The key, writes David Patrick Stearns, is that there are “far more numerous entry points. … The era of self-produced recordings, ushered in by LSO Live!, allowed major symphonies by major artists to be delivered at a lower price, so buyers could take a chance on something they only might want to hear two or three times. The world has also become populated by boutique labels that will issue all manner of recordings, often handed to them ready-made by the artists with no overhead cost, and issued with a curatorial sensibility that’s considerably less narrow than major labels of the past.” – WQXR (New York City)
Why Can’t Amazon Figure Out How To Create Good Video Games?
“Any veteran of the video games industry will tell you that good games are products of miracle. … Yet Amazon’s total inability to excel in gaming is remarkable. Breakaway wasn’t its first fiasco, or its last. After more than a decade of concerted effort, the tech company that brute-forced its way to dominance in books, retail, and cloud computing has failed to produce a single successful big-name title.” Why? As one former employee put it, “There’s this hubris. We’re Amazon. We can do it all. We can spend our way to success.” – Wired
How Is Hollywood Still Getting Paris So Very, Very Wrong?
It’s as if writers from the U.S. can’t see the city as anything but a backdrop for old clichés, narratives long grown stale. “Many of the misconceptions about the city swirling around in the US imagination are not really misconceptions at all – it’s just they are 100 years out of date.” – BBC
Reddit’s ‘Am I The Asshole?’ Is Addictive. It May Also Be Making The World A Better Place.
“You start reading AITA posts before bed instead of doomscrolling the news because here, at least, it feels like your opinion matters. … It’s a place where accountability actually exists, even if only in the form of branding someone right or wrong in one absurd situation. It’s also a place for growth: Sometimes posters return to talk about how their lives changed — almost always for the better — because of the advice they got from thousands of anonymous strangers. … AITA might [now] be the largest public forum for conflict resolution on the planet. ” – The Ringer
John Luther Adams On What Makes His Music Tick
“Musically, I came of age in a time when there was this ongoing war between smart music and pretty music. And one of the things that I discovered was that it’s a false dichotomy. … The construction of the music, the intellectual care, the mathematical rigor, the algorithmic detail — all that is essential, even if you don’t hear it or you choose not to listen to it. … Music can be intellectually airtight and still sock you in the belly or grab you by the ears or seduce you, ravish you.” – The Nation
National Gallery Director Defends Postponement Of Guston Show
“I am convinced we can’t do this show without having an African American curator as part of the project,” Kaywin Feldman said of the touring exhibition being presented by the NGA, Tate Modern, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. “It’s not about the artist, it’s about us.” – Washington Post
How The Philadelphia Orchestra Learned To Give Virtual Performance A Sense Of Occasion
The expanse of the Mann’s stage looks like some hip warehouse theater in Berlin. With black masks and plexi-glass partitions, the concert might be mistaken for an art installation in pre-COVID times. – Philadelphia Inquirer
At 40, Edward Watson Figured He Could Keep Dancing And Dancing. And Then …
“At 41 it all went wrong.” (There was a ruptured ligament, then a broken foot. Then the pandemic put a stop to the new Wayne McGregor Dante Project he would star in. So he’s up and retired, aged 44.) “It becomes very revealing how much you’ve put your body through. What I’ve done for the last 30 years, it’s not normal to do that to your body. But it is possible.” – The Guardian
Google Nears Agreement With France To Pay Publishers For News
“The deal with French publishers would come on the eve of a ruling by a French appeals court on a so-called neighbouring right enshrined in revamped EU copyright rules, which allows publishers to demand a fee from online platforms for showing news snippets.” – Reuters
Back To The Museum – But Alas It Had Lost Its Charm
Phil Kennicott: “I had thought I might escape the outside world for a few hours, shut out the chaos and crisis. But in room after room, the vast majority of the objects were mute and meaningless, and only those that somehow referenced other periods of crisis spoke with clarity. I had entirely lost my ability to experience art as escape.”- Washington Post
Preserving The Black Culture That Has Flourished Online
Jenna Wortham and Kimberly Drew: “With social platforms, there is newly shared culture, and in effect, shared history, but it is one that is vulnerable to a loss as arbitrary as a server migration or company sale. … In 2015, we set out to create our own analog archive of contemporary Black life by Black people and for Black people. … The ephemerality of social media terrified us, and as such, inspired us.” – The New York Times Magazine
New Netflix Project: ‘Made By Africa, Watched By the World’
“Mixing new, original content with older African classics that have not previously been streamed elsewhere, this initiative … creates a path for stories that specifically address different slices of the African experience to see the light of day and reach a wider audience. Considering that there’s a growing feeling among Africans that inaccurate representation on screen is a given, that’s a good thing for everyone.” – The Guardian
Is Netflix Too Quick To Cancel Series?
Exactly how Netflix makes the call on what to renew or not is something of a mystery – it never releases ratings or viewer figures that would illuminate its decisions. Instead, everything is driven by top-secret data. Netflix notoriously number-crunches every bit of viewer interaction – what you watch, when you watch it, the device you watch it on (TV, PC, phone, tablet, smart microwave, whatever), how many episodes you watch in a row; even when you pause and for how long. It then uses this to inform production choices.- The Guardian
How Can Choirs Can Sing Together Again COVID-Safely? In Cars, Drive-In Movie-Style
“It started with David Newman, a baritone on the voice faculty of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va. In May, after a widely discussed web conference on the dangers of singing, Mr. Newman set up a sound system with four wireless microphones, an old-school analog mixer and an amplifier. Several singers gathered in their cars on his street, and he conducted them from his driveway. It worked.” – The New York Times
V&A Preparing To Return Items Looted After Ethiopian Battle
“The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has started talks with the Ethiopian embassy over returning looted treasures in its collections, including a gold crown and royal wedding dress, … plundered after the 1868 capture of Maqdala.” – The Guardian
Two Actors’ Unions Fight For Jurisdiction Over Streamed Theater
“Actors’ Equity Association [theater] is accusing SAG-AFTRA [film, television and radio] of raiding its turf and undercutting its contracts by negotiating lower-paying deals with theaters for streaming productions. SAG-AFTRA, in turn, says that work made for broadcast has always been its domain, and that it has offered to work with Equity through the pandemic but that the stage union has refused all efforts at compromise.” – The New York Times
The Movie Problem: No Blockbusters, No Business
The top 50 best-performing films in the UK box office take nearly 90% of the total box office. With more than 700 films released every year, that leaves little space for smaller, foreign language and independent films. Cinemas have high fixed costs and need a certain number of hit films to keep afloat. – The Conversation
Why India’s Government Is Trying To Demonize Bollywood
If you had switched on news television in India in the past two months, you would have found a country obsessed with a singular subject: the taming of Bollywood, supposedly a wild, drug-addled place where horrible things happen to outsiders; India’s Gomorrah, infested with vile liberals and Muslims. This hysterical campaign of vilification and the persecution of numerous actors is an attempt to distract people from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s failure to handle the coronavirus pandemic and a sinking economy. – The New York Times
Viability
Arts and culture organizations that can learn to grow their audiences and leverage these connections into long-term financial stability may learn that a successful pivot is often one that turns toward their neighbors. – Doug Borwick
Deplorable in Baltimore: Careening Down the Slippery Slope of Collection Monetization
Call me Cassandra. The “slippery slope” of monetizing museum collections, which I previously prophesied would get more dangerous under the Association of Art Museum Directors’ temporarily relaxed guidelines, has just been greased. – Lee Rosenbaum
Theater Company SITI Will Disband After 2022
“After 30 seasons, Anne Bogart and Tadashi Suzuki’s famed experimental New York theater company, … the Saratoga International Theater Institute, better known as SITI, announced today that it will stop touring and performing shows after its 30th and final season, which it anticipates will run through Fall 2022.” – The New York Times
A Day In The Life Of India’s Dance Village, Still A Haven From Coronavirus
“‘We have been living our lives exactly as if nothing has happened,’ [said] Surupa Sen, Nrityagram’s artistic director of 23 years. … [The village] continues to be what it always has been, but more so: a dance haven, self-contained and single-minded in its focus, at a remove from a chaotic and sometimes frightening world. … For this piece, we asked the dancers to document their day, from dawn to dusk, capturing moments and places with disposable cameras.” – The New York Times
Ancient Villa With Mosaics Unearthed Under Apartment Block In Rome
“The remains of the series of ornately decorated rooms were discovered when engineers were carrying out the earthquake-proofing of the 1950s residential building in 2014. Archaeologists were called in to undertake €3 million excavations funded by BNP Paribas Real Estate, the company that owns the apartment block. The archaeologists found a complex of lavish rooms with black and white mosaic flooring. The site will soon be accessible to the public as a subterranean museum.” – Forbes