Organizations who balance growing the number of younger patrons engaging with alternative artistic product while also retaining older generations’ philanthropic support seems to be an emerging best practice for finding resiliency through COVID-19. – TRG
France’s Culture Of Complaint (Just For The Fun Of It)
In France, there are several words for “to complain”: there’s “se plaindre”, used for regular old complaining; there’s “porter plainte”, for complaining more officially. And then there’s “râler”: complaining just for the fun of it. – BBC
How To Explain How New Yorkers Talk?
To an outsider, someone from, say, Toronto or Seattle or London, a conversation among New Yorkers may resemble a verbal wrestling match. Everyone seems to talk at once, butting in with questions and comments, being loud, rude and aggressive. Actually, according to the American linguist E J White, they’re just being nice. – Literary Review
Cancel Culture? This Too Shall Pass
So what to make of the apparent growing strength of cancel culture and affiliated movements? Here is the fundamental point: With the rise of social media and low-cost communications, virtually everything that can be said, will be said. – Bloomberg
Good Improv Performers Adapt To Almost Anything On The Spot. How Are They Adapting To COVID?
“An art form and industry built on ‘Yes, and …’ face a world of ‘no,’ ‘maybe,’ and ‘who knows.’ … Whether it’s reshaping content to fit a new medium, staring down the possibility of permanent closures, or facing their own reckoning with a legacy of racial and cultural exclusion, improv and comedy theatres are learning just how important it is to be able to listen and adjust.” – American Theatre
BBC Doesn’t Deliberately Favor Lefty Comedians. It Can’t Find Any Right-Leaning Ones Who Are Funny.
Earlier this week, The Daily Telegraph reported that the incoming BBC director general planned to cancel left-leaning comedy shows because the broadcaster’s comic programming was unfairly biased. However, a BBC insider tells The Guardian that network execs have been pushing for months for more balance, but “some people aren’t very good. The issue is a shortage of rightwing comics.” – The Guardian
COVID Has Made Arts Audiences Smaller, Yes, But Also Younger
Or, to put it more pessimistically/realistically, ticket sales have plummeted across the board in the US and UK, but the biggest drop has been in older audience members, according to the new report “Who is Booking Now? Changes in Ticket Buyer Demographics Post COVID-19.” – TRG Arts
Maybe We Need To Expand Notions Of What Creativity Is
Imagine instead that we worked with idea that creativity wasn’t about novelty. That doesn’t mean we’d have to give up the value of originality entirely, but rather see it as one of a range of possible outcomes. Casting a wider net in this way might hence make creativity (whatever it involves) easier to achieve. – Psyche
The Venice Film Festival Is About To Open. Will It Be Safe?
Ahead of the event guests have been sent a list of Covid-19 guidelines, including information on passing through thermo-scanners as they enter the festival and anyone found to have a body temperature of 37.5°C or higher will be denied access. The guidance also states that face coverings must be worn at all times, including in outdoor areas. It is not clear how that rule will be enforced, or whether attendees will be allowed to eat or drink while in screenings. – The Guardian
Why We’re Drawn To Stories About Monsters
Loving monsters is a love of chaos, a longing to dance a little with death to better understand the danger. Cryptid violence is more approachable than human violence. It’s easy to ponder ways to control something that is other, a thing. We’ve built entire political and economic structures based upon just that—imperialism, colonialism, racism, sexism. It’s more difficult to figure out how to survive the things we do to ourselves. – LitHub
How The Classical Music System Conspires Against Minority Participation
White people and some ethnic groups follow a progression of youth orchestras and schools of the arts and then are often paired with principal musicians in local professional orchestras. Meanwhile, young Black musicians inevitably draw attention to their raw talent but can’t afford the coaching and mentoring to help develop technical expertise and to help direct the way through the audition maze. Having little or no experience in a youth orchestra, they arrive in college music departments with, as one musician put it, “a lot of heart and personality but may not catch every note.” – San Francisco Classical Voice
Russian Cinema’s Ongoing Preoccupation With World War II
Studios in the Federation have released at least seven major big-budget movies set during what Russians call the Great Patriotic War just since 2010. Alex Cox has a look at what they say about how the conflict that ended 75 years ago is viewed by Russians now. – The Guardian
A German Experiment In How To Have Large Audiences And Be Safe From COVID
All the fans were volunteers, part of Restart-19, a study to see if and how big cultural and sporting events can be held safely in the era of COVID-19. The daylong experiment was set up by scientists to try and understand why mass events are so effective at spreading the novel coronavirus and how organizers can act to minimize the risk. – The Hollywood Reporter
When Merce Cunningham Collaborated With A Computer Program
No, it wasn’t to generate random patterns of movement; rather the contrary, in fact. Ellen Jacobs, for years his company’s publicist, recounts how, at age 70, when his body could no longer demonstrate to his dancers everything he wanted, he began using a software program called LifeForms: “He carefully moved the limbs of these avatars — he called them Michelin men — joint by joint, in multiple directions, and wondrous new possibilities appeared.” – The New York Times
Small Theatres Are Innovating Online In Ways That Will Change The Art Form
Over the last few months, it has been interesting to watch how theatre navigates what, in many cases, is largely new territory: digital space. What began as a free-for-all, with organisations throwing anything they could online, has started to develop into something more interesting, as theatres and companies grapple with questions around the creative possibilities and also how to monetise them, so that artists and organisations have income. – The Stage
There Was An Entire Lost Generation Of Gifted African-American Conductors
“[They] led major concerts by Arturo Toscanini’s NBC Symphony, gave the Philadelphia Orchestra premiere of the Shostakovich Symphony No. 8, and led the Metropolitan Opera’s celebrated rehabilitation of Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète. Most of them were robbed of that over-60 elder-statesman period when the world was likely to more widely celebrate their accumulation of artistic wisdom. But there’s ample proof that Dean Dixon (1915–76) and Calvin Simmons (1950–82) had many great moments well before then. They can be counted among the finest of any generation.” David Patrick Stearns looks at Dixon, Simmons, and their Black colleagues, and at why many never reached that elder-statesman stage. – WQXR (New York City)
Tate, V&A And Pompidou Museums Defend Projects In China
All three are collaborating or consulting on major projects in China with development firms owned by the state. They say that sharing their collections and expertise in this way “can help to foster tolerance and curiosity” (Pompidou); “generates greater understanding between global cultures and communities” (V&A), and helps “increase Chinese people’s access to the possibilities of international art” (Tate). – The Art Newspaper
Using Greek Tragedy To Make Sense Of The Pandemic
Elif Batuman on watching Theater of War’s online production of Sophocles’s Oedipus the King: “You’ve never really seen Oedipus, I found myself thinking, till you’ve seen it during a plague. The plague hadn’t really stood out to me on previous readings, yet it was the key to everything. … No matter how many times you see it pulled off, the magic trick is always a surprise: how a text that is hundreds or thousands of years old turns out to be about the thing that’s happening to you, however modern and unprecedented you thought it was.” – The New Yorker
Singer-Conductor Claudio Cavina, Major Force In Monteverdi Revival, Dead At 58
He first came to prominence on recordings by Rinaldo Alessandrini and Concerto Italiano, especially their landmark series of Monteverdi’s madrigals. He then broke off to found his own consort of singers and instrumentalists, called La Venexiana, with whom he performed and recorded all of Monteverdi’s operas, madrigals, and major sacred works as well as music of other 16th- and 17th-century Italian composers, winning a pack of awards along the way. – Presto Classical
Why Dictionary.com Has Revised 15,000+ Definitions: A ‘Focus On People’ And Not ‘Clinical Language’
The world’s most-used online dictionary has, among other changes, capitalized Black throughout; changed homosexuality to gay sexual orientation; revised language around ethnicity, suicide, and addiction; and added such terms as DGAF and Afro-Latino, Afro-Latina, and Afro-Latinx. – The Guardian
Why Was There Just A Twitter War Over Van Gogh And Realism?
Way back on August 9, “Margarita” tweeted side-by-side images of van Gogh’s Café Terrace at Night and a rendition of the same scene in Arles by contemporary painter Haixia Liu (not to be confused with Thomas Kinkade); she appended the message “Should expose how overrated Van Gogh is.” It took until this past weekend, but the Twitterverse did notice, and it … reacted. – ARTnews
Atlanta Opera, Pushed By COVID, Moves To New Business Model For Fall 2020
“‘This pandemic has devastated so many lives and businesses,’ [general director Tomer] Zvulun said. ‘But it has also been a major catalyst in accelerating our shift to a business model that we have been discussing for years: creating a company of players, performing in nontraditional spaces,” — for this fall, that means alternating performances of Pagliacci and The Kaiser of Atlantis in an open-sided circus tent — “and developing our video and streaming capabilities.'” – ArtsATL
Edinburgh Int’l Festival Online Racks Up More Than A Million Views
“The festival said its 26 digital productions, which featured specially staged performances involving about 500 artists, musicians and technical staff, were watched 1.013m times in nearly 50 countries worldwide. Last year, its live shows in Edinburgh had an audience of 420,000.” – The Guardian
Culture Clash: Where The British Ex-Director Of Paris’s Châtelet Theatre Went Wrong
Laura Cappelle, a thoroughly bilingual arts journalist and a trained sociologist, looks at the assumptions made and misunderstood by both Ruth Mackenzie and the officials who hired and then fired her. – The New York Times
Is there anybody out there? Yes.
No one had any idea if people would tune in to all this arts content when the digital floodgates opened in March. Now arts organizations are reporting massive increases in online audiences driven by viewers and participants who have never set foot inside their buildings. – Hannah Grannemann