"While the return of tourists is essential, local politicians and leaders in the cultural sector are emphasising the need to rethink how visitors interact with heritage. But how far, during the enforced hiatus in tourism, have they actually rethought their strategies to manage visitors and their experience more effectively?" Venice and Florence have some ideas. - Apollo
"Former pupils have raised allegations including how tutors have 'grabbed' female students' breasts, made sexual comments about their bodies and pressurised them to remove clothes during rehearsals or performances. … a female student complained that a visiting teacher had sexually assaulted her at home." - The Telegraph (UK)
"If that department comes to fruition, it would signify a break with the Louvre's president, Jean-Luc Martinez, who had deemed its formation unnecessary, and a willingness to expand the ways the museum presents religious art." - ARTnews
Eileen Kramer still dances every day. And she also "writes a story a day from her Sydney aged-care facility, publishes books and has entered Australia's most prestigious painting competition. After decades living abroad, Ms Kramer returned to her home city of Sydney aged 99. Since then, she's collaborated with artists to create several videos that showcase her primary talent...
The Cambridge classics professor (and Twitter, TV, and book star) says that our desire to compare the U.S. to ancient Rome is normal - but not sensible. "Rome, in a way, doesn’t matter at all. It’s a very long time ago; no one’s going to get hurt by them. ... Rome helps us stand outside ourselves. For me, Rome...
In replica form, that is. "Exact replicas of masterpieces from the Prado museum, including paintings by Goya, El Greco, and Fra Angelico, have been installed behind tree branches, inside airport security stations, on the sides of buildings, and along wrought-iron fences." - Artnet
As vaccines spread and COVID-19 numbers drop, "concert and theater venues are scrambling to keep up and figure out when and how to welcome back the crowds they depend on. For the Hollywood Bowl — perhaps the most celebrated outdoor venue in the nation — that has meant making plans, and ripping them up again, as it rides rapidly...
It goes way - way - beyond dopamine. "You could say that dopamine is to happiness what petrol is to a car; it’s an integral part of making it work, but if you were to literally fill your car with petrol, to the point where it’s leaking out the windows, that wouldn’t help anyone." - Psyche
TV shows, TikTok, live mini-shows, Instagram Stories, and memes - comedy has changed. Even the second Borat movie, though it was made and was fairly popular, only shows that "the form itself is in transit, evolving and branching out into a multiplicity of approaches that reflect the diverse and pulsating world we now live in." - Prospect (UK)
William Grant Still's one-act Highway 1, U.S.A. has barely been seen since its 1963 premiere, but it's being brought back to life this summer by Opera Theater of St. Louis with a cast headed by Nicole Cabell and Will Liverman and no less than Leonard Slatkin conducting. Yet it wouldn't have happened at all if not for COVID. -...
After the terrible effects of COVID-19 on the arts, what should Australia do next? One think tank says the country, where arts funding dropped in the years leading up to 2020, needs a plan to "ensure creatives industries have a place at the ‘big table’ of decision making and budgets." - ArtsHub
Owen Gleiberman: "To go or not to go? To believe in the primacy of the communal, cathartic big-screen experience or to see it as a stodgy, unhip relic? No one thought this way about the movie theater versus VHS or DVD; the industry wasted no time transforming those technologies into ancillary markets that helped keep movies afloat. But streaming...
Oberlander, who died at the age of 99 in May, had a long, rich career whose influence continues to grow. She was "an early proponent of rewilding, community consultation, pedestrian-friendly accessibility and creative playgrounds for children," and her devotion to green spaces and the influence of greenery on humans "tell a story of a great mind that spearheaded change...
"Rather than offering an escapist vision of a world unravaged by pandemic, I've taken reassurance from the way these shows offer an escapist vision of pandemic. They present quarantine conditions as a utopia in which creative laborers, isolated in a single space for an extended period of time, yield art validated through external adjudication. They have 'flourished,' instead of...
The facts just don't bear it out. "It’s questionable that there ever really was a ‘movement’ other than in the mind of 19th- and early 20th-century historians." Perhaps one conclusion is that classifications like "the Renaissance" are not great mechanisms for understanding the world of ideas, or the historical world either. - Aeon
