The debate over statues—and the wider debates around the Black Lives Matter movement—have thrust the issue of our relationship to history into public consciousness. We should seize this moment to think more deeply about the complexities of the past that have shaped the present. – New York Review of Books
The ‘Gentrification Font’ (There’s Really A Typeface For Rich People Taking Over Poor Neighborhoods?)
“‘Gentrification font’ applies to any stylish sans serif that decorates houses and real estate developments, especially in changing areas. Users replying to the viral Twitter thread pegged it as anything from Avenir to Futura to Century Gothic, which look identical to an untrained eye.” But the font most identified with gentrification is Neutraface, most familiar from the restaurant chain Shake Shack. Here’s a deep dive into how this phenomenon developed. – Vice
Where Do Joe Biden and Kamala Harris Stand on the Arts?
“With the election less than two months away, Hyperallergic looked at the Democratic candidate and his running mate’s track record in the field, from legislative achievements to museum affiliations and general support of the industry.” – Hyperallergic
Turns Out Most Of Scots Wikipedia Is Fake. What To Do About It?
If there is any reason to think the situation with Scots Wikipedia will improve over time, it might simply be that Wikipedia editors themselves are quite industrious—and, relatively speaking, more forgiving. – Slate
Meet The New Artificial Intelligence That’s Got Everyone’s Attention
GPT-3 is a marvel of engineering due to its breathtaking scale. It contains 175 billion parameters (the weights in the connections between the “neurons” or units of the network) distributed over 96 layers. It produces embeddings in a vector space with 12,288 dimensions. And it was trained on hundreds of billions of words representing a significant subset of the Internet—including the entirety of English Wikipedia, countless books, and a dizzying number of web pages. Training the final model alone is estimated to have cost around $5 million. – Nautilus
Quick About-Face: Metropolitan Museum Follows Drastic Staff Reductions with Strategic Additions
I’ve suggested that the Met’s radical downsizing of staff (necessitated by the Virus Crisis) might give its leaders an opportunity to install their own hand-picked team “sooner and less controversially than would have otherwise been possible.” “Sooner” turns out to be immediately. – Lee Rosenbaum
Oscars’ New Diversity Rules Ignite A Debate
Predictably, the backlash has already begun. The Academy’s announcement was greeted on its own website by comments including: “You ruined the Oscars. It’s no longer about a cinema as a genre of art. Now it’s totally about politics,” and “forced diversity lowers quality of the product”. – The Guardian
Are Parking Lots A Solution For Live Venues?
There are other pop-up drive-in theaters in North Texas, but none are as focused on bringing back the performing arts as Tin Star. “I’ve lived my life in theaters,” Nolan McGahan says. “Just because there’s a pandemic doesn’t mean you have to give up on your dreams.” – Dallas News
Is Online Streaming Of Performances Here To Stay?
“While widespread live performance without social distancing remains unlikely until 2021, streaming platforms have found their moment in the spotlight, offering audiences access to a library of theatre. Key figures in the digital theatre movement tell Tom Wicker about what the future holds for streaming services.” – The Stage
Official Report On Abuse At Berlin State Ballet School Released
“The report spoke of failures in school leadership and oversight. While it did not describe individual incidents, it said physical and psychological abuse had been taking place for years without consequences. Current and former students spoke of ‘lots of drilling and physical stress’ including beatings, verbal attacks and humiliation by instructors. The expert commission demanded the SBB be fundamentally reformed and democratized.” – Deutsche Welle
Notre-Dame Reopens Its Crypt For The First Time Since The Fire
“Before the crypt could reopen, masses of toxic lead dust from the fire had to be removed, ancient stones cleaned, ventilation systems vacuumed, lighting and interactive programs reorganized, molds eliminated and anti-COVID measures imposed. … The crypt celebrated the opening with an exhibition on the two 19th-century men who helped restore the 850-year-old medieval monument to greatness: the novelist Victor Hugo and the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc.” – Smithsonian Magazine
Boris’s ‘Festival Of Brexit’ Is Now Accepting Proposals
“Critics have dubbed it a ‘festival of Brexit’ and pilloried it as a waste of £120m of public money, but the first plans for the festival of Great Britain and Northern Ireland … will officially launch on Wednesday. Using the working title Festival UK * 2022 organisers have opened applications for teams who wish to be commissioned to come up with ideas for the event.” (In fact, Theresa May first proposed the arts festival, but just about everyone associates it with Boris Johnson.) – The Guardian
Boris Johnson Announces Plan To Restart Performances By Testing Audience Members On Site
“Addressing a press conference at Downing Street on Tuesday, [the British prime minister] said, ‘Theaters and sports venues could test an audience, all audience members, one day and let in all those with a negative result, all those who are not infectious. Work places could be opened up to all those who test negative in the morning to behave in a way that was exactly as in the world before COVID.'” The scheme will be put to the test in October in Salford, near Manchester. – Variety
Michigan Opera Theatre Picks Yuval Sharon As Its Next Artistic Director
Sharon’s presence elevates MOT immediately to international relevance in the opera world and brings to Detroit the kind of innovative artistic leader unique among the city’s cultural institutions. His hiring is a bold but risky choice for a company with a largely conservative artistic profile that has historically lived on razor-thin financial margins and struggled to forge a post-DiChiera identity. – Detroit Free Press