As always, Egypt was fruitful ground for archaeologists, with the discovery of the first ancient Egyptian funeral parlor, the world’s oldest Illustrated book, and a mummy buried with a secret painting gallery, among other finds. But the biggest news in Egyptian archaeology this year was undoubtedly the excavation of over 100 painted sarcophagi in Saqqara, an ancient burial ground south of Cairo....
"While there have been times during the past year when theatre and all who work in it have felt helpless, unloved and ignored, there is also plenty of evidence that it does matter and can make itself matter – not just to its own community but beyond. When theatre doesn’t just think of itself, when it thinks beyond the...
At the height of the disco craze in the late 1970s, Empire Rollerdrome, a rink in Brooklyn across the street from where the Brooklyn Dodgers once played baseball, was ground zero for what would become a major fad: dancing to glitzy pop music on eight wheels on a maplewood floor. At the center of it was Bill Butler, about...
"On either side of the Atlantic, museums have teamed up with corporations in an effort to utilize their spaces—and collections—in order to reach new audiences and make a little extra dough." - Artnet
"Jared Mezzocchi has been systematically exploring what Zoom and the editing program Isadora can offer theatre practitioners during the pandemic. He has been working in the field for over a decade and has explored it from multiple points of view — designer, director, playwright, artistic director. … We Zoomed in November to talk about the production, how to reverse-engineer...
"There’s a difference between everyday selfishness and real narcissism – and there’s a distinction between a normal personality trait and the harmful, rare personality disorder. As the research around narcissism has evolved in recent years, psychologists and psychiatrists have learned more about these differences." - Psyche
Her horrible 2020 began in January when movers dropped her four-pedal Fazioli, the instrument on which she made every recording she'd done since 2003. Paolo Fazioli, the eponymous piano maker, had five new pianos made for her to choose from, and it took her about half an hour to pick one. Is it her new best friend? "I guess...
Today, one of the world’s largest collections of Nazi propaganda sits in a climate-controlled warehouse at Fort Belvoir, in northern Virginia. Much of it is virulent; most of it is never seen by the public. - The New Yorker
"As predicted, domestic movie tickets sold between Jan. 1 through Dec. 31 came generated an estimated $2.3 billion (or $2.28 billion) compared to $11.4 billion in 2019, according to Comscore estimates. That's the lowest showing in at least 40 years." - The Hollywood Reporter
"Time will tell if theater grantmakers adopt the coalition’s demands en masse, and some of the demands have yet to make it into grantmakers’ toolboxes in a meaningful way. But at the very least, We See You has done a huge service for funders by creating a checklist of familiar, provocative, and disruptive action items." - Inside Philanthropy
"Imported films accounted for only about a sixth of China's total box office in 2020, a nearly 55% decrease year-on-year, industry data tracker Maoyan Entertainment said Monday. The decline highlights the chaos COVID-19 has wrought on Hollywood release schedules as well as the diminishing appeal of foreign content in what has just become the world's largest film market." -...
" described '21st-century sensibilities' as having prevented the inclusion of the play in Tales from Shakespeare, his retelling of 10 Shakespeare plays for children aged six and older." Morpurgo says that this way of describing his decision is bogus: he had to choose only ten plays, and he felt they should be stories appropriate for eight-year-olds, which The...
The small canvas depicting Christ carrying the cross and wearing the crown of thorns, owned by a private individual, was authenticated after two years of study by a team at the University of Lleida. - ARTnews
The board of governors of the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad admitted that an international outcry prompted their decision to call off plans to demolish 14 of the school's 18 buildings designed by Kahn in the '60s and completed in 1974. But the buildings are still considered unsafe to use because of deterioration in their bricks and damage...
"A tenacious outsider who refused his sole Tony Award nomination — for his biggest hit and only Broadway show, the Sophocles adaptation The Gospel at Colonus — Mr. Breuer flourished in the scrappier realm of Off Off Broadway, even as the scale of his works and ambitions took him to larger stages, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the...
