From parking garages to lakes and rooftops, outdoor performances can be exhilarating for artists and audiences alike. Vistas that would be impossible to re-create onstage are now more available. – Dance Magazine
Science Fiction Was Depicting Climate Change More Than A Century Ago
“For a few decades in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, authors from across ideologies and genres published stories that today would be called ‘cli-fi,’ or climate fiction.” Among those authors were no less than Mark Twain and Jules Verne (who wrote about industrialists intentionally heating the Arctic in order to mine coal). – JSTOR Daily
COVID Has Changed The Way Hollywood Works For Good
“‘People are fooling themselves if they think we’re going back to a pre-pandemic work lifestyle,’ says Arianna Bocco, president of IFC Films. … To get a sense of the new contours of a business that has been battered by the pandemic, Variety spoke with dozens of entertainment industry players, almost all of whom predicted that the nature of office life and how movies and television shows are made, marketed and distributed will be fundamentally changed.” – Variety
Inside The Cryptocurrency Calculations Of The Beeple Sale
The B.20 tokens based on Beeple’s work are about 41 times more valuable today than they were in January, when MetaKovan first made them available, according to CoinMarketCap. From the day the Christie’s auction began, on Feb. 25, to the close of the auction on March 11, the price of one B.20 token grew from $8.28 to $18.57. – Washington Post
Behind The Scenes, Artists Confronted MoMA Leadership About Board Chair’s Iraq War Ties
And the confrontations – and revelations about who on MoMA’s board and who on MoMA PS1’s board are implicated in “security firms” in Iraq, not to mention ties to Jeffrey Epstein – are ongoing. Iraqi American art scholar Rijin Sahakian: “The denial of the artists’ right to peacefully protest through their work — on an active war actively accumulating profit for the museum’s lead funder — is as resounding as the museum’s refusal to comment on or rethink its commitments.” – Hyperallergic
The Gender-Based Lawsuit Against Disney Expands To Include Pay Secrecy
California labor law doesn’t allow for pay secrecy. Disney denies the claims by the plaintiffs that “Disney prohibits employees from disclosing their own wages, discussing the pay of others or inquiring about another employee’s compensation. … Some of the plaintiffs also claim to have been instructed multiple times not to talk about their compensation, with one alleging that another employee had been disciplined for sharing their pay information with others at the company.” – Los Angeles Times
Warner Studios Cancels Plans To Build Tram To The Hollywood Sign
The effort, dubbed the Hollywood Skyway, would have cost the studio an estimated $100 million. The tramway would have taken visitors on a six-minute ride more than 1 mile up the back of Mt. Lee to a new visitors center near the sign, with pathways to a viewing area. – Los Angeles Times
The Controversies In Translating Amanda Gorman
“In one camp, translators argue that the issue is representation in the field, not whether a white translator is incapable of translating an author of a different background. Another contingent believes the incident signals a threatening policing of who is eligible to translate, a step closer to a world where the validity of one’s experience and ideas is contingent on identity.” – Asymptote Journal
Could A Joint Dictionary Unify North And South Korea? (Well, No)
Being that the South has been open to the rest of the world while the North has been sealed off for seven decades, the Korean spoken on the two sides of the DMZ is rather different. South Korea’s Unification Ministry has been hoping that an “inter-Korean dictionary” — launched in 2005 and currently getting a new push from Seoul (which is paying for it) — could bring the Republic and the Democratic People’s Republic closer together. The project hasn’t been going so well. – Deutsche Welle
Oscar Nominees Told Zooming In Not An Option For The Event
“We are treating the event as an active movie set, with specially designed testing cadences to ensure up-to-the-minute results, including an on-site COVID safety team with PCR testing capability. There will be specific instructions for those of you traveling in from outside of Los Angeles, and other instructions for those of you who are already based in Los Angeles.” – The Hollywood Reporter
IKEA Has Turned Its Catalog Into An Audiobook
“When IKEA canceled its beloved print catalog last year, it hinted at plans to venture into new formats to better reach an increasingly internet-dependent customer base.” And so it did: “Published on Spotify, Audible, and YouTube, the IKEA Audio Catalog is essentially a quippy version of its 288-page product book.” But can you really use it to shop without any pictures? – Yahoo! (Quartz)
The Bottom Line: How America’s Arts Organizations Are Doing
A new report looks at the balance sheets of the country’s arts organizations. Community and theatre organizations fared the best, while museums and symphony orchestras had negative bottom lines. – SMU Data Arts
Streaming Classical Music: Where The Money Really Goes, And Where It Ought To Go
“In the first two articles in the series, we looked at the streaming industry’s revenues, how they’re shared out between the music we listen to and how we choose that music. This week, we’re going to look at who ultimately receives the money — and at how the industry could or should change.” – Bachtrack
Exec Who Saved Capitol Records, Bhaskar Menon, Dead At 86
The record label was reeling in 1970: its cash cow, The Beatles, had disbanded, and it lost $8 million that year. Parent company EMI put Menon in charge the next year and he turned it all around: in 1973 Capitol released Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, and the label spent the decade issuing hit after hit by Tina Turner, Linda Ronstadt, Helen Reddy, Bob Seger, Grand Funk Railroad, and others. Menon went on to run EMI’s enormous worldwide music operations. – The New York Times
Arts In Chicago Set To Restart After IL Governor Raises Capacity Limits
“The new ‘phase 4A’ will allow for 25% fixed seating capacity in indoor and outdoor film, theater and performing arts venues of 200 seats or more. For fixed-seating venues with capacities under 200, the limit will increase to 50% capacity or 50 seats, whichever is fewer. .. The new plan will be implemented when 70% of Illinois residents 65 and over are vaccinated.” – Yahoo! (Chicago Tribune)
Many Museums Want To Remove The Sackler Name From Their Campuses. State Attorneys General Want To Let Them.
“Following [Purdue Pharma’s bankruptcy] court filing in New York, the attorneys general from 23 states issued a statement calling for amendments to the plan, which they say does not offer sufficient concessions — including one that would protect non-profits that opt to remove the Sackler name from their spaces, regardless of gift agreements.” – Artnet
Russia Is Investigating Its Own Eurovision Song Contest Entry For ‘Illegal Statements’
Following criminal complaints by a veterans’ group and the Russian Union of Orthodox Women that the pop tune’s words “aim to seriously insult and humiliate the human dignity of Russian women” and “[incite] hatred towards men, which undermines the foundations of a traditional family,” authorities are investigating singer Manizha Sangin for her anthem “Russian Woman,” which salutes the strength of the nation’s females and calls on them to be independent and resist sexism. – Yahoo! (AFP)
NBC Cancels “World Of Dance”
The show had been a strong performer for NBC over its first three seasons, but the fourth season ebbed and flowed in the numbers. The format, which is owned by Universal Television Alternative Studio, also has been remade in a number of territories globally including Thailand, Philippines and Poland. – Deadline
2020 Movie Box Office Down Big Time (But Home Streaming Offsets Much)
The U.S./Canada box office market was down 80% in 2020, to $2.2 billion, while tickets sold were down 81% to 0.24 billion. Still, that was offset by home and mobile entertainment, which increased to $30 billion, up 21% from a year earlier. The number of online video subscriptions increased 32% to 308.6 million. – Deadline
How A Japanese AI Used In Bakeries Ended Up Fighting Cancer
In early 2017, a doctor at the Louis Pasteur Center for Medical Research, in Kyoto, saw a television segment about the BakeryScan. He realized that cancer cells, under a microscope, looked kind of like bread. He contacted BRAIN, and the company agreed to begin developing a version of BakeryScan for pathologists. – The New Yorker
What Should Be on the Syracuse Symposium’s Agenda: The Urgent Need for Museum Deaccession Regulations
Museum professionals have instinctively recoiled at the thought of government interference in their activities, insisting that they can police themselves. But that hasn’t worked out too well when it comes to preventing misguided museum officials from converting works that rightly should remain in the public’s patrimony into easy money. – Lee Rosenbaum
Spotify Finally Provides An Explanation Of How It Pays Royalties
“First things first: It will not tell you how much money Drake made from Spotify; in fact there are no artist names on the site at all. Instead,” Loud & Clear (as it’s called) “‘aims to increase transparency by sharing new data on the global streaming economy and breaking down the royalty system, the players, and the process.'” – Variety
As Pandemic Drags On, A Boom In Online Writers’ Groups
“Some of these informal gatherings have flourished as people who once shied away from writing groups — because of the time commitment, commute or intimidation factor of a room full of aspiring authors — are finding that the pandemic has lowered the barriers to entry.” – The New York Times
BBC Plans Major Transfer Of Production And Jobs Away From London
“The blueprint for the plan, which is called ‘The BBC Across the U.K.,’ commits at least an extra £700 million ($978 million), cumulatively, across the country by 2027/2028. … The expansion also includes the relocation of 400 positions, with half from BBC News and the other half from radio. Around 200-300 new roles in local content journalism will also be created.” – Variety