"The German government on Wednesday unveiled a €2.5 billion ($3 billion) fund to kick-start the country's pandemic-hit cultural sector. The fund will provide insurance in cases where a spike in coronavirus infections forces events to be canceled or postponed. It will also supplement event ticket sales if audience numbers have to be capped to meet social distancing rules." -...
Concerns around social media have become mainstream, but researchers have yet to elucidate the specific cognitive mechanisms that explain the toll it takes on our psychological wellbeing. New advances in computational neuroscience, however, are poised to shed light on this matter. - Aeon
The demand for remote performances is presumably waning, which is why it's weird that Spotify just entered the virtual concert business and thinks people will pay $15 for prerecorded shows you can only watch once at a dictated time. - Mic
For 427 days, an old wooden board inside the foyer of St Martin’s Theatre in London was stuck on the number 28,199. It had ticked upwards every night for 67 years, logging the number of performances of the longest -running play in the world. But on March 16, 2020, The Mousetrap paused for breath. This seemingly immovable object met...
In an act of protest, the artists are now calling for any of their works on view in the museum to “be covered in such a way as to prevent their ‘communication’ to the public, and that those works that are not exhibited but belong to the collection be removed from the museum's web page” until Manuel Luis Alcántara...
In 2018, New York State’s Office for the Aging launched a pilot project, distributing Joy for All robots to sixty state residents and then tracking them over time. Researchers used a six-point loneliness scale, which asks respondents to agree or disagree with statements like “I experience a general sense of emptiness.” They concluded that seventy per cent of...
Mayor Sadiq Khan said it was the "most international line-up" of artists. The landmark has been home to a rolling commission of artworks since 1998. The plinth was built in 1841 but remained empty due to a lack of funds. - BBC
"The collection was put together by Arthur Bell Nicholls, the widower of Charlotte, who of the six Brontë children lived the longest, dying in 1855 at the age of 38. Nicholls sold the majority of the surviving Brontë manuscripts in 1895 to the notorious bibliophile and literary forger Thomas James Wise. The collectors and brothers Alfred and William Law...
"I sometimes feel we’re losing sight of how valuable music is. I get messages on Patreon or Instagram from fans telling me how my music got them through a huge depression or losing a child. It was the same for me." - The Guardian
" résumé included reimagining classic American plays through diverse casting and a stint in the ensemble of Ntozake Shange's groundbreaking 1976 Broadway show, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf. But she was best known for shows she wrote and performed at venues like the Kitchen in Manhattan and Franklin Furnace in Brooklyn,...
In his new book, “Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020,” Rushdie attempts to perform a defensive castling move. He suggests his work has been misunderstood and mistreated because the literary culture has turned from brio-filled imaginative writing toward the humbler delights of “autofiction,” as exemplified by the work of Elena Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausgaard. - The New York Times
Patrick Makuakāne understands well the value of the traditional dances passed down through generations. ("I love those little gems. They're like family heirlooms … they're very precious and you understand they don't need to be changed and their inherent value is just the way they are.") But that doesn't mean that, in his longtime base of San Francisco, he...
Sunday's spending spree means the mysterious anonymous bidder will become the owner of the Charlie Bit My Finger clip. But it also gives them a chance to create some follow-up content. The auction page says the NFT winner will be given the opportunity to "recreate a hilarious modern-day rendition of the classic clip" that will feature "the original stars,...
"A recent surge in cases — Taiwan's worst outbreak since the start of the pandemic — has brought a halt to cultural life on the island, forcing performing arts centers, concert halls and museums to shutter just as they are coming back to life in the rest of the world. Performers from Taiwan and abroad have been caught in...
For Amazon, snapping up MGM — which has more than 4,000 movies and 17,000 TV shows in its catalog — is a way to supercharge its Prime Video service with a slew of well-known entertainment titles. In addition, Amazon is anticipating being able to mine Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer properties like the Pink Panther, Rocky and, yes, the 007 franchises for new...
