Generally speaking, an innovation is more than an idea and more than an invention. Yet beyond that, things get confusing. We live in a moment when we’re barraged by new stuff every day — new phones, new foods, new surgical techniques. In the pandemic, we’re confronted, too, with new medical tests and pharmaceutical treatments. But which of these are true innovations and which are novel variations on old products? – Washington Post
Time To Rethink The Arts
One problem is that our arts palaces lock in comparably palatial costs. In this grave new world, bigness, in fact, is actually a bug, not a feature. Producing in mega-venues like Portland5 or the Hult Center is so expensive that they discourage artistic risk as well as affordable tickets. The unviability of the centralized, large-scale approach will be exacerbated by the new virus-imposed restrictions coming down the pike if this crisis proves to be more than a one-time aberration. – Oregon Arts Watch
At What Point Did Humans Become Creative?
At some point, from around 40,000 years ago in Europe, we see evidence of these behaviourally modern humans in a sudden flourishing of cultural artifacts in the archaeological record. So what caused anatomically modern Homo sapiens to turn into behaviourally modern people? – Aeon
Podcasts Are The New Frontier For Tales Of Superheroes
Is Spotify the new Disney? While film production is paused or barely resumed, the music subscription service has made a deal to be the new home of audio tales of DC superheroes. Perhaps this hearkens back to the radio days of superhero origins, but it’s also about Spotify’s desire “to be less reliant on record labels.” – BBC
How To Figure Out ‘Performance For One’ Online
Playwright and director Edward Einhorn on adapting his in-person creation for the virtual world: “I have never witnessed the audience member witnessing the performance. Which, I must say, is hard for me.” – HowlRound
The Race To Publish Trump Tell-Alls
The confluence of these explosive books, in the months leading up to the 2020 election, has made Simon & Schuster the current front-runner in an ongoing race among publishers to produce news-making titles about the Trump administration. It’s a lucrative business to be in right now. – The New York Times
Maybe Now Is The Time To Reconsider Rousseau’s Radical Education Idea
Rather than stuffing children full of moral precepts and academic knowledge, the aim was to work with the grain of the pupil’s innate capacities and desires. Rousseau was one of the first proponents of the Romantic belief in the nobility of childhood, its freedom from adult corruption and closeness to the state of nature. – Aeon
With Nine Out Of 24 Board Members Remaining, National Book Critics Circle Tries To Pick Up The Pieces
Following an internal dispute gone public that has led to nearly two-thirds of the organization’s directors resigning (but the one whose incendiary comments were at the heart of the problem still there), a new board chair (clearly reluctant to take the position) and her remaining colleagues have decided to delay most of this year’s awards and have stated to NBCC membership that they will undertake “difficult internal work … with deep reflection upon past mistakes, and a commitment to serious, structural change in how we conduct business and continue to celebrate the rich diversity of global literature.” – Publishers Weekly
What Diversity Means In The Choral World
Choral music has unique diversity issues that are more subtle than those in the instrumental world. Because of my work as a publisher and composer, I am particularly interested in the representation of our programming as well as in leadership and overall participation. Unlike orchestral programming, many choral music programs consist of music by living composers. In fact, over 80% of the recommended repertoire from the ACDA National Repertoire and Standards lists were by living composers. Choral singing has fewer barriers for participation and the approach taken by any given choir can range from an egalitarian activity with which nearly anyone can participate to an elite one available only to the highly trained and educated. – NewMusicBox
Chicago’s iO Theater, Mainstay Of City’s Comedy Scene, To Close For Good
The improv company, which was co-founded in 1981 by Charna Halpern and the late Del Close and numbers Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, and Adam McKay among its alumni, has been closed to the public since March because of the coronavirus. Halpern hasn’t set a final closing date but confirms that the theater won’t reopen and its building will be sold. – Vulture
Carnegie Hall And Lincoln Center Cancel All Performances Through End Of 2020
“Coming on the heels of similar announcements from the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic, the decisions make clear that there will be few, if any, large-scale performances before 2021 in one of the world’s musical centers.” Carnegie, expecting multi-million-dollars deficits for both this past season and the next one, is also furloughing 50 of its 274 remaining employees. – The New York Times
San Francisco Ballet To Go Ahead With 2021 Winter Season, And Maybe Even 2020 ‘Nutcracker’
The company announced plans for a season with the overall title “Leap of Faith,” acknowledging that everything depends on the state of the COVID epidemic and what San Francisco authorities will permit. As for this year’s Nutcracker, “We’ve done this production now for something like 15 years, so we will be ready to get back onstage if the city allows it.” – San Francisco Chronicle
New York City Ballet, Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet Cancel Fall Seasons, Including ‘Nutcracker’
It’s a difficult decision to make: as Joffrey CEO Greg Cameron said, “The loss of The Nutcracker alone — more than half of the Joffrey’s annual earned revenue — compounds a financial crisis for the company that began this past spring.” Yet, as NYCB artistic director Jonathan Stafford put it, “It became apparent that there would be no way to pull this production together safely.” – The New York Times
Nearly Two-Thirds Of U.S. Arts Groups Surveyed Expect To Resume Performances By End Of 2020 (Brits Aren’t So Optimistic)
“If already not performing, … 50% of U.K. clients are planning a return to the stage in January 2021. Only 25% expect to be performing pantos in December 2020. In contrast, 63% of U.S. clients expect to return to performances in 2020. Dance and multi-disciplinary organizations are the most optimistic; dance’s optimism is likely fueled by the requirement of Nutcracker revenues to bring stability to the balance of the 2020-21 season.” – TRG Arts
Photo Taken By Thieves Of Stolen Van Gogh Made Public
The artist’s Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring (1884) was taken by a robber from the Singer Laren Museum near Amsterdam on March 30. Now a “proof of life” photo, showing the painting between a May 30 newspaper and a biography of a (different) convicted Van Gogh thief, has been obtained by well-connected investigator Arthur Brand and turned over to authorities. – The New York Times
Art Dealer/Fugitive Angela Gulbenkian Arrested For Theft Of Andy Warhol Print And Yayoi Kusama Pumpkin
“Angela Gulbenkian, who married into one of Europe’s most prominent art families and allegedly leveraged their name to conduct fraudulent art deals, has been arrested in Portugal. The jet-setting art heiress is facing two charges of theft in the UK, including one in connection with the £1.1 million ($1.4 million) sale of a Yayoi Kusama pumpkin sculpture in 2017.” – Artnet
Orchestre De Paris Names Music Director
Klaus Mäkelä, a 24-year-old Finnish cellist and conductor who is already at the helm of the Oslo Philharmonic, starts in his Paris position in the fall of 2022. He succeeds Daniel Harding, who left the orchestra for “artistic reasons” last summer after only three years and started working as a commercial airline pilot. – Gramophone
PHILADANCO At 50
“Movers & Makers sits down with Founder & Artistic Director Joan Myers Brown for an engaging discussion on how she dealt with overwhelming bias to attain success in the world of dance as a ‘Black Ballerina’ in the era of segregation. We also talk with Brenda Dixon Gottschild, author of a biography on Brown.” (video) – WHYY (Philadelphia)
To This We’ve Come: A Reality Show Where Men Compete To Impregnate A Woman
Jessa Crispin: “Despite being pretty in a Getty-stock-image kind of way, and despite being a successful holistic health and beauty expert, Kristy has not yet found her fantasy husband. So she has turned to reality television programming to help her out. That’s the premise of the new show Labor of Love, in which 15 men compete to be the ‘one’ honored with impregnating the show’s heroine. As I watched her journey toward motherhood unfold, I thought, finally. Finally, someone has found a way to make a buck off the fracturing of the American family.” – The Guardian
What Other Governments Are Spending To Save Their Nations’ Arts Sectors From COVID Collapse
From prosperous Germany (a €1 billion rescue package) to destitute Madagascar (distributing bags of rice to out-of-work artists), here’s what ten countries are doing to mitigate the damage that the pandemic and shutdown have done to cultural institutions and arts workers. – The Guardian
Has Somebody Really Figured Out How To Decipher The Voynich Manuscript This Time?
“Any attempts to decipher the manuscript’s unique text, made up of a mixture of handwritten Latin letters, Arabic numbers, and unknown characters, have so far failed. … Now, after three years of analysis, the German Egyptologist Rainer Hannig … believes he has cracked the code to translating the work, and found the manuscript’s language to be based on Hebrew.” – The Art Newspaper
Vera Lynn, Britain’s Singing Sweetheart Of World War II, Dead At 103
“At the start of the second world war, Vera Lynn … was an up-and-coming dance band singer. By 1945” — thanks to her hits “We’ll Meet Again” and “The White Cliffs of Dover” — “this working-class young woman had become a symbol of the British wartime spirit, with a status comparable to that of the patrician prime minister, Winston Churchill. After the war, her friend Harry Secombe liked to joke that ‘Churchill didn’t beat the Nazis. Vera sang them to death.'” – The Guardian