The internet is healing, I would say now, but we should all know better: a garbage vortex of such scale doesn’t just disappear, but drifts on, accumulating more and more trash, slowly choking everything around it. - The Drift
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once described play as ‘ecoming and dissolution, building and destruction without moral implication, in eternal innocence’ – as an act to be found ‘in the world only in the play of the artist and child’. - Aeon
On Thursday morning, the orchestra released its operating results for the fiscal year ending Aug. 31, 2020. The big news: a deficit of $11.7 million, the largest in its history. Last year’s deficit was $8.8 million, another record-breaker. No one who follows the orchestra has forgotten that the record-breaker before that, for 2012, was $6 million, enough to help...
McGee, the prodigious dean of Detroit’s visual arts scene whose works can be seen everywhere from the Detroit Institute of Arts to the Broadway Station of the People Mover and who made invaluable contributions as an influential teacher, gallery owner and arts advocate dating back to the 1960s, died Thursday afternoon of natural causes at his home in Detroit....
Kate Hartson, a fit 67-year-old who once ran a small press specializing in dogs, had all the trappings of a liberal book editor, including an apartment on the Upper East Side and a place in Hampton Bays. But she also seemed to be that rarest of figures in New York media: a true believer in Donald J. Trump, people...
For popular music fans, "rock created the music publications we read today. R&B created rock. Blues created R&B. And Mamie Smith made the blues a national sensation." - NPR
Elton John says his tours can absorb the costs and the paperwork, so theoretically Brexit's horribly negotiated touring musician deals (note: what deals?) don't affect him. But, he adds, "I don’t want to live in a world where the only artists who can afford to tour properly are those who have been going for decades and have already sold...
In Springfield, Oregon, if you see people wandering around with choose your own adventure-style art books in their hands, don't be surprised: "Three writers, an executive editor and an illustrator worked side-by-side with local businesses and organizers at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., to create the 51-page illustrated epic journey along Main Street in Springfield." - The Eugene Register-Guard
Mwazulu Diyabanza is a Congolese activist who would prefer France's museums were open so he could get some attention for taking African objects from their displays "to highlight what he sees as the mass pillaging of the continent by European colonialists. And it’s not just the mighty museums. Diyabanza and his supporters also plan to include smaller galleries, private...
Warning people off doesn't work: "We hear a lot about inoculating people against fake news or 'prebunking' it, but new research shows that the best time to fact-check a false headline — and have subjects remember the fact-check a week later — is after the subject has already read the headline." - Nieman Lab
Nemser started calling out sexism in the art and art history worlds half a century ago. "Her serious criticism and scholarship belied a whimsical streak she would occasionally indulge, as she did in a 1973 issue of The Feminist Art Journal when she parodied the Gilbert and Sullivan song 'I’ve Got a Little List,' from The Mikado, substituting 'piggy'...
Nothing against the (many) kick-ass, and asskicking, Black actresses of the science fiction universes, but for something closer to reality? Enter Queen Latifah. - Los Angeles Times
At least in the 18th century. "Wherever they were writing, these women had dared to move out of the conventional female role of service and self-sacrifice to pursue their own needs and drives. Dogged by financial insecurity, ill health, and bad eyesight as a number of them were, it took a special kind of courage to defy the stifling...
One youth poet laureate: "She was given the platform to really pull people in and witness the magic of it, and I think that once you get that, you're going to be hooked." - BBC
Five Florine Stettheimer works showed up in 2020. But there was a bit of an issue: "Only two turned out to have been actually created by Stettheimer. Of the other works, two were removed from the marketplace and the attribution changed on the third." - The New York Times