Even as the studio insists that its streaming strategy is a one-off response to the pandemic, it might not be able to rebuild those bridges. Seeing the backlash is just another reason the rest of the industry’s major players continue to hold off from anything so drastic. Patience is hard, but it’s Hollywood’s surest path to profitability. - The...
Jodi Archambault: "As COVID-19 takes a fearsome toll on our people, it also threatens the progress we have made to save our languages. The average age of our speakers — our treasured elders who have the greatest knowledge and depth of the language — is 70. They are also those who are at most risk of dying from COVID-19."...
This expanding cornucopia of tech and entertainment has served as a compensatory narrative of progress and advancement for an empire in decline. The future seems more and more constrained, materially, but, on the flip side, you are freer and freer to build your own virtual worlds and get lost in them. - Artnet
The 61-year-old conductor spent a dozen years as music director of the Milwaukee Symphony (1997-2009). "Once reportedly accustomed to a few sellout audiences a year, the orchestra reportedly sold out 30 shows within a year of his arrival." - WXXI (Rochester, NY)
“Are we giving to organizations that are actually doing the best work? Or are we giving to organizations that are giving us the best grants?” - WestWord
Michael Andor Brodeur: "There is really no playlist to match this unstable, uncertain moment. And, honestly, right now I'm less interested in rummaging through the past for reference points. I'm just trying to find my way forward. In that spirit — and since we're feeling all inaugural — please find below the first-ever class of 21 for '21." -...
In the interim, expect a flood of cable programming to start migrating over to streaming in anticipation for the day when cable is no longer a viable platform for networks to reach audiences. - Axios
"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
