“The ADA is often mentioned as some kind of total solution to a still inaccessible world. But as was pointed out at the beginning of Monday’s panel, Variations on a Theme: Funding Disability Aesthetics, the ADA is the bare minimum. It is often a box half-heartedly checked … The ADA exists and the world is still inaccessible, and that includes the art world — a tangible and theoretical space that touts itself as radical. But there is nothing radical about inaccessibility.” (For the main web page of the 2019 GIA conference, click here. For the full GIA 2019 conference blog, click here.) – Grantmakers in the Arts
The First Black Woman to Direct a Major Hollywood Film Is Finally Getting Her Due
“Thirty years after the release of A Dry White Season, Euzhan Palcy is on a roll with a Barbican retrospective and a slew of recent screenings. Here’s a look back at some of her major works.” – Hyperallergic
Combating The Stigma Against Mental Illness Through The Power Of Music
“When people talk about the healing power of music, they are generally referring to the listener, but one orchestra in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont is founded on the idea that music can be transformative for the people playing it, too. The orchestra, called Me2/Orchestra, is made up of performers living with mental illness and those who support them.” (video) – WGBH (Boston)
Australia Changes The Way It Funds Major Performing Arts Companies
“A meeting of Australia’s arts and cultural ministers in Adelaide … has seen a major overhaul of the way the Major Performing Arts sector is funded through the Australia Council for the Arts, and contemporary circus company Circa – whose Artistic Director Yaron Lifschitz once described the system as a ‘protectorate of the privileged’ – welcomed into the fold of Major Performing Arts companies.” – Limelight (Australia)
Reading As An Active Sport (No Really)
“The main contention of What We Talk About When We Talk About Books – that reading print can be a sociable, active, and even seditious activity – is so sensible that it seems incredible that this long-form, evidence-based case hasn’t been made before. Why does it matter? Perhaps not only because we should think about whether our fantasies about the printed word are true, but also because we should ask why these particular fantasies have become so dominant.” – Times Literary Supplement
When Schools Utterly Fail At Sex Education, Fanfiction Fills In The Gaps
That’s right: Fanfiction, with its hookups of likely and unlikely characters, its absolute refusal to live by the rules of the world set by authors like J.K. Rowling and Suzanne Collins, educates the teens of the world about sex, friendship, and much more, especially for LGBT youth: “Where the education system failed us, our fellow horny teens stepped up.” – BuzzFeed
Sean Dorsey Has Blazed A Trail For Trans Dance Artists
“Now in its 15th season, Dorsey’s award-winning San Francisco company, Sean Dorsey Dance, is heralded for intersectional dance-theater works that celebrate trans, gender-nonconforming and queer identities. Along the way, Dorsey, 47, has become the first trans choreographer to receive funding from the National Endowment for the Arts (seven grants to date, totaling $115,000), and the first U.S. trans artist presented by the American Dance Festival and New York City’s Joyce Theater. Today, he’s the role model he always wished he had.” – Dance Magazine
Why Orchestras Giving Free Concerts Is A Very Bad Idea
Aubrey Bergauer: “Giving it away for free, whether by regularly scheduled programming or by striking or locked out musicians, is not getting the job done. It’s not growing audiences, it’s not building tons of new support, and — please hear this — it hurts us when people don’t see how much it costs to produce this art. [Here] are five reasons why free concerts are not serving us well.” – Medium
Stefan Edlis, Leading Chicago Art Collector, Dead At 94
“Long known for a premier collection of Pop art that he built with his wife, Gael Neeson, Edlis made a star turn in a recent HBO documentary about the art market, providing one of the film’s most poignant moments.” – ARTnews
So What Exactly *Is* The Interrogation Method At Issue In The Ava DuVernay/Netflix Lawsuit?
This week the law enforcement consulting firm John E. Reid and Associates sued Netflix and director DuVernay for defamation over the Central Park Five miniseries When They See Us, alleging that the script makes false statements about an interrogation method developed by the firm called “the Reid Technique.” Here’s an explanation of what the Reid Technique is and why it’s controversial. – The Guardian
‘Salvator Mundi’ Probably Won’t Be At The Louvre’s Leonardo Retrospective — And There May Be A Good Reason For That
Very few people even know where the world’s most expensive painting is right now: it’s supposed to be at the new Louvre Abu Dhabi, but it’s never appeared there. (There’s a report that it’s aboard Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s megayacht.) The painting was expected to be a centerpiece of the (Paris) Louvre’s big Leonardo 500 show, but the museum is hearing nothing from its owners. Sebastian Smee observes that there’s one powerful incentive for those owners not to send it to France. – The Washington Post
Cambridge University Loans Art To Its Students. In 60 Years None Of It Has Been Damaged
Students can hire up to two artworks for the year for £20 each. A visitors’ book shows the former director of the Tate, Sir Nicholas Serota, borrowed a Henri Gaudier-Brzeska drawing when he was at Christ’s College in the 1960s. – BBC
Morphing ‘Swan Lake’ Into A Modern Irish Folk Tale
Choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan has taken the kernel of the Tchaikovsky/Petipa classic’s story and transplanted to in the milieu of contemporary Ireland to create Swan Lake/Loch na hEala, with a score of Irish and Nordic folk music accompanying a narrative of a depressed loner and a young woman molested by a priest and changed into a swan so she can’t tell anyone of his crime. – The New York Times
Band-Aids And Sticking Plasters: UK Government Promise Of More Culture Investment In Perspective
With local authority funding for culture now more than £236m lower than in 2010, and museums alone having lost £109m in annual funding over the past decade, the Government’s promise of £250m for culture over the next five years will at best put a sticking plaster on a patient with a life-threatening injury. – Arts Professional
The Rehabilitation Of Marie Antoinette
“This week, 226 years since her execution on Oct. 16, 1793, a new exhibition in Paris aims to show how the queen’s image has been transformed in recent years. From reviled royal to pop icon, her face now appears on gift shop souvenirs at her former home at Versailles, on bars of chocolate, hairbrushes, mugs, shopping bags, fridge magnets and snow globes.” – Los Angeles Times
Shape-Shifting Screens: How Filmmakers Are Playing With Aspect Ratios
The proportions of movies’ height and width have changed several times over the course of cinema history, but, for practical reasons (projectionists don’t like changing equipment all the time), at any given time the ratios have been standardized. Until the rise of digital projection, that is. Now it’s fairly easy for filmmakers to play with aspect ratios, and that’s what they’re doing. Ben Kenigsberg looks at four examples from this fall’s releases. – The New York Times
There’s Doublethink At The Heart Of Arts Awards, And This Year’s Double Booker Prize Brought It To The Surface
“Everyone agrees that competition is the enemy of art. And yet, on the whole, there is also an agreement to conspire in the notion that it isn’t. This paradox, this doublethink, usually works fine, since it opens up the space in which the extra-artistic functions of prizes can be fulfilled.” Charlotte Higgins analyzes how this doublethink works — and how the decision of this year’s Booker jury to flout the prize’s rules messed it up. – The Guardian
Why We Define Ourselves By What We Own
With age (and lawyers), we develop more sophisticated ways of resolving property disputes, but the emotional connection to our property as an extension of our identity remains with us. – Aeon
How Apple Made Its Move Into TV Production
“After a few false starts and a little offscreen drama, AppleTV+ finally makes its big debut with a slate of shows, Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon, and a billion potential customers ready to see what original programming looks like from the world’s largest company, led by CEO Tim Cook.” – The Hollywood Reporter
Number Of Self-Published Books In U.S. Up By At Least 40% In One Year (And Probably Much More)
“According to Bowker’s annual survey of the self-publishing market … the total number of print and e-books that were self-published in 2018 was 1.68 million, up from 1.19 million in 2017. [This figure] does not include self-published e-books by Amazon’s Kindle division, … [which is the] largest publisher of self-published e-books.” – Publishers Weekly
Longtime San Francisco Chronicle Music And Dance Critic Marilyn Tucker Dead At 89
“Tucker’s primary love was music, a devotion that she first cultivated in the Lutheran church of her childhood. But over the course of her [three decades] at The Chronicle, which began in 1964, she developed a wide-ranging versatility that allowed her to write about theater, literature and especially dance.” – San Francisco Chronicle
In ‘Snatch-And-Run’, Salvador Dalí Etching Stolen From San Francisco Gallery
On Sunday afternoon, a man walked into the Dennis Rae Fine Art Gallery, walked up to Dalí’s 1966 hand-colored etching Burning Giraffe, picked it right off the easel, and walked out the open door while the staffer on duty had his back turned. – NPR
Five Women Sentenced For Plot To Blow Up Notre-Dame De Paris
“A French court on Monday sentenced five members of an all-female jihadist cell to between five and 30 years in prison over a failed bid to detonate a car bomb outside Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris. … The five women, aged between 22 and 42, were arrested after a car packed with gas cylinders was found parked near the bustling esplanade in front of the cathedral … on November 4th, 2016.” – The Local (France)
If At First You Don’t Succeed… Nobel Winners Who Faced Early Rejection
In literature, some of the most celebrated writers were once considered too strange, too limited or just too boring. Several publishers turned down Toni Morrison’s first novel, “The Bluest Eye,” and she was chastised for years by white critics for focusing too much on black characters. – Washington Post (AP)
Canadian Choir Performs On Both Sides Of US/Mexico Border
“With a barbed wire fence and border patrol dividing two groups of drop-in singers, one located on the beach at Border Field State Park in San Diego, Calif., and the other just metres away in the border town of Tijuana, Mexico, the popular choral group performed a rendition of With A Little Help From My Friends by The Beatles. About 300 people took part on the U.S. side and 500 across the divide in Tijuana.” – CBC