“As live music begins to make a cautious comeback, Matthew Bain, a freelance violinist with the London Philharmonic and Philharmonia amongst other ensembles, shares his experience of returning to orchestral playing.” – The Strad
Philip Guston Bluster: Why It’s Wise to Postpone a Show Depicting Cartoonish Ku Klux Klan Figures
Knowing that I’m sticking my head into a lion’s mouth, I strongly disagree with sanctimonious art critics, artists and scholars who have piled on against a decision by four museum directors to postpone (not to cancel) their Philip Guston Now retrospective. – Lee Rosenbaum
LA’s Center Theatre Group Creates A New Digital Stage
CTG Artistic Director Michael Ritchie said in an interview that he would like to make the Digital Stage a permanent fixture, even after the threat of the coronavirus fades. The hope is that the kind of work appearing on the Digital Stage will transcend COVID-related restrictions to establish a new language for theater. – Los Angeles Times
China Is Planning A Giant New Green City Run By AI
This data would be used to inform various aspects of city planning, including security systems and tourist areas. As more data is collected and analysed by the AI, the city will be continuously “upgraded”. – Dezeen
Maybe The Movie Theatre Experience Could Come Back Better?
Normal was an ecosystem where huge marketing onslaughts created conversations around massive movies at the expense of smaller, more artistically adventurous ones, with entertainment outlets forever trying to find the balance between covering big releases that would get clicks and little ones that need all the support they can get. – Wired
Is LACMA Sacrificing Its Art For Architecture?
To establish greater equity among artworks and subvert the presumed patriarchal and Eurocentric prejudice of LACMA collections, he is resorting to the hard and expensive corrective—architecture—rather than managing and expanding the collections, making them more complex and inclusive, and simply upgrading the existing buildings (which he had allowed to deteriorate). In Govan’s scenario, design would solve the problem by making the collections disappear. Intending to save the museum, Govan is destroying it. – New York Review of Books
Orchestras Have Quickly Added Music By Black Composers. So…
“There’s a real sense of people trying to save face. It has to be met with some skepticism. It’s always this concern that I’m being programmed just to fit a mold, like I’m being tokenized.” – The New York Times
Baltimore Museum Of Art Will Sell Three Major Works Of Art To Fund Diversity Efforts
The Baltimore Museum of Art’s board of trustees voted Thursday night to have Sotheby’s auction house sell three significant — and, it could be argued, irreplaceable — modern artworks later this fall in an effort to expand ongoing diversity initiatives. – Baltimore Sun
How Should Museums Deal With Racist Art In Their Collections?
Removing works with problematic content won’t improve historical understanding, but keeping them on the wall without addressing their historical context doesn’t help either. Their fundamental meanings need to be faced head-on, no matter how ugly the content or how charming the painting. – San Francisco Chronicle
It Means Something Different To Be A Polymath Today
“We have moved from an age of institutionalized specialization in the second half of the nineteenth century to an age of institutionalized anti-specialization in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond.” – Washington Post
Analysts Warn AMC Movie Theatres Has Only Six Months Without Turnaround
The stock mostly shrugged off the news, down 0.4% to $4.63. But that’s half of where it was trading a year ago as exhibition has been the entertainment sector hardest hit by COVID-19, aside from theme parks. – Deadline
Britain’s National Theatre Has Been Closed For Six Months, But What’s Left Of Its Staff Has Been Working Hard
“Rufus Norris, the theater’s artistic director, has been spending his time lobbying Britain’s government for extra funding and putting together a reopening plan. Its digital team has been running NT at Home, a streaming service of recorded plays from the theater’s archive, some of which have been viewed millions of times. Other staff members have been working out how to run the theater in a world changed by the coronavirus. Even the theater’s pest controller has been busy.” Seven of those staffers, including Norris, talk about what it’s been like. – The New York Times
Are Our Universities Becoming More Intolerant?
Universities everywhere have hosted eccentric cults and the gods of reason have somehow survived them. What was new in Critical Theory – at least in its latter-day incarnation – was its adoption of militant direct action to enforce its creed. – Times Literary Supplement