First there was the fire. “Since then, tragedy has turned to travesty and toxicity as a wall of silence coupled with multiple sackings has left Glasgow reeling. The city that was once renowned for both its hundred-plus years of artistic heritage and current can-do dozen Turner prize winners now has a vast burnt-out shell – literally – at its city centre and an even bigger hole in the Art School’s spiritual psyche.” – Artlyst
Why Is The Turkish Government Trying To Sue This Cultural Organization Out Of Existence?
“While art philanthropist Osman Kavala has been jailed in Turkey for more than three years without conviction, the country has now filed an unprecedented lawsuit in an attempt to dismantle his Istanbul-based arts organization Anadolu Kültür. … Kavala’s various initiatives to support cultural memory projects for Kurds, Armenians, Yazidis, and other marginalized groups in Turkey have long made Anadolu Kültür a target of government scrutiny.” – Hyperallergic
ABT Alum Takes Reins At Uruguay’s National Ballet
In 2012, a different ABT alum, Julio Bocca, was named director of the Ballet Nacional del Sodre in Montevideo with the remit to raise the company’s level. One of the first things he did was recruit his colleague, ABT soloist Maria Riccetto, to come back to her hometown and join the company; so she did, and she became a major celebrity in Uruguay, nearly as big as soccer stars. She retired from dancing at the end of 2019 at age 39, and as of the beginning of 2021, she is the BNS’s artistic director. Here’s a Q&A between Riccetto and Marina Harss. – Pointe Magazine
(Un)Daunted: Crystal Pite On Choreographing For The Paris Opera Ballet
“You feel the weight of the famous Palais Garnier opera house itself, and the history and legacy of the legendary dancers who have performed there. And then there’s the pressure of expectations, but after about eight minutes in a room full of dancers, I felt okay. They were all so welcoming, and you could sense how hungry they were for something new. There was real passion during the rehearsal process. It’s true that you can feel exhausted by the institution itself. The company has 154 dancers. It’s huge, but just being there as a guest meant I didn’t have to play politics.” – Ludwig Van
U.S. Newspapers Are Starting To Accept The ‘Right To Be Forgotten’
Back in 2014, when the EU passed a law allowing people to petition Google to de-index old news stories about them (e.g., criminal convictions or embarrassing incident from youth that became public), American newsrooms were dead-set against the idea. Now, The Boston Globe, The Plain Dealer of Cleveland, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and some other papers have begun to institute such programs on their own, and industry consensus may start to turn. – Slate
Research Paper Linking Violence To Video Games Is Retracted
“Zhang and his co-authors reported high levels of statistical significance for their finding, but the reported differences in the effects of violent games versus nonviolent games were too small for that high statistical significance to be possible.” – Science
Did The Louvre Just Ruin Its Cy Twombly Mural?
“After a renovation of a storied gallery at the Louvre Museum in Paris, the Cy Twombly Foundation has claimed that a monumental ceiling painting by the late artist has been permanently altered, thanks to a new paint job on the surrounding walls and a change in lighting. … [The Foundation] is demanding that the Salle des Bronzes be returned to its original state ahead of the museum’s reopening to the public.” – ARTnews
YouTube Chief Talks About What’s Next, Misinformation, And New Features
YouTube is planning an official rollout for “Applause,” a feature—already in testing—that lets viewers make cash payments to their favorite creators by initiating an on-screen clapping effect. Like existing features such as Super Chat, “it’s a token of my appreciation of some monetary value.” – Fast Company
AI Researchers Are Increasingly Worried About The Ethical Implications Of Their Work
Just as some computer scientists seem oblivious to ethical concerns, others appear to be trigger-happy with their moral outrage. – The New Yorker
Can Historians Be Traumatized By What They Study?
“The phenomenon of the historian traumatized by history remains unstudied and is not widely known. Yet anyone who has documented depravity knows the symptoms. After writing a book on the Armenian Genocide, a process that took me five years, I found it impossible to slip comfortably into sleep. All kinds of catastrophes visited me—still visit me—in that space before dreams.” – The New Republic
Study: Are “Minor” Literatures More Nationalistic?
“Our data consists of digital editions of 200 works of prize-winning fiction, divided into four subcorpora of equal size: U.S.-American, French, German, and a collection of novels drawn from 19 different “minor” European languages. We ultimately find no evidence to support Casanova’s theory that minor literatures are more nationalistic than literature produced within major cultural capitals. Indeed, the evidence points to the exact opposite effect.” – Cultural Analytics
Struggling With The Meaning Of Cultural Appropriation
“Your poem was meant to be a complex double portrait of both the Black caregiver and your white grandmother, and the racist logic and history that bound them both. Did you, a young white person, the child of people you freely admitted had been shaped by racist beliefs, have any claim or relationship to this voice? Our workshop worried this question for an hour without resolving it. And while our discussion never devolved, as I was concerned it might, into open hostility, it also didn’t make anyone feel better for having participated in it, nor did it settle the questions your poem raised to anyone’s satisfaction.” – LitHub
Now We Know What New Orleans Without Mardi Gras Music Is
His city—our cities—aren’t empty now. They’re just pretty much shut down. There’s a social media campaign attached to the Jazz & Heritage Foundation’s new outreach efforts, asking for posts in response to the question, “Have you ever been saved by a song?” Our answer is and will be, yes. – The Daily Beast
Paul Ganson, Who Saved Detroit’s Orchestra Hall, Dead At 79
The Detroit Symphony’s assistant principal bassoonist from 1969-2004, he had been with the orchestra one year when he launched the Save Orchestra Hall campaign, which rescued from the wrecking ball the venue that the DSO had left in 1939 and ended up returning to in 1989. A memorial statement from the orchestra said, “Paul’s extraordinary impact on the DSO cannot be overstated. … We literally would not be where we are today without Paul.” – Detroit Free Press
How Bang On A Can Changed Contemporary Music
These days, Bang is a sprawling artistic conglomerate, with an annual budget of $2 million to $2.5 million, a dedicated record label, a virtuoso chamber ensemble (the Bang on a Can All-Stars) to carry its branding internationally, an active commissioning program, a summer residency and a distinctive performance format — the new-music marathon concert — that is practically a trademarked part of the organization’s identity. – San Francisco Chronicle
Hollywood’s Hottest Young Director Is A Chinese Woman Who Makes Westerns
Chloé Zhao came to L.A. from Beijing to finish high school and go to college, got a poli-sci degree from Mount Holyoke, went to NYU film school, and ended up making three feature films at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. One of those caught the eye of Frances McDormand — and now Nomadland is a major Oscar contender, Zhao has won more awards in a single season than any filmmaker in history, and she’s currently making a Marvel blockbuster. – New York Magazine
Indianapolis Museum Staff Demand CEO Resign Over Job Posting
A group of 85 Newfields employees and members of the Board of Governors released a public letter Tuesday that calls for president Charles Venable to step down after the arts campus apologized for the wording in its job description for a new director. – Indianapolis Star
What Better Use For An Empty IKEA Store Than As An Arts Center?
That’s what could happen in the English city of Coventry: the Swedish furniture chain closed its store there last year, Coventry is the UK’s City of Culture for 2021, and the big interior space could hold artwork that the current museum can’t. The city council votes on a plan next week. – BBC
Why Disney Really Fired Gina Carano From ‘The Mandalorian’
It wasn’t just because she likened being a conservative in America today to being a Jew in 1930s Germany on Instagram. “Carano had become a lightning rod among Star Wars fans and a headache for Lucasfilm, … [and] had repeatedly been warned by those around her about her social media behavior.” – The Hollywood Reporter
Opera Singers Help Long-Term COVID Patients Get Their Breath Back
“Called E.N.O. Breathe and developed by the English National Opera in collaboration with a London hospital, the six-week program offers patients customized vocal lessons: clinically proven recovery exercises, but reworked by professional singing tutors and delivered online.” – The New York Times
Second City Has A Buyer
Last summer, after the pandemic led to the layoff of two-thirds of the company’s staff and accusations by alumni of color of serious race issues, co-owner and executive producer Andrew Alexander resigned; in October, he put Second City up for sale. Final purchase negotiations are now reportedly underway with private equity firm ZMC, which is owned by the CEO of the video-game company behind Grand Theft Auto. – Financial Times
San Francisco Opera Is Returning To Live Performance With A Drive-In Show
The company’s first staged presentation, set for April and May, will be a 90-minute English-language adaptation of Rossini’s Barber of Seville on an outdoor stage (repurposing what would have been the set for this season’s opener, Fidelio) before an audience parked in cars in Marin County. The other big event will be free streams of San Francisco Opera’s sold-out 2018 Ring cycle. – San Francisco Chronicle
The Cultural Significance Of Magazines
“The best way to think about magazines is as the analog Internet—they’d foster communities of people, just like on social networks,” Steven Lomazow, a seventy-three-year-old New Jersey neurologist who created the exhibition from his personal collection of more than eighty-three thousand magazine issues, said the other day. – The New Yorker
Reimagine Yourself
The failure to lift our eyes and see that our core work can and should be connecting people with art is the principal source of the problems we have experienced over the last 20-30 years. – Doug Borwick
‘A Thunderclap”, Says Publisher: Unknown Work By Proust Coming This Spring
“The texts in The Seventy-Five Pages [Les Soixante-quinze feuillets] were written in 1908, around the time Proust began working on In Search of Lost Time, which was published between 1913 and 1927. The papers were part of a collection of documents held by the late publisher Bernard de Fallois, who died in 2018.” Gallimard will release the book in France on March 18; there’s no date yet for an English translation. – The Guardian