"People become more prone to misinformation when three things happen. First, and perhaps most important, is when conditions in society make people feel a greater need for what social scientists call ingrouping — a belief that their social identity is a source of strength and superiority, and that other groups can be blamed for their problems." - The New...
"My own favoured explanation, in The Decadent Society, is adapted from the American sociologist Robert Nisbet’s arguments about how cultural golden ages hold traditional and novel forces in creative tension: the problem for the Western world is that this tension snapped during the revolutions of the 1960s, when the baby boomers (and the pre-boomer innovators they followed) were too...
The Sala Paganiniana, where Il Cannone resides inside the Palazzo Tursi, is monitored by scientists, experts, and bodyguards. The instrument is played monthly by curator Bruce Carlson and each year by the winner of the Premio Paganini contest for young violinists. - Strings
Kwame Kwei-Armah told the Guardian the pandemic had changed theatre forever, with the livestreaming of plays becoming “hard baked” into how the industry operates. - The Guardian
“An impassioned letter from Tennessee Williams to Eugene O’Neill is an astonishing find in the world of American drama studies. Just when it seems that the archival well has been drunk dry for these exhaustively studied artists, something truly wonderful appears and changes things. - UKNOW
"For centuries, the tradition was passed down from one man to another. But sisters Irfana and Rihana Yousuf began to play with support from their father, Mohammad Yousuf. A musician himself, he sometimes had to sell household items to afford the costly instruments so they could keep their dream alive – and his. … In Sufism, a form of...
"We're going to hire artists, musicians, performers, and they're going to be out in communities doing public art, public performances, pop-up shows…creating murals, you name it," said Mayor Bill de Blasio. "We want to give artists opportunities, and we want this city to feel the power of our cultural community again." - Gothamist
Cygnet School, based in Canterbury, "is designed to bridge a gap that Bourne had noticed between young people who excel in dance at a grassroots level and those who are able to proceed with vocational training. 'A lot of the young people who were coming to us for auditions were quite raw – the talent was there but they...
The artists’ demands are threaded with anger and anxiety over the degradation of creative labor. But the musicians face long odds. Despite solidarity among many older and independent artists, the most successful current pop acts have largely been silent on the issue. And while many musicians paint Spotify as the enemy, the shift to streaming over the last decade...
"A new online art project based on data from the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Liverpool Biennial attempts to imagine 64 different curatorial statements and artist lists for future exhibitions, all 'curated' by a robot. … Each alternate universe is characterized by art speak that straddles the line between highbrow and utter incomprehensibility and is based on...
To date there are no large-scale programs or comprehensive models for dealing with defaced or removed monuments. However, the museum and heritage sectors — two professions that are founded on the essential notion of preservation — have been challenged by calls, largely from outside of these fields, suggesting that museums take in damaged or fallen monuments. - Hyperallergic
"Newsletters began in mid-fifteenth-century Venice. Subscribers would receive handwritten letters twice a week rounding up interesting events. Sixteenth-century merchants used similar news sources to keep track of exchange rates, taxes, and other business news. The form's popularity expanded in England after the country's first postal service took off around 1660. This opened the door to news writers, who could...
Revenues at the world’s largest exhibition chain topped out at $148.3 million, down 84.2 percent from the year-ago period, while the company logged a loss of $1.42 per share, an improvement on the loss of $20.88 per share that it reported in the year-ago period. - Variety
"There was only one time when he seriously thought about quitting. The project … had just been announced, in the fall of 2016. Within hours of the news — BARRY JENKINS TO ADAPT HOT NOVEL 'UNDERGROUND RAILROAD' — the tweets had arrived. "THIS is what he's doing after 'Moonlight'? I HATE slave movies. Do we really need more images...
Over the past months we've gotten "a range of short films that showcase top talents in American opera, highlight contemporary composers and recruit other artists (including costume designers and cinematographers) as well as tens of thousands of new viewers … overdue embrace of the dormant chemistry between cinema and opera, so rarely consummated." - The Washington Post
