Charles Desmarais: “SFMOMA’s new collection initiative is hardly in the vanguard of such efforts, but it may keep the museum from falling further behind. And we, the public to whom the museum owes a more holistic, and thus more accurate, picture of art and its history, will be watching closely.” – San Francisco Chronicle
ABC Needs To Stop Trying To Trim The Oscars Broadcast And Embrace Its Oscarness
“If you paid any attention at all to the run-up to this year’s Academy Awards, you might reasonably think the ceremony’s producers and network wish they didn’t have to do the damn thing at all. … ABC learning the wrong damn lesson from the Super Bowl is depressing, because that quintessential Live! Television! Event! offers so much more guidance on which way to go with Hollywood’s big night.” – Flavorwire
A Worrisome Disconnect Between The Arts And The Public
“If, as many people think, the type of culture you enjoy is one marker of class, then by definition the arts can never be ‘working class’ because class and culture define each other. By this argument, if the working or lower classes (cringeworthy terms) leave their cocoons and somehow emerge as middle-class butterflies because they listen to Radio 3, then they no longer count as working class precisely because they listen to Radio 3. We are still stuck in this catch-22.” – Arts Professional
The Real Pianist Behind The Movie ‘Green Book’
The filmmakers didn’t line up Don Shirley’s original music with Mahershala Ali’s fingers; instead, they got a Julliard-trained pianist to play it. Kris Bowers “had never heard of Don Shirley. Bowers immersed himself in Shirley’s recordings. That made him nervous. ‘I was pretty scared actually once I listened to it because of how intricate it was, how difficult it was,’ Bowers says.” But he transcribed all of the music and then listened to it repeatedly, practicing for up to nine hours a day for the part. – NPR
Back In The Day, Hollywood’s Highest Paid Director Was A Woman
In early days of the movies, some people thought that women had a special relationship with cinema. There were jobs – and not just as actors or script girls. “Women wrote at least half of all silent films, while narrative film—film that tells a made-up story—is arguably the invention of Alice Guy-Blaché, … [who] made La Fée aux Choux (The Fairy of the Cabbages) in 1896. There are actors, costumes, props, sets and a whimsical story; in the surviving clip, newborn babies emerge from giant heads of cabbage with the help of a fairy-midwife. The birth metaphor seems deliberate; the first narrative film may also be the first film about film.” – LitHub
The Haskell Indian Nation University Is About To Close Its Museum ‘Indefinitely’
As a grant ends, the Historical Cultural Center and Museum, with three employees and a collection dating back to 1884, is planning to shut down. But apparently it will, at some point, reopen, says a dean: “‘We have been working diligently to secure more funding in order to reopen it later this semester,’ said Julia Good Fox, dean of the College of Natural and Social Sciences.” – Lawrence Journal-World
D.C.’s Synetic Theater Won’t Lose Its Lease To Amazon HQ – Yet
The theatre now has a three-year grace period. “With the announcement of Amazon’s move into Arlington, the mostly vacant building became a centerpiece for the first phase of the company’s takeover of National Landing, née Crystal City. This left Synetic Theater—known for its wordless, physical productions—looking for a new home.” – DCist
A Jiffy Lube Owner Talks About His Business’s Relationship With The Arts
Steve Sanner: “Small business owners like me don’t often view the arts as an area in which we can make a real difference. Even our “stretch” sponsorship levels are overshadowed by the huge dollar amounts that wealthy individuals, banks, law firms, and insurance companies can generate. For us, philanthropy is difficult to plan for, so our sponsorship investments tend to come out of our advertising budgets. Therefore, we’re motivated to find ways to drive our business in more immediate, ROI-based campaigns than what is thought a typical sponsorship of the arts might provide.” – Americans for the Arts
Will AI Ever Be Artists? Be Creative? Produce Art? A Philosopher Argues No
“Human creative achievement, because of the way it is socially embedded, will not succumb to advances in artificial intelligence. To say otherwise is to misunderstand both what human beings are and what our creativity amounts to.” – MIT Technology Review
The Troubled Oscars – A Timeline
Have we ever seen a more chaotic lead up to an awards telecast? A host is announced, then revoked. Categories are added, then rescinded. Awards are to be televised, then not. Then televised again. It’s enough to make you think the Academy doesn’t know what it’s doing. At the least, it shows a collapse in confidence. – The New York Times
Explaining ‘The Satanic Verses’ — Any Why We Won’t Be Seeing Anything Like It For A While
“The increasing prominence of radical Islam, or Islam as a political force, is obviously one factor. The other factor, especially in the West, is the increasing emphasis on culture and ethnicity, religion included, as a means of self-definition. … Rushdie’s satirical look at religion comes across quite differently when Islam is conceived of as an identity. What began as a critique of ideas is taken as an insult to a group, and often a marginalised group, at that.” – Aeon
Ah, The Scourge Of Jukebox Musicals… Except… They’re Really Fun!
The critics aren’t wrong: We really do want that crisp, new snap. But Broadway has deep roots in vaudeville — no story, just acts — so audiences are right: We’ll always crave performances that revel in that singing, dancing beat. – Washington Post
What Went Wrong At Ireland’s Two National Orchestras, And How To Fix It
An investigation last year found that the national broadcaster’s two orchestras, the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra and the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, were under-utilized, underfunded, and plagued by low morale and mistrust. RTÉ National Symphony general manager Anthony Long talks with a reporter about how things got to such a pass and what’s being done to improve things. – The Journal of Music
Jussie Smollett’s Alleged Hate-Crime Hoax Won’t Change A Damn Thing
Dorrine Kondo: Film Industry Diversity Numbers Are Revealing, But Not Nearly The Whole Story
“In my book “Worldmaking: Race, Performance and the Work of Creativity,” I approach the issue of diversity as a cultural anthropologist, playwright and performance studies scholar. In it, I argue that cultural representation is about something deeper than parity for the sake of parity – that everyone needs to be mirrored in the public sphere in order to exist and to count as a fully dimensional human being.” – The Conversation
Actor Jussie Smolett Charged With Felony For Staging Hate-Crime Attack
The 36-year-old actor, a star of the Fox series Empire, received an outpouring of national attention and sympathy after he was reported to have been violently attacked in Chicago by two white men shouting anti-black and anti-hay epithets. After the police found and interviewed the ostensible attackers, who turned out to be two Nigerian-American brothers, and collected additional evidence, they arrested Smollett, alleging that he concocted the entire thing. – Vulture
Nine Months After #MeToo Resignation, Milwaukee’s Florentine Opera Names New CEO
Last May, company general director William Florescu resigned because of what the Board described as because of “violation of the Florentine Opera’s policies and prohibitions concerning sexual misconduct.” His successor, the company’s first female leader, is Maggey Oplinger, currently director of community partnerships at the Milwaukee Symphony. – Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Public Theater Sues Ian Schrager’s Public Hotel For Trademark Infringement
“A half-mile apart on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, two buildings claim to be putting on theater for the PUBLIC, using boldfaced font to advertise their mission. … The Public Theater, which opened its first show in the 1960s, claims that the Public hotel [which has a performance space] is essentially siphoning off its business by riding on its theatrical coattails.” – The New York Times
Met Museum Gets Major Gift Of Colonial South American Art
“It was either a dream come true or a prank: a man living in São Paulo with no previous relationship with Metropolitan Museum of Art cold-called the New York institution one day in 2017 and said he wanted to donate some of his paintings. And not just any paintings, but Spanish colonial works, a category that the Met publicly said it wanted to build up. It was not a prank, and in early March, the museum will unveil the gift from James Kung Wei Li — ten 17th- and 18th-century works from Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia, in a gallery in the American Wing called Art of the Colonial Andes.” – The Art Newspaper
Michael Jackson Estate Sues HBO Over ‘Leaving Neverland’ Documentary
“On Thursday, Optimum Productions and the two co-executors of the Jackson estate sued HBO and parent company Time Warner claiming the documentary constitutes a breach of a non-disparagement clause in an old contract.” – The Hollywood Reporter
Plan For Jane Austen Statue At Winchester Cathedral Dropped After Public Objects
“The cathedral had commissioned the sculptor Martin Jennings to create a statue of Austen for its inner close … [But] residents and local groups submitted ‘a barrage of criticism’ in response to the plans. ‘There is a strong body of opinion that rejects the idea of another Jane Austen statue anywhere, or any statue at all in the cathedral close,’ wrote one resident.” – The Guardian
Eduardo Chillida’s Sculpture Park In Spain To Reopen For First Time Since Financial Crisis
“Chillida Leku, the private museum and sculpture park devoted to the work of the Spanish sculptor Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002) in the Basque countryside, will reopen fully to visitors on 17 April.” Since 2011, it had been only by appointment. – The Art Newspaper
In The 1930s, The Hammond Organ Took America By Storm, Setting A New Standard
The Federal Trade Commission held an entire hearing in 1937 to evaluate the Hammond’s sonority. The Commission sought to determine whether a series of advertising claims about the Hammond’s timbre were “deceptive, misleading and false.” Though many of the hearing’s participants believed their testimony would go down in history as an important reckoning of what constituted “real” and “good” musical sound, the affair is largely forgotten today. What the hearing does offer is an unusually detailed record of contemporaneous arguments over the quality and value of a new electronic sound. – New Music Box
The Case Against The Obama Presidential Library
In the Obama center case, foes of the $500 million plan have centered their objections around the site location—a perch in an historic park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in 1871. Almost no one objects to the Obama Presidential Center coming to Chicago’s South Side, but some feel that it hoovers up an existing community asset instead of creating a new one. The question has lingered over the project since its introduction near the end of the president’s tenure in 2015. – CityLab
Social Platforms Want To Cut Down On Spreading Fake Conspiracy Theories. But There’s A Problem…
Part of the problem for platforms like YouTube and Facebook — which has also pledged to clean up misinformation that could lead to real-world harm — is that the definition of “harmful” misinformation is circular. There is no inherent reason that a video questioning the official 9/11 narrative is more dangerous than a video asserting the existence of U.F.O.s or Bigfoot. A conspiracy theory is harmful if it results in harm — at which point it’s often too late for platforms to act. – The New York Times