Says the executive producer at one major troupe, "Brexit will have the bigger impact because it's a long-term restriction. We're a flexible, dynamic sector and can work our way out of COVID – but if we can't produce and export our work, that's going to have a devastating effect." - The Guardian
"A Street Scene In Montmartre has been owned by a French family for most of the time since it was painted in 1887. Sotheby's estimates it could fetch up to eight million euros (£6.9m) when it is sold at auction next month." - BBC
"It has recently been argued that reading novels, especially epistolary novels, helped people in the 18th century to put themselves in other people’s shoes, and sensitized them to cruelty in everyday life, savage punishments and abuses of human rights: In reading, they empathized across traditional social boundaries between nobles and commoners, masters and servants, men and women, perhaps even...
"By the time that America’s reckoning on race reached a fever pitch last year, publishing was months into a messy upheaval of its own. On Twitter, publishing insiders railed against the blinding whiteness of the industry, while writers of color used #PublishingPaidMe to show that they often received far less money than their white peers. The resulting move by...
"Every decision made by Charles Venable over the past decade seemed to be in service of remaking a museum founded in the 19th century into an income-generating attraction, when in fact it is a peer of other great Midwestern art museums that are open to the public for free and pursue an educational mission rather than masquerading as amusement...
Some might say tackling Richard Wagner’s four-part Ring Cycle during a pandemic is folly. English National Opera, announcing the plan on Wednesday, believes the opposite and wants to return to live performance with a bang. - The Guardian
"For institutions that have historically enjoyed a certain level of prestige, these calls for reexamination of (and accountability for) their charitable purposes may be disorienting. For some, the impulse might be to retreat further, to protect their reputations and their leadership, to ride this out." - NonProfit Quarterly
"The trouble is that smiling is easy to do. If flashing a smile can so easily convey good intent, it could be ‘hacked’ by unscrupulous individuals who want you to think that they’re trustworthy so they can exploit you. These kinds of ‘false smiles’ certainly happen in everyday life, yet we still generally trust smiles. In my research, I...
Choreographer Robert Moses: "The notion of change is sophomoric. The idea is to give people honest opportunity to be part of whatever they're intending to be a part of. … Should we have more representation? No, we should have more influence. More actual ability to exercise that influence and power. All those things will be happening for the better...
"This failure has many roots: The low social status of teachers and librarians relative to those in other professions, the lack of consistent instruction about information and media literacy across students’ educational experience, the diminishment of the humanities as a core element of general education, and the difficulty of keeping up with technological change and digital culture have all...
"In a country where Turkish is the only official language, speaking Kurdish is sometimes seen as an act of rebellion." (It is the mother tongue of nearly 20 million people in the Turkish Republic and another 20 million in neighboring countries.) "Teatra Jiyana Nû, or New Life Theater, has struggled to find stages to perform its repertoire, which includes...
I was so surprised how “place-keeping” became such a sticky word across the country. I was offering a strong artist’s point of view about place, one in which artists weren’t being instrumentalized by the architect, or even the city planner, who wants a vibrant cultural district so that they can have sales; generate tax dollars. - Open Space
"The Prado paid €70,000 (around $85,000) for La Boulonnaise, a 1929 work by the Spanish painter María Blanchard. … But the move has riled some commentators, who point to a 1995 law dictating that any works created after 1881 belong in the collection of the Reina Sofia ." - Artnet
"For those who view the very notion of the canon as inherently elitist, it’s worth noting that the phenomena mostly clearly implicated in its formation were the democratizing processes of the late 19th and early 20th century: the massive extension of free education—not just to little white proto-patriarchs, but to girls, and children from diverse communities as well—together with...
"An actor in her 20s … accuses Depardieu of having raped and assaulted her at his Parisian home on two separate occasions in August 2018. … An initial investigation into the rape accusations against the 72-year old was dropped in 2019 for lack of evidence. It was reopened last summer, leading to criminal charges being filed in December." -...
