Thomas Cole's Arch of Nero wound up being one of the symbols of the ongoing argument about US museums' deaccessioning of artworks in order to get through the financial difficulties caused by the pandemic. Fortunately, the destination of this particular painting is neither inappropriate nor far away: the purchasers are placing it on long-term loan with the Philadelphia Museum...
What’s important to note about these hoaxes is that they are absolutely terrible—totally artless, not believable at all, only really a “fool me once” situation if you were born or signed up for a Twitter account yesterday. Their relative success is even more embarrassing when you consider that the targets are supposed to be readers, people who approach language...
"I do feel proud that as a woman in the film industry in her mid-40s, having been doing this job since I was 17, that I'm being given this space to fully embrace all of these changes that life's years have left my face and body with." - BBC
The science author and historian Sarah Dry withdrew as a trustee of the Science Museum Group in March after she was asked to support the government’s position on contested heritage. Meanwhile, the re-appointment of the Bangladeshi-British academic Aminul Hoque as trustee at Royal Museums Greenwich was vetoed by the government earlier this year, prompting Charles Dunstone, the chair of...
"Your ability to express what you see in an artwork, to explain why it is good, and to examine the ways in which it stinks has impressed your art history professors. After nine years in college, you wonder what it would feel like to have others read your writing. Can the theory-heavy jibber jabber you ingested and regurgitated in...
Residents were caught by surprise on Thursday when a cruise liner sailed into the lagoon city for the first time since the pandemic began, despite prime minister Mario Draghi’s government declaring that the ships would be banned from the historic centre. The 92,000 tonne ship MSC Orchestra collected 650 passengers before leaving for Bari, in southern Italy, on Saturday....
"The upcoming season will be more modest than usual: about 90 concerts, compared with a typical slate of 150, though more may be added depending on the state of the pandemic. With the virus still raging in many parts of the world and variants circulating, Carnegie said it planned to require concertgoers to show proof of vaccination. It has...
"In the past, statistical analysis at this scale was limited by the complexity of the task and the lack of mathematical and computational tools. The triumph of modern machine learning lies in developing increasingly sophisticated, efficient, and data-driven computational methods for doing such analysis. “But is this AI?” ask the skeptics. It is too narrow, too specialized, too dependent...
Katy Pyle and her company, Ballez, have a new work called Giselle of Loneliness (click here if you don't get the reference) "that grapples conceptually with ballet's stringent and arguably exclusionary, conformist and outmoded traditional norms. … production pairs seven dancers, all female-assigned or of femme experience, with an imaginative framing concept: They are competing to play Giselle,...
The Iliad and the Odyssey weren’t written by Homer, because they weren’t written at all. They were products of an oral tradition, performed by generations of anonymous Greek bards who gradually shaped them into the epics we know today. - The New Yorker
"The number of podcasts … ballooned, filling voids in the professional lives of the hosts and the social lives of the listeners, and in some cases replacing both. There were periods during lockdown where I was hearing more from certain podcasters than anyone else on Earth – even the people I was sharing a home with. But believing that...
"Tickets are keys to experiences. These keys have a finite life and finite utility. That’s because the majority of rights issuers want to maintain control of the ticket and access to the experience until the experience is complete. NFTs, by contrast, are (and are portrayed as) owned assets. This is groundbreaking for digital content, offering a way to both...
"From natural disasters to cast mishaps, from visa snafus to failing voices, the team at Spoleto Festival USA has been there, done that and has the war stories to prove it. And here you thought those beads of sweat on their foreheads were from Charleston humidity." - The Post and Courier (Charleston)
"The problems have built up over at least the last half century and they cannot be solved overnight. But there are a host of strategies—many already being implemented successfully by some of the more forward-looking organizations." - Nightingale Sonata
"Even though people did not … personally identify as nonbinary in the way we understand it today (though some identified as 'neuter'), neutral pronouns existed — as did an understanding that the language we had to describe gender was insufficient. … English speakers have proposed 200 to 250 pronouns since the 1780s. Although most petered out almost immediately after...
