The monument, stolen (or "liberated," if you prefer) from a cemetery in Alabama, will now be returned to its former owners, United Daughters of the Confederacy. "'Everything about the South is painfully polite, even the racism, that is, until it’s not. We don’t have the luxury of being polite,' the activists said in a statement. 'We aren’t doing this...
Despite what every podcast host says (is forced to say?) and what your author friends tell you, it's not five-star reviews. Those are literally a dime a dozen. This is a different appeal, according to a study, and it explains why people crying about books on TikTok can juice those books' sales. - Fast Company
Art museums sometimes have difficulties responding to the current moment, by design. A new show in Louisville might change some of that. "Conventional encyclopedic museums like the Speed, the largest and oldest art museum in Kentucky, are glacial machines. Their major exhibitions are usually years in the planning. Borrowing objects from other museums can be a red tape tangle."...
Beatts helped shape the early days of Saturday Night Live. "'It was pretty much any adjective you want to throw at it,' she told the Orange County Register in 2013. 'It was exciting, stimulating and fabulous. It was also horrible, boring and exhausting.'" - Washington Post
The art fest was planned for February, then July, and at locations all over the city (supposedly to promote social distancing). But as July get closer, organizers decided to move it once again - to an online-only location, and to try a 2022 restart in real life. Pandemic uncertainty strikes again. - Los Angeles Times
It's not easy for a woman in comedy, and that's doubly true for a Black woman. Ask Ziwe (who now has a series on Netflix). "You really have to create for yourself and create in that vacuum because you’re not going to get the instant gratification and validation." - Variety
The rush of documentaries - they are cheaper to make, and especially if they're true crime, there's a willing and eager audience - has some aesthetic issues. "Cornball fuzzy re-creations lack credibility. ... It doesn’t have to be like this. Plenty of recent shows and movies have made compelling artistic choices that enliven the storytelling." - The New York...
The business side of music can be vicious for its musicians, and when a label owned by a man you loathe gets to profit off your music? Well. "The debut this week of the now 31-year-old Swift’s full rerecording of that album she made at 18, under the title Fearless (Taylor’s Version), is a reminder of how inextricably blurred the creative...
The Small Business Association opened a grant portal for arts venues closed down by the pandemic - and, after a few hours of deep misery for every arts venue trying to apply, took it all offline, indefinitely. "Anyone who tried to log on to apply for grants when the portal first opened was met with different error messages at...
In 2016, 25 queer women characters on TV died on scripted TV and streaming shows. But Wynonna Earp promised to be different. With the choices the writers' room and showrunner made, viewers saw "an acknowledgement of — and a direct rebuke to — a hurtful trope." They rewarded the producer with trust and increased interest. - Los Angeles Times
It's every art dealer's nightmare, but if a fake is a beautiful painting, what's our problem with it? We care about authorship is why - but humans didn't always care. "What mattered before the Renaissance was the meaning of an image, not the ineffable singularity of the image-maker’s touch." - Hyperallergic
Ahmed, whose performance in The Sound of Metal has been nominated for countless awards this season, doesn't prefer the easy life. When he was a kid, he says, "I wanted to perform in some way, but I didn’t think it was viable. Teachers told me I should be a barrister, because I was always arguing with them." - The...
Gabriel began working at RCA when she was a student at Temple University, testing records for manufacturing imperfections. And she didn't leave. "Gabriel often said that she had produced some 2,500 records. Tucker said officials at Sony, which now holds RCA’s archives, had told her that the number may actually be higher, since contributions were not always credited."...
Ma Rainey, Mank, and others win on the first night of the British Academy Film and Television Arts awards, when mostly the crafts are recognized. - Variety
We now consider disinformation a defining part of the contemporary experience. In 2016, Oxford Languages chose post-truth as its word of the year. The essential characteristic of our age, the accompanying press release stated, was the loss of a distinction between truth and feeling; we were entering an era in which “objective facts are less influential in shaping public...
