" On 29 January, the government of prime minister Mark Rutte became the first in Europe to approve a central mechanism for repatriating colonial loot. … Now, a research consortium of nine museums and Amsterdam's Vrije Universiteit is preparing to launch a €4.5m project in June that will develop practical guidance for museums on colonial collections." - The Art...
"Theatres, cinemas, museums and other cultural spaces have been shut since France's last full lockdown in October, and … thousands marched in cities across France last Thursday to demand they reopen with social distancing. The Paris march ended with around 50 people forcing their way into the shuttered Odeon Theatre and refusing to leave. Similar actions were seen on...
A month before "meme stocks" like GameStop and AMC Entertainment took flight and captured the public imagination, many of the world’s entertainment giants were the beneficiaries of a nine-figure windfall driven by retail trader enthusiasm. - The Hollywood Reporter
"During this period of soul-crushing boredom, it would be valuable to pay more attention to what people are feeling and thinking, rather than trying to distract and lull them; to collect our daydreams, reveries and thoughts from this time, and let expectations and desires find common expression." - The Guardian
"AI as scientist conception runs the risk of missing out on a — the — characteristic feature of AI, particularly machine learning. Once this feature of machine learning is thrown into relief, AI as artist seems a more fitting conception." - 3 Quarks Daily
The UK’s theatrical culture is obsessed with the idea of theatre as storytelling, both as a discourse and as a conditioning of what the work is and should be like. This is extremely rigid: theatre is not storytelling but an experience. In London almost every season announcement sounds the same, everyone seems to be saying, “We are telling new...
Recently, researchers have begun to treat bullshitting as having two separate dimensions. “Persuasive bullshitting” is motivated by a desire to impress or persuade. “Evasive bullshitting” is different — as a “strategic circumnavigation of the truth”, it’s the sort that a politician might engage in when trying to cover up a mistake, for example. By definition, the creation of either...
In this new wilderness, democracy is becoming impossible. If one half of the country can’t hear the other, then Americans can no longer have shared institutions, apolitical courts, a professional civil service, or a bipartisan foreign policy. We can’t compromise. We can’t make collective decisions—we can’t even agree on what we’re deciding. - The Atlantic
"In ballet when you lose a year, you lose a lot. It takes years of sacrifice and training to become a professional, and the performing life of a dancer is short. For elite ballet dancers, a solid career lasts around 15 years — and that comes after roughly a decade of schooling. Could this pause alter the evolution of...
Eiko’s performative gestures are captured in opulent compositional detail as she defiantly inserts her body amidst crumbled buildings, vine-encrusted train tracks, large bags of radioactive trash, upended cars, tender memorial altars, washed-away fields, crushed fishing ports, and abandoned beaches. Over the course of the collaborator’s five trips, nature’s resiliency is revealed as Eiko inhabits regenerating (while still contaminated) gardens,...
For instance, ugly ethnic stereotypes from the 1920s and '30s were removed from the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books all the way back in 1959, and from Mary Poppins and The Story of Dr. Dolittle in the '80s; Roald Dahl himself rewrote the original, now-cringeworthy portrayal of the Oompa-Loompas in the early 1970s after complaints from the NAACP....
Listed as a National Historic Landmark District, the Air Force Academy campus is still one of the most advanced fusions of technology, education, art, and architecture that the country has ever seen. At its heart, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s Walter Netsch Jr. designed an aluminum skinned chapel pointing straight up to the sky and the heavens beyond it. -...
"In one of the more surprising revelations of the shutdown, it turns out that the American theater has no towering figure even attempting to lead it through this crisis, the way Andrew Lloyd Webber has in Britain. … In such a scarily perplexing time, there is no one to rally the troops, let alone do what I'm hoping you...
A recent leadership change at Danceworks has led to the longtime artistic director's resignation and a letter from a co-founder criticizing the board of directors for "disempowering" the dancers who make up much of the staff. - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
The amorous/borderline-rapey skunk was cut from Space Jam 2 and is not included in any future projects, though studio sources say that this is not because of last week's tweet from New York Times columnist Charles Blow that Le Pew "added to rape culture." (Alas, it seems the cut scene from the Space Jam sequel showed the stinker finally...
