ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

Stories

Fired Montreal Museum Of Fine Arts Director Lands New Job In Paris

Last July, after a tenure that had been widely viewed (at least from outside) as a major success, Nathalie Bondil was dismissed from the Montreal museum amid allegations that she created a "toxic" work environment. Now she's returning to France to become director of exhibitions and collections at the Institut du Monde Arabe. - ARTnews

Baltimore Symphony President To Depart, Ending Turbulent Tenure

"Peter Kjome capped a roller-coaster five years as president and CEO of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra" — a period that included a financial near-collapse, a lockout-turned-strike, and, ultimately, a new contract that improved relations between musicians and management — "by announcing Monday that he will leave the organization when his contract expires in January 2022. Combined with the departure...

Italy Begins Reopening Theaters And Museums

"After six months of rotating on-again, off-again closures, restaurants, bars, museums and cinemas opened to the public in most of the country under a gradual reopening plan that is seen as too cautious for some, too hasty for others." - AP

Scalpers Have Been Buying Up UK Festival Tickets And Massively Hiking Prices

A Guardian investigation found that dozens of professional touts have snapped up tickets for eagerly awaited festivals and are demanding massively inflated prices from fans desperate to see artists such as Stormzy, Nile Rodgers and Fatboy Slim. - The Guardian

I was A “Minority Intern” In The 1990s. We Need To Talk About These Programs

"Without long insights into the early diversity programs, our profession cannot address the structural inequities that perpetuate the need for entry-level opportunities targeted for non-white individuals. Museums must acknowledge the stigmatizing, tokenizing, and economic effects of these programs, in addition to the opportunities they offer." - Hyperallergic

China Censors News Of Chloé Zhao’s Best Director Oscar Win

The Chinese government imposed a virtual news blackout, and censors moved to tamp down or scrub out discussion of the award on social media. - The New York Times

How Your Movie Theatre Experience Will Likely Change

To survive beyond the pandemic, theaters must persuade moviegoers not just to come back, but to come back more frequently than they did—to start thinking of their local cinema as akin to their favorite coffee shop. Because a return to pre-pandemic habits isn’t enough, industry executives told me they’ve been spending this past year rethinking the role of theaters...

New California Bill Could Save LA’s 99-Seat Theatres

Enter SB 805, which is up for a hearing by the California Senate Labor, Public Employment and Retirement Committee on April 26. If passed, the bill would greenlight low-cost payroll and paymaster services for small nonprofit performing arts organizations that make $1.4 million a year or less. It would also create a fund to award grants so that these...

Choreographer Creates Company To Copyright Dance Moves

The JaQuel Knight's company Knight Choreography & Music Publishing will see to the rights to Knights dance moves while operating as a music publisher as the company will broker licensing deals and protect IP. - Geo

How TikTok Has Made “Vibe” A Multimedia Haiku

What a haiku is to language, a vibe is to sensory perception: a concise assemblage of image, sound, and movement. (#Aesthetic is sometimes used to mark vibes, but that term is predominantly visual.) A vibe can be positive, negative, beautiful, ugly, or just unique. It can even become a quality in itself: if something is vibey, it gives off...

Opera Super-Fan Leaves Behind 200,000 Autographs

Lois Kirschenbaum was a switchboard operator from Flatbush, Brooklyn, who became perhaps New York’s biggest and longest-standing opera buff — and an obsessive autograph collector. For over half a century, she spent about 300 nights a year at the Met and other musical and dance performances. - The New York Times

American TV Watchers Flee Cable

Five years ago, 63% of Americans mostly watched television through cable and satellite. Today, that percentage has dropped to fewer than half of all Americans, while the percentage of those primarily watching television via a streaming service on the internet has jumped 17 percentage points, from 20% in 2016 to 37% today. - CBS News

Streamers Ruled The Oscars This Year

Yes, 2020 was a weird year, and the rules for movies to debut in movie theatres were waived, but still: Netflix had seven statues, Amazon two, Disney one (or a lot more, if you count Nomadland as a Disney production), and Warner Bros one, all for movies that were either only streamed or debuted on streaming and theatres (if...

Anthony Hopkins Sure Didn’t Expect To Win, Either

The actor didn't appear on video for his Best Actor win, leaving the Oscars production with a big letdown of an ending. A Los Angeles Times article explained that "while at 83 years old Hopkins became the oldest winner of an acting Oscar in any category, it wasn’t worth the risk of being exposed to the coronavirus to travel...

Before The Pandemic, Jenny Odell Wrote A Book About Being Stuck In The Doomscroll

So how did the author of How to Do Nothing survive the various self-isolations, lockdowns, and other stay-at-home initiatives before vaccines got their start? For one thing, she remembered what she had learned about social media, "this way of engaging with the attention economy that feels toxic to me, that I talk about in the book, how much that’s...

Our Free Newsletter

Join our 30,000 subscribers

Latest

Don't Miss

function my_excerpt_length($length){ return 200; } add_filter('excerpt_length', 'my_excerpt_length');