"The kinds of movies that traditionally contend for awards — mid-budget dramas with recognizable stars and respectable historical subjects or social themes — were thin on the ground throughout the year, though a handful did show up on Netflix. The audience and the industry floated in a strange pandemic limbo." - The New York Times
There can be no national recovery, no American Rescue, without the creative economy, and the 5.1 million creative workers who make it up. And right now, many of those creative workers are in dire straits. The impact of COVID has been profound in every state in the country and will continue to be for much of 2021. - Americans...
"Despite a state ban on live comedy performances, the pandemic hasn't destroyed the New York comedy scene — it just pushed it underground. … Venue owners are finding ways to stay in business by exploiting exemptions set aside for religious services, indoor dining, and trivia nights (yes, really) as a means to get comics back onstage, even if that...
"The internet contains, for better or worse, a significant amount of humanity’s intellectual and creative outputs. It’s also a cesspool of outrageous falsehoods. Having access to so much information, then, is useful only if you’re able to separate the wheat from the chaff. For instance, the amount of information related to COVID-19 has been called an ‘infodemic’ by the...
"Many deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals have welcomed the increase in visibility that deafness and hearing loss have enjoyed on TV lately. … But for many who use devices like cochlear implants or hearing aids, onscreen representation still falls short by not reflecting enough of their experiences. … Deaf characters tend to be portrayed onscreen as people who sign and...
A recent study invited college students to talk about their emotions via an online chat with either a person or a “chatbot” (in reality, the chatbot was operated by a person rather than AI). The students felt better after talking about their feelings; it made almost no difference whether they thought they were talking to a real person or...
It's a messy enough business that the first commercial choreography for a pop music video (an industry where you'd think there's enough money involved to have figured this out years ago) to get copyrighted was only last July. (It was JaQuel Knight's moves for Beyoncé's "Single Ladies".) Steven Vargas gives readers some background in American copyright law, hints for...
"If you’re a prodigy with a great gift for something, you can simply do it – yet might not be aware of why and how. And you don’t ask questions. Indeed, the geniuses I met seemed too preoccupied with committing acts of genius to consider the cause of their creative output. Maybe an outsider looking in has a clearer...
The performances — by such well-known artists as Mitsuko Uchida, Steven Isserlis, and the choir Stile Antico — cost about £3,000 each for personnel and copyright payments, and that doesn't include artists' fees. This while the venue has had no ticket income for months on end. On the other hand, viewers have donated £750,000 so far, and Wigmore's membership...
"With digital, there is no such thing as authenticity. You are trusting that it is what it is. I feel eventually no matter how convincing it may seem, what we are experiencing through media could be something engineered against our best interests in some way. Even if one doesn’t care about the big picture, when it is proven that...
"The complex will include a dozen buildings, including two separate museums — one for Ukrainians and Eastern European Jews killed in the Holocaust, and one specifically memorializing those who died at Babyn Yar. There will also be a church, a mosque, a synagogue, a multimedia center, a research center, and a conference building." The artistic director of the project...
"The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction includes some 1,800 separate entries, from actifan and aerocar to zero-gravity and zine. … A historical dictionary devoted to the history of something as future-oriented (and imaginary) as science fiction may seem like a contradiction in terms. But then science fiction has always had a curious relationship to the real world, said Jesse...
Here are reports from Taiwan ("Shows go on – with precautions in place"), Italy ("A sharply divided theatre world"), the U.S. ("Struggling on despite lack of leadership"), Sweden and Denmark ("Back to lockdown"), and Greenland ("Cut off from the outside world"). - The Stage
Except in the countries where they aren't: the Uffizi in Florence welcomed all of 800 visitors when it reopened last week, and Belgium declared museums essential and let them keep operating. But the lockdown stretches on in Britain and Germany, and museum workers get more and more worried; in France, museums had to close again after opening in the...
" began her astonishingly prolific eight-decade career performing radio plays as a child in Iowa. She appeared in Shakespearean comedy and Eugene O'Neill melodrama on Broadway in the 1950s, was a television mainstay from the dawn of the medium" — not to mention her now-legendary big-screen performances in The Last Picture Show and Young Frankenstein — "and, at 82,...
