That’s a notable uptick from the streamer’s 2020 spend of $11.8 billion, as the pandemic prompted production delays across the industry, and a 2019 content spend of $13.9 billion. - Variety
For 45 years, the light sculptor has been designing and building a complex inside Roden Crater, a volcanic cinder cone about 50 miles northeast of Flagstaff. In his 70s (he turns 78 this year), he had begun to think there was no hope of living to complete his ambitious plans. Then $10 million in seed money arrived from (of...
That view is to see the rise of Substack and podcasting and Bandcamp for musicians who want to escape the tyranny of the record labels and streaming platforms—supported and enabled by other services like Stripe and Patreon and Kickstarter—as a kind of Distributism for artists and knowledge workers. - Hedgehog Review
Says Ken-Matt Martin, who was named artistic director last month after having been Robert Falls's number-two at the Goodman, "If I figured out how to get Black people to come to a theater in Des Moines," — he founded the Pyramid Theatre Company, which present the work of Black artists in Iowa's capital — "I can probably figure out...
As the risks reduce and the research possibilities open up, then it is easy to imagine how we could slip, unnoticing, from thinking the recording of neurons in a healthy human brain is unimaginable to thinking it is something that needs doing to further our understanding of ourselves. Sooner than we thought, we will face a deep ethical challenge,...
Thomas Larson, former music critic for the Santa Fe New Mexican (1980-82), now a staff writer at the San Diego Reader: "Figuring out that the thing words do for music is not a musical problem. It's an aesthetic one, which adds more ambiguity, not less. Good ears and smart criticism trail the music like a bloodhound, howling out the...
"How do you support artist relief, raise money, how do you help people still feel like they haven’t disappeared? It has been a huge effort. When I posited the idea of how best to create continuity with what we have in a rapid economic decline, , “Why don’t we just stop because everything stopped?” No, we have a moral...
"A career in ballet lasts only as long as a dancer's body does. If they're lucky, dancers can perform into their 30s — or in rare cases, into their 40s. When every season counts, taking time off to get pregnant, give birth, and recover is daunting. … they were already losing valuable career time to COVID-19. Why not...
Amid a move for educational “prioritization,” Howard University is dissolving its classics department. Tenured faculty will be dispersed to other departments, where their courses can still be taught. But the university has sent a disturbing message by abolishing the department. - Washington Post
Says San Francisco Opera general director Matthew Shilvock of the platform, called Aloha, "It allows a singer and a pianist to essentially be in the digital space together making real-time music — which is just transformational for us. A pianist can now hear a singer breathe, and that may sound very basic, but those breath cues are the things...
The site, on land recently added to the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge on the Eastern Shore, includes ten acres that Tubman's father, Ben Ross, was given when he was freed. What's been discovered are the remains of Ross's cabin, where he brought his wife (whose freedom he purchased) and sheltered Harriet, when she was aged 17 to 22, and...
The initiative, called Arts 77 (referring to Chicago's 77 neighborhoods), takes in multiple programs spread over several departments of the municipal government. Along with plans to bring performance and visual work to parks, libraries, and other neighborhood locations, Arts 77 will see the annual budget for public art rise from $100,000 to $3 million — with an extra $3.5...
"In July 1941, Richard Wright, then America's leading Black author, began writing the novel he felt was his masterpiece. Written 'at white heat,' … The Man Who Lived Underground was drafted in just six frenzied months. … Following a crushing rejection from Wright's publisher and a truncated publication as a short story, the novel was shelved for eighty years...
Steve Gilula and Nancy Utley have been at the helm of Searchlight Pictures since the turn of the millennium, and one could argue that the films they've produced have (as Brooks Barnes puts it here) "shaped global culture." They've won four Best Picture Oscars in the past dozen years (for Slumdog Millionaire, 12 Years a Slave, Birdman, and The...
Since Raúl Castro's government had recently had another period of censoring art and arresting artists, there's some hope — off the island, at least — that there might be a Khrushchev-style cultural thaw coming. In Cuba itself, not so much: "Nothing has changed," says one artist, "nor does there seem to be a will for change within the new...
