“As the June 22 primary draws near, we rounded up the top six contenders” — in alphabetical order, Eric Adams, Kathryn Garcia, Dianne Morales, Scott Stringer, Maya Wiley, and Andrew Yang — “and summarized their priorities for the sector if elected.” – Hyperallergic
Kirill Serebrennikov Barred From Leaving Russia To Attend Cannes Festival
The award-winning, beleaguered dissident — famous recently for his dance and opera productions — is also a filmmaker, and he has a new title, Petrov’s Flu, in competition at Cannes this year. He wrote the screenplay while under house arrest pending trial on an embezzlement cased widely considered to be trumped-up; he was convicted on that charge last June and given a three-year suspended sentence, during which he is forbidden to leave Russian territory. – Variety
Kate Winslet: A Huge Increase In Roles For Women My Age
“I do feel proud that as a woman in the film industry in her mid-40s, having been doing this job since I was 17, that I’m being given this space to fully embrace all of these changes that life’s years have left my face and body with.” – BBC
Are Board Members Of UK Cultural Institutions Being Punished For Disagreeing With The Government?
The science author and historian Sarah Dry withdrew as a trustee of the Science Museum Group in March after she was asked to support the government’s position on contested heritage. Meanwhile, the re-appointment of the Bangladeshi-British academic Aminul Hoque as trustee at Royal Museums Greenwich was vetoed by the government earlier this year, prompting Charles Dunstone, the chair of the museum board, to resign. Hoque was reportedly rejected because of his focus on “decolonisation”. – The Art Newspaper
Should You Become An Art Critic? Take This Test!
“Your ability to express what you see in an artwork, to explain why it is good, and to examine the ways in which it stinks has impressed your art history professors. After nine years in college, you wonder what it would feel like to have others read your writing. Can the theory-heavy jibber jabber you ingested and regurgitated in graduate school actually be spun into bylines, paychecks, and a platform to tell people what you think and why it matters?” – ARTnews
AI Is All Around Us Now. But Is It?
“In the past, statistical analysis at this scale was limited by the complexity of the task and the lack of mathematical and computational tools. The triumph of modern machine learning lies in developing increasingly sophisticated, efficient, and data-driven computational methods for doing such analysis. “But is this AI?” ask the skeptics. It is too narrow, too specialized, too dependent on data and statistics.” – 3 Quarks Daily
The Scholar Who Proved Homer Didn’t Exist
The Iliad and the Odyssey weren’t written by Homer, because they weren’t written at all. They were products of an oral tradition, performed by generations of anonymous Greek bards who gradually shaped them into the epics we know today. – The New Yorker
How Podcasts Became Substitutes For Friends During The Lockdown
“The number of podcasts … ballooned, filling voids in the professional lives of the hosts and the social lives of the listeners, and in some cases replacing both. There were periods during lockdown where I was hearing more from certain podcasters than anyone else on Earth – even the people I was sharing a home with. But believing that people you encounter through the media are your friends is not a new phenomenon. It is called parasocial interaction, a term coined by sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl in 1956.” – The Guardian
Tickets Or NFTs? Do You “Own” The Experience?
“Tickets are keys to experiences. These keys have a finite life and finite utility. That’s because the majority of rights issuers want to maintain control of the ticket and access to the experience until the experience is complete. NFTs, by contrast, are (and are portrayed as) owned assets. This is groundbreaking for digital content, offering a way to both claim and prove ownership for a medium that previously had no method to certify authenticity. This doesn’t work for tickets.” – Medium
What Ails The Classical Music Industry
“The problems have built up over at least the last half century and they cannot be solved overnight. But there are a host of strategies—many already being implemented successfully by some of the more forward-looking organizations.” – Nightingale Sonata
Garth Drabinsky’s Comeback Will Be Broadway’s First Fully New Musical Since COVID Arrived
The first production on Broadway that hadn’t been previously scheduled and postponed will be Paradise Square, a show about the origins of tap dance, set in the 19th-century Manhattan slum called Five Points and featuring songs by the pre-Civil War composer Stephen Foster, directed by Moisés Kaufman and choreographed by Bill T. Jones. Drabinsky, a three-time Tony-winning producer in the 1990s, has spent the past few years restarting his career after serving a prison sentence in Canada for fraud. – The New York Times
Art Theft Is Way Down In Italy, Thanks To The Carabinieri’s Drones
“Fewer art and cultural heritage works were stolen in Italy in 2020 compared with the previous year, according to the annual report of the Carabinieri TPC, the country’s police force dedicated to recovering stolen art.” (Well, except for antiquities, it seems.) “The drop was partly caused by the pandemic, which also forced dealers in stolen art online, but is part of a longer-term downward trend driven by increasingly high-tech security and surveillance technology.” – The Art Newspaper
How Our Technology Can Change Our Character
There is the possibility that technology can come to influence or reflect our values in ways that are beyond our control. For example, wearable technologies (such as fitness trackers or smart watches) provide us with a stream of biometric information. This information changes the way in which we experience ourselves and the world around us. – 3 Quarks Daily
Experiments In Opera: Philip Glass At The Circus
The revelation of “Circus Days and Nights” is existentially simple and direct. Cut through a thin layer of tawdriness and cheap tinsel that may be on its surface, and you discover that a circus can exist only thanks to absolute trust. The life of every acrobat lies in unerring balance. Balance is the religion of circus life. Trust and balance, of course, are the two essential things our polarized societies need to regain. – Los Angeles Times
Princeton Drops Latin And Greek Requirements For Classics Study
“The policy change at Princeton presumes the existence of various potential contributions that classics students knowing no Latin or Greek could have been making to classroom discussions before now. What are those contributions?” – The Atlantic
Music Stars Demand Streaming Music Regulation
It argues that streaming via services such as Spotify and Apple Music be legislated more like radio. “The law has not kept up with the pace of technological change and, as a result, performers and songwriters do not enjoy the same protections as they do in radio,” the letter states. “Today’s musicians receive very little income from their performances – most featured artists receive tiny fractions of a US cent per stream and session musicians receive nothing at all.” – The Guardian
New York To Stage A Mega-Concert In August To Signal End Of The Pandemic
Seeking a grand symbol of New York’s revitalization after a brutal pandemic year, Mayor Bill de Blasio is planning a large-scale performance by multiple acts and has called on Clive Davis, the 89-year-old producer and music-industry eminence, to pull it together. – The New York Times
Evidence
My introduction of Emanuel Ax in May in Boston, as he received an honorary doctorate from New England Conservatory. – Bruce Brubaker
What America’s Best-Selling Books Say About Americans
In the U.S., people like nonfiction, especially self-help – and cookbooks, and sex advice. The books in the best-seller canon “are not books so much as appliances. They are not read; they are used. And probably many of them have been bought by people who do not otherwise buy many books.” – The New Yorker