Art critic Enid Tsui looks at the perennial controversy over Rirkrit Tiravanija’s performance piece untitled (pad thai), in which the artist creates a “micro-utopia” by cooking the eponymous noodle dish in the gallery and sharing it with everyone in attendance (which means the kind of people who go see performance art in galleries). – South China Morning Post (Hong Kong)
UK Culture Minister: I Won’t Allow Our History To Be Cancelled
“Confident nations face up to their history. They don’t airbrush it. Instead, they protect their heritage and use it to educate the public about the past. They “retain and explain,” rather than “remove or ignore”. They don’t do what Liverpool University did and remove William Gladstone’s name from an accommodation block because of his family’s links to slavery.” – The Telegraph (UK)
Hollywood Has An Issue With Women Action Heroes
Well, it has issues with women, aging women, of any type, but nevertheless: “40-something actresses rarely lead action films—even though Jolie is 13 years younger than Tom Cruise, and 23 years younger than Liam Neeson. She is also the same age as Charlize Theron, one of the few female A-listers who’s managed to maintain a steady presence in the genre, yet who still got replaced in her career-defining role as Furiosa in the upcoming Mad Max prequel. (De-aging technology, it seems, is available only for the likes of Will Smith.)” – The Atlantic
WhatsApp’s Weird Privacy Debacle Hints At Deeper Tech Issues
When WhatsApp – for years, owned by Facebook – asked users to agree to a privacy update for something that had been true since 2016, the service engendered a revolt and a massive uptick for the more private, not owned by Facebook service Signal. Why? Unclear, but “‘When your users have made it clear that they would rather not accept a new policy, and your response is to very gradually push them out of an airlock, it doesn’t prove that they’re happy about it just because they eventually accept,’ says Johns Hopkins University cryptographer Matthew Green.” – Wired
The Shy Performance Poet Who Writes About Everything From Sex To Death
Hollie McNish, who once changed her name to “Hollie Poetry” – what she now calls “a search engine name” – says that sex and writing are linked: “All energy drives are linked. I’d call it an orgasm drive – an urge to make something specific from a dream inside your head or skin.” – The Guardian (UK)
David Ludwig talks technology in the arts
The Artistic Advisor to the President and Chair of Composition Studies at the Curtis Institute of Music, also Artistic Director of Curtis Summerfest, speaks about the role of technology in today’s conservatory. – Aaron Dworkin
Apple Wants To Upend Podcasts The Way It Did Music Downloads
The company – which was one of the first to jump on the podcasting train, providing podcast sourcing through iTunes in 2005 – is now figuring out how to get podcast creators paid, which could be a game-changer for podcasters. – Fast Company
Theatre Has Long Been Fatphobic, And Actors Are Speaking Out
An errant sentence in a New York Times article (since reworded) led to a lot of participation from actors via social media. They’re fed up with the sizeism and lack of body diversity on Broadway – and everywhere else in theatre. “The infamous ideology of a ‘Broadway body’ — a term that assumes a stage performer’s castability is specifically related to their size — has come to reinforce ‘the imposed ideals we place on women to be waif-like, or men to be Adonis-figured,’ tweeted Kinky Boots alum Sean Patrick Doyle.” – Los Angeles Times
Writers Know All Too Well The Other American Epidemic
And it was one exacerbated by the virus – loneliness. – The New York Times
Novelist Brit Bennett Is Considering What To Think About Next
Her newest book is a deliberate picture of how America wasn’t ever really great at all for quite a few people. And what’s she considering now? She thinks we’re all in recovery from the former president. “This is a person who colonised our brains for years. I don’t think there was a day in the last four years when we were not constantly reacting or commenting or reading about the things he was saying and doing, or weren’t being affected in a visceral way by his actions and his whims, his moods and emotions.And suddenly they’re just gone? It feels very surreal.”- The Guardian (UK)
Bob Koester, Of Delmark Records And Chicago’s Jazz Record Mart, 88
Koester funded his recording company by selling jazz and blues records at his store. He “was a pivotal figure in Chicago and beyond, releasing early efforts by Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton, Jimmy Dawkins, Magic Sam and numerous other jazz and blues musicians. He captured the sound of Chicago’s vibrant blues scene of the 1960s,” among many other achievements. – The New York Times