? This.

The artwork, the oldest tapestry in the possession of the UK's National Trust, underwent 1,300 hours of conservation. While the colors are brighter and the detail work clearer, still murky is the question of where the piece spent most of the past five centuries. - The Guardian

The Decline (And Fall?) Of Facebook

What I’m talking about is a kind of slow, steady decline that anyone who has ever seen a dying company up close can recognize. It’s a cloud of existential dread that hangs over an organization whose best days are behind it. - The New York Times

Here Are The Finalists For The 2021 National Book Awards

"A food memoir that examines a mother's schizophrenia. A novel about an author's book tour, and about growing up as a Black boy in the rural South. Poetry honoring migrants who drowned while trying to cross the Rio Grande." - The New York Times

Tyshawn Sorey On How His Jazz Drumming And His Classical Compositions Inform Each Other

"Whenever I'm playing drums, I'm always thinking compositionally about how things develop. … Why do certain harmonies accompany the musicians in a particular way? Or why does a type of rhythmic information that I'm hearing … make me accompany the musicians in a certain way?" - The Paris Review

Pondering Masks As Theaters Reopen And Theater Workers Meet Their Colleagues Again

Playwright Sarah Ruhl: "To ask 'How are you?' no longer felt like small talk. We relied on our eyes above our masks to make connections. … If actors have always been avatars for what we cannot express, they seemed even more so now." - The New York Times

The Disappearance Of America’s Midsized Indie Book Publishers

Following Hachette's purchase this past summer of Workman Publishing, "there is a dearth of what can be called midsize publishers that fall between the Big Five and the many independent publishers with sales of $20 million or less." - Publishers Weekly

IATSE Members Vote Overwhelmingly To Authorize Hollywood Strike

The vote by the affected members — cinematographers, electricians, video editors, costumers, and the like — was 98.7% in favor of greenlighting what would be the union's first-ever nationwide walkout on film and television production. - Variety

Revival Of Vinyl Records Hobbled By Shortages Of Vinyl

Worldwide sales of the old-style black discs are up 700% in a decade, so the supply chain has no slack to absorb problems caused by the temporary closure of a petrochemical plant due to the Texas snowstorm or a California lacquer plant due to wildfires. - The Observer (UK)

Flash Floods Cause Closure Of Slovenia’s National Theater And Modern Art Museum

A total of nearly five inches of rain fell on Ljubljana on the evening of September 25, and among the many buildings to suffer millions of euros in damage were the theater SNG Drama Ljubljana and the Moderna Galerija. - The Art Newspaper

Art Market Soars To Record £2.7 Billion, Driven By Online, NFT Sales

Having seen sales collapse by a third in the previous year because of the initial crisis caused by the pandemic, sales soared between June 2020 and June 2021 as auctioneers quickly adopted a more online approach. - The Guardian

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