The current crisis has turned the industry’s cracks into chasms, exposing the ways in which it fails its workers almost by design. It has also raised the question of what restaurants will look like—and how they could survive—once this is all over. But a better question might be whether they should survive as they currently exist. What could restaurants look like if we threw out the old system and built something better? – The New Republic
Are Patents And Copyrights Slowing Down Innovation?
Whether we’re talking about vaccines or groundbreaking clean energy, lifesaving technologies shouldn’t be treated as precious commodities to be hoarded for private gain. In the midst of global emergencies, they’re public goods to be deployed as rapidly as possible. – The New Republic
How Did Renaissance Architects Build Church Domes Without Columns? High-Tech Analysis Has Found The Answer
The broad cupolas in Italian churches of the era were constructed by laying bricks in a “complex cross-herringbone spiraling pattern” called a double loxodrome, according to a team of engineering researchers at Princeton and the University of Bergamo. – Artnet
Artist Boss Move: Befriending Your Thief
Not everyone’s first reaction, is it? But: “After two of her most prized paintings were stolen, Czech artist Barbora Kysilkova came face-to-face with thief Karl-Bertil Nordland in a courtroom. Rather than reprimand Nordland though, she asked him if she could paint his portrait.” – Vanity Fair
Now The Hard Part: Testing Out Concerts In The New Normal
For the moment, the eyes of the concert industry are on the Arkansas city of Fort Smith. There, at a venue called TempleLive, blues-rock singer Travis McCready is set to perform a solo show Monday. It may well be the first ticketed indoor public music event in the nation to take place since the coronavirus-fueled shutdown of concerts. – San Diego Union-Tribune
Pandemic Is A Golden Opportunity For Australia’s Big Festivals To Reinvent
With high profiles, comparatively secure government funding and established philanthropic networks, major arts festivals are in a position to make a difference. At one point in Getting Their Acts Together, Adelaide festival’s annual bill is placed at $20m – around four times the amount of money the Australia Council has scraped together for its Covid-19 resilience fund. And after months of cancellations and pushbacks there will be no shortage of compelling shows by Australian artists and companies looking to make up for lost time – and income – in 2021. – The Guardian
An Online Education: Some Essentials Missing
I’ve heard administrators insist that online instruction is just a “change in delivery system,” not a diminution of content. But this bureaucratic bromide wilfully ignores the wisdom of Marshall McLuhan, whose work I often teach. The medium is always the message. You can reduce a seminar to a distortion-addled screen, sure, but that will never substitute for being there. – The Globe and Mail (Canada)
We Have To Talk: Learning (And Teaching) Online Is A Lesser Experience
The real question may not be “How can you possibly teach art online?” but “How can you possibly understand art online?” My simple answer to that complex question is: “At best, imperfectly. At worst, inadequately.” – Los Angeles Times
West End Producer: Without Help, Our Theatres Will Be Obliterated
“Without an urgent government rescue package, 70% of our performing arts companies will be out of business before the end of this year,” she wrote. “More than 1,000 theatres around the country will be insolvent and might shut down for good.” The producer said the loss would be “irrecoverable” and said that without intervention the country would watch as over the next six months “our arts and cultural organisations will have to spend their reserves until there is nothing left”. – The Guardian
Bernice Silver, Beloved Agitprop Puppeteer, Dead Of COVID At 106
“A hummingbird of a woman at 4-foot-8, [she] was a puppeteer whose performances were mock-chaotic, subtly cerebral and always slyly subversive. She made sure to slip in a history lesson, or a plug for conservation or social justice. She called them happenings, for the political theater she was schooled in. Her fellow puppeteers called her the Queen of Potpourri.” – The New York Times
What Will Post-COVID Novels Be Like? For Possible Answers, Look To Post-9/11 Fiction
Chris Bohjalian: “If 9/11 is a literary precedent, it could be years before we will see our first rush of novels about the coronavirus pandemic.” (The first such major titles, Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, appeared in 2005.) “Some will no doubt take place in the innermost ring of Dante’s Inferno that has been New York City’s emergency rooms, and some will be about the chaos of home schooling twin 8-year-olds while your toddler crashes your corporate Zoom meeting. Some will be about claustrophobia and the idea that hell really is other people. Or jigsaw puzzles.” – The Washington Post
Watching ABT’s Virtual Ballet Class
Marina Harss: “A masked dancer in a studio, which is empty but for a pianist, peers into her computer’s camera, calling out a cheerful ‘Hi, everyone! So good to see you!’ In another frame, a toddler ambles by, prompting a dancer to joke,’Hey, guys, I had a baby!’ (The toddler actually belongs to the dancer’s sister, with whom she is staying.) More and more squares appear, revealing living rooms, kitchens where family members prepare sandwiches, a nursery, and something that looks like an airplane hangar. Almost all of the dancers are solo, with just a few lucky couples thrown in. The truly fortunate are outside, somewhere beautiful.” – The New Yorker
Well, Here’s One Way To Give A Coronavirus-Safe Live Dance Performance
“On Saturday night, about 35 cars converged at the Santa Monica Airport parking lot. Inside each vehicle, the passengers had 12 pages of instructions: Arrive exactly at 7:50 pm; stay inside your car with the windows rolled up; when you see a flashing light, turn on your headlights; wear a mask. They had come to see PARKED, an invitation-only, drive-in dance performance put on by Jacob Jonas The Company.” – Dance Magazine
Facebook And YouTube Copyright-Police Bots Are Blocking Classical Musicians’ Concert Streams, Sometimes Mid-Performance
And the music at issue is almost always in the public domain. The bots, developed and trained on popular music, are finding performance videos of, Bach, Mozart, Chopin and so on to be too similar to existing commercial recordings by other musicians and automatically blocking them. Then the appeal process with these enormous corporations is frustrating and way too slow. – The Washington Post
U.S. Copyright Office Says Digital Millennium Copyright Act Should Be ‘Fine-Tuned’
The issue discussed in a report just released by the Copyright Office is the DMCA’s Section 512, which lays out what social media companies and Online Service Providers (e.g., Spotify, YouTube) must do to remove pirated material and police copyright infringement. The Office says that the balance has shifted too far toward the OSPs, leaving creators whose material has been posted without permission to play “whack-a-mole.” – The Hollywood Reporter
Hollywood Studios And Craft Unions Struggle Over How To Restart Production
“The industry task force that was assembled last month to address the safety issues has generated a 30-page draft of a white paper that is designed to convince governmental officials to give Hollywood the greenlight to resume production. … But the white paper is not complete and has not been signed off by all of the participants in the task force, which has spurred anger and finger-pointing among union and studio officials and … the labor negotiating body for the major studios.” – Variety
Going for the Archrival’s Jugular? Christie’s Assures Clients About Its “Continuity of Activity”
A message from Christie’s CEO Guillaume Cerutti, which hit my inbox late Friday, included a boldfaced passage that struck me (and probably some of his firm’s clients) as an implied gibe at archrival Sotheby’s. – Lee Rosenbaum
Jürgen Ploog, R.I.P.
“Jay,” the name he went by among close friends, was widely regarded as one of Germany’s premiere second-generation Beat writers. But his narrative fiction — like that of William S. Burroughs, a mentor with whom he was associated — was more experimental and closer to Brion Gysin’s or J.G. Ballard’s than to Jack Kerouac’s or Allen Ginsberg’s. – Jan Herman