“We inhabit a dystopian reality, which may account for the dearth of dystopian fiction. Yet the novels of Zamyatin, Huxley and Orwell continue to cast a powerful spell. All of them end in defeat for the protagonists, but in each case a possibility of revolt remains.” – New Statesman
Why Write Books That No One Will Read?
“Books are now published in numbers so vast that the writing of one can no longer be presumed to be an act of communication between writer and reader. Yet even books that aren’t read, and stand little chance of ever being read, can have their value.” – LitHub
The Pandemic Has Killed Whole Classes Of Friendships
Understandably, much of the energy directed toward the problems of pandemic social life has been spent on keeping people tied to their families and closest friends. These other relationships have withered largely unremarked on after the places that hosted them closed. The pandemic has evaporated entire categories of friendship, and by doing so, depleted the joys that make up a human life—and buoy human health. But that does present an opportunity. In the coming months, as we begin to add people back into our lives, we’ll now know what it’s like to be without them. – The Atlantic
Madrid’s Far-Right City Councilors Want To Destroy A Mural With Rosa Parks And Other Strong Women
The mural, which also depicts women including Nina Simone, was the result of a popular vote four years ago. But “the far-right party Vox had called for the mural in the Madrid neighborhood of Ciudad Lineal to be removed and replaced with another representing five male and five female paralympic athletes. The current work, which is painted on the walls of La Concepción sports facility, pays homage to the achievements of 15 pioneering women, including Nina Simone, Rosa Parks, Frida Khalo and Emma Goldman.” – El País
Playwright: We Need To Stop Cancel Culture
“I do not consent to being part of an arts community that engages in witch hunts of people who don’t think like me,” Carmen Aguirre says in the nearly 30-minute video, which she posted to YouTube. “If I am to argue with someone because I oppose their views or even find their views harmful, then I’d like the argument to state why I think that person is wrong, not why I think they’re evil,” she says. – The Globe and Mail (Canada)
Apple’s Tim Cook: We Have To Say All Engagement Isn’t Good Engagement
“At a moment of rampant disinformation and conspiracy theories juiced by algorithms, we can no longer turn a blind eye to a theory of technology that says all engagement is good engagement — the longer the better — and all with the goal of collecting as much data as possible. Too many are still asking the question, ‘how much can we get away with?,’ when they need to be asking, ‘what are the consequences’?” – MacRumors
The Improbable Story Of A Disney Movie That Almost Didn’t Get Made
“So, uh, how — and why — did all of this happen? Here is the oral history of The Emperor’s New Groove, an irreverent, pratfall-heavy, non sequitur of an animated movie that so defied Disney’s painstakingly deliberate traditions, it’s hard to believe it actually exists today.” – New York Magazine
Eva Coutaz, Longtime Director Of Classical Label Harmonia Mundi, Dead At 77
“Having started her career with Harmonia Mundi in 1972 as a press officer, she went on to produce more than 800 recordings with artists including Philippe Herreweghe, [William Christie], Jean-Guihen Queyras, Isabelle Faust and Paul Lewis. She retired from the classical music label in 2016 following a career spanning nearly 30 years. When her husband Bernard Coutaz, Harmonia Mundi’s founder, died in 2010, she became the chairman and CEO of the label until its acquisition by PIAS, a family of independent European record labels.” – BBC Music Magazine
Cheech Marin’s New Museum Gets A Green Light
After years of planning, the long-awaited Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture of the Riverside Art Museum in Riverside, California, has finally received the green light from the city. – Artnet
A Rethink In Investing In Smaller Arts Organizations
“It is time to make significant investments in these smaller organizations to increase their capacities and develop a practice that does not make becoming more mainstream the ultimate goal. Most of these smaller organizations devote a significant portion of their energies to the task of survival, and while that might be a given in the nonprofit world, many of them will greatly benefit from redirecting more of their energies to their artistic practice instead of constantly treading water.” – Howlround
Improvised Comedy: How New York’s Standups And Clubs Are (Barely) Making It Through Lockdown
“Despite a state ban on live comedy performances, the pandemic hasn’t destroyed the New York comedy scene — it just pushed it underground. … Venue owners are finding ways to stay in business by exploiting exemptions set aside for religious services, indoor dining, and trivia nights (yes, really) as a means to get comics back onstage, even if that stage is in a church or on the subway.” – Vulture
The Cure For Disinformation
“The internet contains, for better or worse, a significant amount of humanity’s intellectual and creative outputs. It’s also a cesspool of outrageous falsehoods. Having access to so much information, then, is useful only if you’re able to separate the wheat from the chaff. For instance, the amount of information related to COVID-19 has been called an ‘infodemic’ by the World Health Organization: there is so much information that it’s impossible to keep up with all of it, and often difficult to determine what to believe.” – Psyche
We’re Seeing More Deaf People On TV. Now Let’s Hear Some Of Them.
“Many deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals have welcomed the increase in visibility that deafness and hearing loss have enjoyed on TV lately. … But for many who use devices like cochlear implants or hearing aids, onscreen representation still falls short by not reflecting enough of their experiences. … Deaf characters tend to be portrayed onscreen as people who sign and don’t speak,” whereas implant users usually speak and often don’t know ASL. – The New York Times
Study: Can Machines Make Good Therapists?
A recent study invited college students to talk about their emotions via an online chat with either a person or a “chatbot” (in reality, the chatbot was operated by a person rather than AI). The students felt better after talking about their feelings; it made almost no difference whether they thought they were talking to a real person or to a bot. – New Statesman
The Inauthenticity Of Working In A Digital Medium
“With digital, there is no such thing as authenticity. You are trusting that it is what it is. I feel eventually no matter how convincing it may seem, what we are experiencing through media could be something engineered against our best interests in some way. Even if one doesn’t care about the big picture, when it is proven that media can be changed like this, it loses validity and in our minds our trust in it erodes.” – Medium
$100 Million Holocaust Memorial And Museum Planned For Site Of Babyn Yar Massacre
“The complex will include a dozen buildings, including two separate museums — one for Ukrainians and Eastern European Jews killed in the Holocaust, and one specifically memorializing those who died at Babyn Yar. There will also be a church, a mosque, a synagogue, a multimedia center, a research center, and a conference building.” The artistic director of the project is the controversial filmmaker Ilya Khrzhanovsky (DAU), and several senior staffers have quit in protest over his plans: one says Khrzhanovsky intends to subject visitors to ‘psychometric algorithms’ and experiments, while another calls the whole thing “Holocaust Disneyland.” – Artnet
Actress Cloris Leachman, 94
“[She] began her astonishingly prolific eight-decade career performing radio plays as a child in Iowa. She appeared in Shakespearean comedy and Eugene O’Neill melodrama on Broadway in the 1950s, was a television mainstay from the dawn of the medium” — not to mention her now-legendary big-screen performances in The Last Picture Show and Young Frankenstein — “and, at 82, became the oldest female contestant on Dancing With the Stars. In the industriousness she displayed into her senior years, she was matched perhaps only by comedian Betty White.” – The Washington Post
Cannes Film Festival 2021 Isn’t Cancelled (Yet), But It Is Postponed
With ongoing uncertainty about the future course of the pandemic, Cannes organizers decided they had no choice but to change this year’s dates from May 11-22 to July 6-17. “The move, while expected, will have a domino effect across the festival circuit.” – The Hollywood Reporter
The Culture Wars Come To Slovenia
Perhaps it’s better to say the culture wars have been brought to the tiny ex-Yugoslav republic in the Alps, courtesy of prime minister Janez Janša, now in a third term as prime minister. (His previous term ended in a 2013 corruption scandal.) Janša has been replacing museum directors, canceling government leases and contracts with arts organizations, and pushing a right-wing nationalist artistic agenda in the ways we’ve seen in Hungary and Poland in recent years. – The New York Times
The Plight Of The Artist… As Expressed In A Cartoon
There is ample absurdity to wring from the fine-art ecosystem, where hierarchies and quid pro quos rule. Players ruthlessly engage in an unspoken competition for limited opportunities and resources—be they grants, residencies, publications, exhibitions, panel spots, teaching gigs, public commissions, or sales. And all of the above is adjudicated by gatekeepers who, like the gods of Olympus, deal fate and favour. – The Walrus
Longtime Folger Theatre Director Janet Griffin To Step Down
The announcement means the departure of one of Washington’s longest-serving theater chiefs and an opening in a company with a prestigious literary pedigree: It is an arm of one of the world’s great classical collections, the Folger Shakespeare Library. – Washington Post
These Classical Music Organizations Have Always Been Focused On Racial Equity
The long-overdue work that larger institutions have started on in the wake of last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests has been the day-in-day-out project of some other groups. Joshua Barone talked to people at seven of them — among them the Sphinx Organization, Imani Winds, and Black Pearl Chamber Orchestra — about what they do and what advice they’d give the wider classical industry. – The New York Times
Matter
An arts organization must come to matter to the community. When it matters, the community will support it. But how do arts organizations come to matter? The mindset that “We matter because we present great art.” does not cut it. It is only things that people see as important to their lives that fill this bill. – Doug Borwick