“Although its museums have been closed since February, commercial galleries were allowed to remain open. Several have done so, some throughout the crisis, putting South Korea alongside Taiwan and Hong Kong as one of the few places to have an art scene still running, or at least limping, throughout this extraordinary spring.” – The Art Newspaper
Coffee Culture, The Business
Coffee is sold less to provide an individual with pleasure than to support an industry with a skillfully primed audience. – The New Yorker
For Quarantine, A Salute To The Literature Of Idleness
Dwight Garner: “With so many hours to obliterate, I’ve found myself turning to the experts. I’ve pushed away the Tootsie Roll wrappers and empty root beer cans and gathered around my bed what I will call my library of indolence,” featuring such heroic figures as Bartleby the Scrivener and Oblomov. – The New York Times
Can Music Can Boost Your Immune System? Yes, Evidently
“Sound like quackery? It’s not. Numerous studies … have found that both performing and listening to music can have a significant impact on the immune system” — including one review that found levels of Immunoglobulin A to be “particularly responsive to music.” Jeremy Reynolds reports. – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Dancing At Home? ABT Ships Dance Floors To Its Dancers
ABT polled the dancers to find out how many would be interested. Then they placed a single order for 68 pieces, paid for it all and shipped them out to company members isolating everywhere from Australia to Hawaii. – Dance Magazine
Streaming Yes, But The Tech Still Has A Way To Go
When it comes to live music streaming, and in particular, the capacity to play together real time over the internet, the technology could be said to be in a nascent state — still very much under construction. – Ludwig Van
We Like To Blame Cities For Our Ills. Is This Fair?
The demonization of density harkens to the heyday of urbanization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. American civic leaders and reformers of the time embraced the notion that urban social problems — disease, poverty, immorality — stemmed from the physical environments of cities. – CityLab
It Starts: Cash-Strapped NYC Proposes Cutting Cultural Affairs Budget
Now facing an immense shortfall in tax revenue—about $7.4 billion—the city has proposed a revised budget for the next fiscal year that would reduce the overall budget by $3.4 billion, compared to last year’s adopted budget. Among those cuts is a budgetary reduction of $10.6 million for the Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA). – ARTnews
Distance Learning Isn’t Working. And There’s An Important Reason Why
The situation into which almost every parent in America has now suddenly and unwillingly been thrust could not be more different. One-size-fits-all education barely works in a classroom, but it is completely unmanageable with kids spread out across their various households working independently. – The Atlantic
Survey Of LA Art Galleries: A Third Could Close, Most To Be Smaller
A quarter of the respondents, nine of 35, said they are facing the permanent closure of their spaces in 2020 if the situation doesn’t improve quickly. An additional five galleries, or 14%, say closure is a possibility. The numbers are in keeping with a far more comprehensive study issued by the Comité Professionnel des Galeries d’Art, a French trade organization, which estimates that one-third of French galleries could shut down before the end of the year because of the steep losses in revenue. – Los Angeles Times
The Video At The Heart Of The Marina-Abramović-Is-A-Satanist Myth — And The Problems With America It Points Up Despite Itself
Critic Ben Read went looking for the source of the bizarre allegations that have had the right-wing internet in a lather for a few weeks. He found a 77-minute YouTube video about a pair of former-stuntmen-turned-Christianists spinning conspiracy theories about a great Satanic scheme afoot in Hollywood. Sure, it’s “outlandish,” Read allows — before putting his finger on the grains of truth that make it seem believable to some of us. – Artnet
NPR Audience Soars, Underwriting Stalls, And Execs Take Pay Cuts
People are consuming more news than usual. Monthly readership of NPR’s website has more than doubled and average weekly streaming of its radio shows has gone up 31 percent since the crisis began. Podcast downloads have also increased. – The New York Times
Here’s One Case Where Live-Streamed Theater Really Worked
Helen Shaw: “After five weeks of valiant internet productions that looked a lot like readings (even when they weren’t), Buyer & Cellar” — with Michael Urie, live from his living room, his partner as cameraman, returning to the role that kick-started his career — “is the proof-of-concept for low-budget live-capture. It turns out that even without an audience laughing and rustling, a 100-minute comedy can be funny.” – Vulture
Restarting New York Culture? It Will Take Years
The very features that make New York attractive to businesses, workers and tourists — Broadway, the subway system, world-class restaurants and innumerable cultural institutions — were among the hardest-hit in the pandemic. And they will take the longest to come back. – The New York Times
Standup Comedy Might Just Be Viable Online
“No one in live comedy is thrilled about moving shows online. ‘Doing standup without an audience is like sex without an orgasm,’ quipped Felicia Madison, the booker for West Side Comedy Club. ‘Why bother?’ …
[Yet] there’s been a startling amount of entrepreneurial experimentation in the last few weeks, proceeding in fits and starts, and it should have an impact on the culture long after the lockdown ends.” – The New York Times
Adventure Wildlife Photographer Peter Beard, 82
Born into considerable wealth and privilege in New York, Beard, whose body was found yesterday in woodland in the East Hamptons, was a photographer whose love for the African wilderness and its fragile ecology was first expressed in The End of the Game, a 1965 photo-book that now seems extraordinarily prescient. – The Guardian
Really, Are The Arts Just A Luxury During Desperate Times? For An Answer, Look To FDR
“For Roosevelt, it was not superfluous to the country’s most exigent needs. And in a move that remained decidedly controversial with his conservative congressional adversaries, he made the radical decision to enlarge and augment cultural provisions across the country.” – ARTnews
How Did Writers Survive The Great Depression? They Organized
Jason Boog recounts how his experience as a (non-)working writer during the Great Recession moved him to rediscover the story of the publishing industry’s first strike. – Literary Hub
No Matter What The Governor Says, Most Movie Theaters In Georgia Won’t Be Reopening Next Week
Gov. Brian Kemp has said that cinemas in the Peach State may begin welcoming customers again beginning April 27. People actually in the business of showing movies say there’s no way things can ramp up that fast: there are issues of reassembling furloughed staff, actually getting films to show, developing and maintaining safety and distancing protocols, and liability if customers start getting sick. – Variety
Another Side Effect Of COVID: People Are Having Trouble Reading
This is especially true at (now-online) universities, reports Emma Pettit, for students and professors alike. And as professors find themselves unable to focus on the reading they need to do for their research, they’re becoming more understanding of their students’ difficulties — and their requests to ditch the textbooks for the rest of the semester. – The Chronicle of Higher Education
More Regional, Less Global, Fewer Massive Fairs: The Art Market Post-COVID
Tim Schneider: “An art market justifiably paranoid about frequent international travel is an art market incentivized to fracture into regional and local interests. Short distances won’t just be advantageous on the other side of this mess because of convenience. They’ll also appeal because of the greater protection they afford. It’s the same calculus driving distributors in so many other industries to consider restructuring from largely global supply chains to ones centered closer to their actual end consumers.” – Artnet
New York City Ballet Announces A Virtual Spring Season
“Less than a month after canceling its spring season because of the coronavirus pandemic, New York City Ballet is back with a six-week slate of online programming. The company announced on Monday that it would broadcast full ballets and excerpts twice a week, from Tuesday through May 29, for free on its YouTube channel, Facebook page and website.” – The New York Times
Uffizi Prepares For Onslaught Of Crowds
Museum director Eike Schmidt recalled that after the Arno River in Florence flooded in 1966 and shuttered the museum, the number of visitors to the Uffizi jumped from 1 million to 1.5 million in 1968. – Washington Post (AP)
Viro-Skeptics: Why Are Some Having Trouble Taking The Crisis Seriously?
It’s not entirely irrational behavior. And it can be explained. It’s the product of several longterm trends that encourage hyper-skepticism. – Good Company
Everything Pina
Pina Bausch’s work has been a delight and compulsion throughout my theatregoing lifetime. I’ve seen every piece I can, several of them more than once. And it turns out I’ve written quite a bit about her work, so have collected some of it here. – David Jays