“Every other major orchestra has been compensated since the very beginning of the pandemic. Met management is using the pandemic opportunistically. They are not seeking a short-term crisis-plan to balance out pandemic circumstances. They are seeking permanent cuts. The cuts they seek are so deep that the orchestra would need unrealistic salary gains over the next quarter-century just to...
Regulators have long worried that the opacity of the antiquities trade, where buyers and sellers are seldom identified, even to the parties in a transaction, made it an easy way to shroud illicit transfers of money. The new legislation empowers federal regulators to design measures that would remove secrecy from transactions. - The New York Times
The study found that people who spoke or played music inside the monument would have heard clear reverberations against the massive standing stones. Testing on the model also suggests that the stones increased the volume on interior sound, kept exterior sound out, and made it hard for anyone outside the structure to hear what was going on inside. -...
As the Ford Foundation’s president, Darren Walker, recently told me, “museums are in a crisis because America is in a crisis.” Museums shape narratives that matter, so it’s no surprise young people are passionate about pushing for change. It’s time now to do better—a lot better. That means looking at ourselves honestly and fixing a whole lot about the...
The short-form site crashed and burned mere months after rolling out millions of dollars worth of shows, but Roku is already offering ad-supported free content through its own channel on its own devices. - Variety
The teen actors couldn't perform outside because it was too cold, and they couldn't film because their school went virtual partway through the term. So voice recording and mixing, original music writing, sound creation, and general learning about radio drama it was. One senior actress: "You really have to concentrate on how you use different pitches and tones to...
Outterbridge, also an influential (and "magical") arts administrator and educator, was a master of the assemblage, using the sculptures to tell stories about history and culture. "In castoffs there are profound treasures. ... That’s what soul food is about. Chitterlings and pig feet are all about the notion that, as a people, we’ve taken the scraps, the castoffs, and...
Leslie Jordan wasn't planning any of this, not the 5.5 million followers or the media attention. But, hey, lockdown. "Out of boredom, he began sharing 'silly' pieces of content like his 'Pillow Talk' series, where he snuggles up with a pillow and tells comfort food tales of Hollywood; videos of him dancing to Lisa Rinna’s aerobics class or with his cats; and Sunday...
The legendary Powell's still sits empty of customers, no matter how many people may be buying online or via curbside pickup. The hope for 2021 is just to survive, says its CEO. But for some smaller bookstores, nimble moves were easier. Take Maggie Mae's, a children's bookstore. "The takeway for Maggie Mae’s ... is to 'embrace the pivot' by...
In Italy, for centuries, women weren't allowed to work as artists, but many did anyway. The group Advancing Women Artists has been working its detective magic to change the history. The group "has shed light on a forgotten part of the art world, identifying some 2,000 works by women artists that had been gathering dust in Italy's public museums...
Diego Salazar, former chair of the World's 50 Best Restaurants, has had a longer quarantine than many people. Sure, he and his wife order takeout - and it tastes great, but "I’d realize I was still missing everything about what once made me love food: the people who create it and the 'sobremesa' — the limitless chat after desserts, the...
The Canadian artist painting 2020 for a spot across from Salvador Dalí's Santiago El Grande, which includes a nuclear bomb going off: "I wanted the apocalypse I was creating to be different — different from traditional ending-of-the-world scenes where some people are being elevated and some people are being damned to hell." - CBC
The year was terrible for global pandemic reasons, but also for brutality against artists, journalists, writers, playwrights, cinematographers, and more. How bad was it? "Civil rights were found to have deteriorated in nearly every country." - Hyperallergic
After all, why should we have access to the characters' sex lives? Raven Leilani, author of Luster, says "I try to portray it in the way that moves me when I see it, when it is awkward and silly, which it often is. To depict it that way is to make it tender; what it looks like when two...
The artist, Juliana Notori, "said the scarlet hillside vulva was intended to 'question the relationship between nature and culture in our phallocentric and anthropocentric western society' and provoke debate over the 'problematisation of gender.'" Brazil's alarmingly right-wing government, and its supporters, seem to be provoked. - The Guardian (UK)
