Jean-Daniel Bouchard said although his twin passions may seem like something of a contradiction — farming can be gruelling physical labour and involves plenty of financial mathematics, versus an art form that depends on imagination and creativity — they help him find balance. – CBC
How Did Arts And Culture Respond To Trump?
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
Upending A ‘Typical Immigrant Story’ With Steven Yeun
Yeun, who got the job as Glenn on The Walking Dead five months after he moved to Los Angeles, is starring in Minari right now – the movie famous at the moment because the Hollywood Foreign Press Association didn’t consider this extremely American story American enough since the protagonists mostly speak Korean. “Minari premiered at Sundance and took home the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize and an audience award. Yeun’s father sat next to him during the screening, which unnerved Yeun. … With this film, what he and the director were trying to tell their parents was: ‘I’m a father. And now I understand what you had to go through.'” – The New York Times
EU Green New Deal Includes Building A New Bauhaus
In September the EU launched “an ambitious and historic initiative to fund innovative scientific and artistic endeavours to abate climate change and allow Europe to meet its goal of zero net carbon emissions by 2050. The Commission intends to bring the European Green Deal to life by creating ‘a collaborative design and creative space, where architects, artists, students, scientists, engineers and designers work together (…) to combine sustainability with good design’ within and beyond Europe’s borders. Drawing on the heritage and language of modernism, this initiative has been coined the New European Bauhaus. – Eurozine
The Book Pirates Loved Voltaire
Booksellers often distrusted Voltaire, because by modifying his texts and multiplying the editions, he alienated their customers. No one wanted to pay good money for a slightly new version of a book that one had already bought. And some booksellers had become disenchanted with his endless variations on the same themes. – Lapham’s Quarterly
Want To Understand People Better? Scientists Look To Dogs
In a recent study of 217 Border collies that ranged in age from 6 months to 15, the team, together with the Clever Dog Lab in Austria, found similarities with humans in the dogs’ personality traits as they age. – Nautilus
Remember That Fake Gauguin The Getty Bought? They Were Warned
“The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles was privately warned in 2002 that a Gauguin sculpture it had just bought for around $4m was a fake. A few months later the museum sent a researcher from Los Angeles to Paris to investigate, but she failed to resolve the question — so the matter remained unpursued with the Wildenstein gallery, which had sold them the work. A year ago, the museum finally admitted that Head with Horns is not an authentic work by Gauguin — and it was banished to the storeroom.” – The Art Newspaper
How Much Do Composers Get Paid For Commissions?
The reality is that many questions surround composer pay. Some people wonder why they’re not being paid more. Some people are surprised by the amounts they have been paid. Some people worry they should have gotten more, but weren’t bold enough to ask for it. Some composers get asked to name their number. Others are told, “this is the budget.” Some of us are making a living from our commissions. Some of us have other jobs that help pay the bills. – NewMusicBox
LA Theatre Raises $700K In A Single Online Fundraiser. Here’s How
It was with no small amount of happiness that Center Theatre Group this week said it had generated more than $700,000 through a single fundraising event: a boisterous Zoom party featuring an impressive list of theater makers and celebrities. The event was part of the RWQuarantunes program, launched last year by WME partner Richard Weitz and his teenage daughter, Demi, to raise money for groups devastated by coronavirus shutdowns. – Los Angeles Times
How Do We Mitigate The Chaos Of Social Media?
“I think we’re witnessing, in real time, society grappling with the emergence of social media as a very powerful force. Experts who have been studying this stuff have been warning for months, if not years, that these types of disturbances could happen as a result of online platforms. And this isn’t the first time that we’ve seen social media activity manifest in a real-world threat to democracies or disruption of an economy. But the scale, publicity, and extremity of these recent events feels new in the U.S.” – Harvard Business Review
Build Back Better
At this point I would implore arts organizations not to return to pre-pandemic practices with nothing more than modest tweaks. This is a time for serious reconfiguring. So let me suggest three categories for new or significantly expanded approaches. – Doug Borwick
Record Amount Of Buried Treasure Found In UK (By Amateurs With Metal Detectors)
The vast majority, 96%, were discovered by metal detecting. Norfolk, Lincolnshire, Essex and Hampshire were identified as hotspots for treasure with more than 80 pieces found in each county during 2019. There are approximately 20,000 detectorists in England and Wales, and 348 of their discoveries were acquired by or donated to UK museums in 2019. Of the found treasure, 84% were “object cases”, meaning non-coin finds. – The Guardian
Theatre Of Screens (But Is It, Though?)
Whether or not onscreen theater feels like theater may depend on whether it offers a feeling of liveness, with all the potential for error and surprise and invention and anything-could-go-wrong-at-any-moment contingency that liveness affords. – The New York Times
How Did A Book Of New Poetry Get Passed Off As The Work Of Ancient Buddhist Nuns?
Matty Weingast’s The First Free Women: Poems of the Early Buddhist Nuns was marketed by America’s leading Buddhist publisher — and hailed by many readers — as a translation of the Therigatha, a collection of Pali verse attributed to the very first community of Buddhist nuns. But as scholars familiar with the actual Therigatha got a look, they saw just how little of what Weingast wrote resembles the original, and quite a brouhaha arose. Does Weingast acknowledge that his work isn’t a translation? More or less. Does the publisher? Well … – Literary Hub
Could We Really Revive The Federal Theatre Project? How Would That Work In 2021?
The short answer is that it couldn’t work the way it did in the 1930s: the legal and theatrical landscape then was too different. (For a start, there was no such thing as not-for-profit theatre.) But there are certainly possibilities; here are a few of them. – American Theatre
Libel Lawsuit In Poland Could Derail Holocaust Research, Observers Fear
“Two Polish historians are facing a libel trial over a book examining Poles’ behaviour during the Second World War, a case whose outcome is expected to determine the future of independent Holocaust research under Poland’s nationalist government. … [The case] comes in the wake of a 2018 law that makes it a crime to falsely accuse the Polish nation of crimes committed by Nazi Germany.” – The Guardian
U.S. Supreme Court Unanimously Rejects Suit Over Guelph Treasure
The collection of ornate medieval reliquaries is now held by Berlin’s state museums; the American heirs of German Jewish art dealers, claiming that the objects were sold to the state under duress in 1935, sued in U.S. federal courts to recover them under “the international law of genocide.” The SCOTUS ruling declares, “We do not look to the law of genocide to determine if we have jurisdiction over the heirs’ common law property claims. We look to the law of property” — which says this is a matter for Germany to decide. – ARTnews
Poetry Magazine Faces Down Furor Over Printing Work By Sex Offender
“[The prestigious journal] has doubled down on its decision to publish a poem by a convicted sex offender as part of a special edition dedicated to incarcerated poets, telling critics that ‘it is not our role to further judge or punish [people] as a result of their criminal convictions’.” – The Guardian
Kirill Serebrennikov, Russia’s Most Famous Dissident Director, Fired From His Moscow Theatre
On Tuesday, Serebrennikov hosted an event at the Gogol Center — which he has directed since its opening in 2012 and which has become one of the Russian capital’s hottest theaters — revealing season plans for 2021. On Wednesday, the city of Moscow’s culture department announced that Serebrennikov’s contract would not be renewed when it expires in 3½ weeks. (For years he has battled embezzlement charges widely believed to be trumped-up.) – The Calvert Journal
Amazon’s New Washington DC Tower Will Have A Hiking Trail Up The Side
Named The Helix, the glass spiral tower will be part of a complex of three office buildings that will make up Amazon HQ2. – Dezeen
Snubs And Surprises From This Year’s Golden Globes Nominations
The absence of the Shonda Rhymes-produced Regency-era blockbuster proves the Golden Globes isn’t just a popularity contest. Otherwise, the Netflix drama would have cleaned up in all categories this morning and likely on February 28. – Deadline
The Times’s ‘Five Minutes That Will Make You Love {Piano/Sopranos/String Quartets}’ Series? It’s Working
Says classical music editor Zachary Woolfe (who came up with the idea in the shower), “It has doubled our audience for classical music. It’s gratifying that whatever we do, people are willing to explore and be into it.” – The New York Times
Golden Globe Nominations 2021: ‘Mank’, ‘The Crown’, ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’, ‘Nomadland’
Streaming services thoroughly dominate the roster: Hulu took 9 nominations, Amazon Studios 10, and Netflix a whopping 42. Among notable details: Tom Hanks and Spike Lee were snubbed, and of the five nominated directors, three are women. (For a complete list of nominations, click here.) – Variety