"Telling a lie over and over can make it seem true. It can also remove agency from the viewer, ceding the individual's judgement over to the expectations of the story being told. Brecht refused to let his audience lose themselves in the funhouse mirror of such representations. 'Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer...
"As I was at the beginning of my education as a young director, as well as a nervous, nerdy intellectual, I asked Helene Weigel about the Verfremdungseffekt, Brecht's famous 'alienation effect' theory. … Weigel laughed and said something like, 'Don't pay any attention to Bert's bullshit and theoretical nonsense. Just look at the work. Look at the work, and...
"Staff with the city's Cultural Arts Division unveiled an entirely new funding system in mid-December that, among other changes, lowers the funding cap for all funding programs, drops organizational support in favor of funding events, and allows for-profit businesses to apply for city arts funding. The new funding system also places top priority on 'proposals that directly enhance cultural...
"Marcia Sells — a former dancer who became an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn and the dean of students at Harvard Law School — has been hired as the first chief diversity officer of the Metropolitan Opera, the largest performing arts institution in the United States." - The New York Times
As it did with its abbreviated Nutcracker in December, the company will do its first two productions of 2021 before an in-person audience of 10 people, with all other ticketholders watching online. But the season's final production will be back (local regulations permitting) at Milwaukee Ballet's usual venue, the Marcus Performing Arts Center, June 10-13. - Milwaukee Business Journal
"The world's most visited museum — a record 10 million in 2019, mostly from overseas — is grappling with its longest closure since World War II, as pandemic restrictions keep its treasures under lock and key. But without crowds that can swell to as many as 40,000 people a day, museum officials are seizing a golden opportunity to finesse...
"'We no longer have a choice, the building is in distress,' Centre Pompidou president Serge Lasvignes told Le Figaro of the extensive upkeep needed for its Renzo Piano- and Richard Rogers-designed exterior of steel piping that was constructed in the 1970s." The museum will close for the €200 million project at the end of 2023 and should reopen in...
More than 80 years later, his 300-year-old violin — valued at around $185,000 — is at the center of a dispute that is threatening to undermine Germany’s commitment to return objects looted by the Nazis. - The New York Times
We are neurochemically predisposed to find our dreams meaningful, which may suggest that they do have a pedagogical function. Even the common advice to make an important decision only after you “sleep on it” might be worth revising, to “dream on it.” The fact that dreams often generate powerful emotions and deploy narrative structures further strengthens the notion that...
In April 2020, during the first wave of COVID-19, Amsterdam’s city government announced it would recover from the crisis, and avoid future ones, by embracing the theory of “doughnut economics.” - Time
"The art of creating the connections and building communities of others who also come to believe and amplify them is a virtuous circle that keeps growing and strengthening increasingly wacky beliefs." - Post Alley
"It’s worth recalling that federal support for the arts throughout modern American history has been bipartisan. The Federal Art Project (1935–43) commissioned artworks by some 10,000 artists during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency, while in 1969 Richard Nixon doubled what Lyndon Johnson had previously provided for the newly created NEA." - Apollo
"Every cultural message we get is that happiness can be read off a scorecard of money, education, experiences, relationships, and prestige. Want the happiest life? Check the boxes of success and adventure, and do it as early as possible! Then move on to the next set of boxes. She who dies with the most checked boxes wins, right? Wrong....
"From the American Revolution until the late 20th century, the American elite was divided among regional oligarchies. It is only in the last generation that these regional patriciates have been absorbed into a single, increasingly homogeneous national oligarchy, with the same accent, manners, values, and educational backgrounds from Boston to Austin and San Francisco to New York and Atlanta....
"The pandemic will have caused frustration to students everywhere and it must have been difficult for university authorities to react to the ever-shifting situation. However, this last year has highlighted the extent to which universities are now dependent upon the money generated by the numbers of students they have, and the willingness of those students to go into debt,...
