“It takes some courage to come to a conference of funders and tell them what they do wrong. In no uncertain terms. Especially if you are an organization that could use their money. But there was a lot of that at the Tuesday morning panel titled: Expressions for Justice: Grantmaking in the arts for systems change. The exchange was open, and maybe the most direct of the entire GIA conference.” (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
2019 Grantmakers in the Arts Conference: GIA’s great curiosity — the Black Art Futures Fund
“The Black Art Futures Fund was a topic of great curiosity at the 2019 GIA conference, if only because it seemed to the GIA crowd that founder DéLana R.A. Dameron is on to something new with her start-up funding effort. And so the session titled Our Beloved Community: Collaborative grantmaking, which formally introduced the project to attendees drew an eager audience, even though it started at 8 a.m. Wednesday morning. The room was packed.” (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
Migrating Our Skills as Cultural Workers
Cultural organizer and producer Joon Lynn Goh speaks with Janna Graham, a research-based practitioner, curator, and lecturer, about connecting cultural work with political organizing. – HowlRound
Leonardo Da Vinci’s Design For The World’s Longest Bridge Would Have Worked, Say MIT Scientists
In 1502, Leonardo submitted to the Ottoman sultan a design for a bridge over the Golden Horn in Istanbul that would have been, at the time, by far the world’s longest, and tall enough for ships to pass underneath. The skeptical sultan rejected Leonardo’s plan, but a team at MIT has modeled it out and says that, with materials and technology available at the time, the bridge would have held up. – Ars Technica
Netflix’s U.S. Subscriber Growth Is Slowing As Competitors Ramp Up
This is a bit of a problem for the massive company: “The big question now is whether some of Netflix’s existing subscribers will decide to cancel its service and defect to cheaper alternatives that Apple and Disney will launch within the next month.” Or will the other two just be add-ons for people who get most of what they want through Netflix? The company is counting on it. – The New York Times (AP)
The Radical Personal Life Of Johann Sebastian Bach
“I’ve talked to people who feel they know Bach very well, but they aren’t aware of the time he was imprisoned for a month. They never learned about Bach pulling a knife on a fellow musician during a street fight. They never heard about his drinking exploits—on one two-week trip he billed the church eighteen gorchsen for beer, enough to purchase eight gallons of it at retail prices—or that his contract with the Duke of Saxony included a provision for tax-free beer from the castle brewery; or that he was accused of consorting with an unknown, unmarried woman in the organ loft; or had a reputation for ignoring assigned duties without explanation or apology.” – Lapham’s Quarterly
The Real Problem With Cancel Culture
“The entire cancel culture conversation, including the debate over whether or not it exists at all, has largely missed a crucial point. While celebrities, successful artists, and other too-big-to-fail types can survive a cancellation (or even seek one out as a means of drumming up publicity), the rest of us are trapped in an increasingly deranged surveillance state fueled by the disappearance of our most essential resource: trust.” – Tablet
Epistolary Memoir, An Old Genre Having A New Heyday
The recounting of a life in the form of a letter may go all the way back to Benjamin Franklin, but it’s currently seeing a revival, kicked off by Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me and carried by major works by Imani Perry, Terese Marie Mailhot, Ocean Vuong, and others. “The new epistolary memoirs, however,” writes Parul Sehgal, “are less interested in stitching a life into a tidy narrative shroud than in ripping it from its seams.” – The New York Times
James Wood: Harold Bloom’s “Anxiety Of Influence”
“You mistook him for no one else: the late, popular style was a faded fan, but it was still recognizably Bloom’s old peacockery. The leaping links, hieratic cross-referencing, and amusingly camp self-involvement—the sense you got that everything made sense inside Bloom’s head, that everyone connected with everyone else within the huge Oedipal family he had made of literature—had been there from the beginning, somewhat masked by the scholarly density and relative propriety of his early work.” – The New Yorker
Why Are Instagram Experiences Referred To As “Museums”
These immersive experiences are branded as exhibits, but that might be where the link to traditional museums ends. The companies are, after all, for-profit businesses that sell experiences that have been expressly created for social media postability. – CityLab
Librarians Protest Publishers’ Plan To Limit Their Access To E-Books
Beginning Nov. 1, Macmillan Publishers, one of the so-called Big Five publishing companies in North America, will only allow libraries to purchase one copy of each new e-book for the first eight weeks after it has been released. Librarians who say the decision is unfair to readers are campaigning against it. – CBC
The twenty-five record albums that changed my life (2)
The public library in Smalltown, U.S.A., had a modest selection of classical albums. One of them was this two-disc set of “live” recordings by the first important classical-music instrumentalist whose playing I got to know well. – Terry Teachout
American English Preserves Old Grammar That British English Has Dropped
“The index of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language mentions regional differences in 95 places. … In reality, America has often been the conservative one, and Britain the innovator. When British speakers borrow American habits, they are sometimes unwittingly readopting an older version of their language.” (One surprising example: the subjunctive.) – The Economist
National Ballet Of Canada Posts Its Tenth Season In A Row Of Budget Surpluses
Specifically, the company’s revenues were $37.58 million with expenses at $36.17 million, which resulted in a surplus of $1.41 million. The figures represent a 4 percent operating surplus. – Ludwig Van
After 25 Years, Artistic Director Of New York’s Playwrights Horizons Is Moving On
“After nearly a quarter century as the artistic director of one of Off Broadway’s most acclaimed nonprofits, [Tim] Sanford is announcing his departure. The theater’s next season — its 50th — will be his last as artistic director, and at that point he will have led the organization for half of its history. He will be succeeded by his longtime deputy, the theater’s associate artistic director, Adam Greenfield.” – The New York Times
Is Democracy For Sale? Democracy.com Sure Is
According to the domain brokerage GoDaddy, the five most expensive publicly-reported domain names are CarInsurance.com – $49.7m; Insurance.com – $35.6m; VacationRentals.com – $35m; PrivateJet.com – $30.18m; and Voice.com – $30m. Sex.com sold for $14m and Porno.com – $8.8m. – The Guardian
Activists Want The Oscars, Emmys And Tonys To Give Up Gendered Acting Categories. That Isn’t Happening. (Yet.)
“The debate has roots in older conversations about whether carving out places in a male-dominated field for one group, in this case women, comes at the cost of excluding others. Proponents of gendered categories say that absent such distinctions, men would dominate the nominees and winners.” – The New York Times
An Amazon.Com For Choreography?
“Described as the first resource of its kind, Choreography Online allows individuals to buy the performance licence for choreographic material through a searchable video-based site. … Uploaded choreography can be searched by genre, number of performers or difficulty, and a time-limited licence can then be bought to perform the dance, providing the original choreographer is credited.” – The Stage
20 Ancient Egyptian Coffins, Intact And Sealed, Found Near Luxor
“Found in Al-Assasif, an ancient necropolis on the west bank of Nile, the coffins were spread out over two levels of a large tomb. The site once formed part of the ancient city of Thebes, the ruins of which are found in present-day Luxor.” – CNN
Panama Papers Law Firm Sues Netflix For Defamation Over ‘The Laundromat’
The name partners of the Panama City firm Mossack Fonseca (portrayed in the movie by Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas) allege that the Steven Soderbergh film (which also stars Meryl Streep and Sharon Stone) depicts them as “ruthless uncaring lawyers who are involved in money laundering, tax evasion, bribery and/or other criminal conduct” and claim that it could harm their case in an upcoming criminal trial in Panama. – The Guardian
Leonardo’s ‘Vitruvian Man’ Will Be Going To The Louvre’s Exhibition After All
“With just days to go before its hotly anticipated Leonardo da Vinci retrospective opens, the Louvre has finally secured the loan of one of the artist’s key works, following a two-year political battle and skirmishes in the Italian judicial system.” – ARTnews
Gramophone’s Recording Of The Year Is Bertrand Chamayou’s Saint-Saëns Piano Concertos; Jaap Van Zweden’s Other Band Is Orchestra Of The Year
Chamayou’s Erato-label disc of the 2nd and 5th Concertos with Emmanuel Krivine conducting the Orchestre National de France prevailed over nine other category winners to take the top prize. The Hong Kong Philharmonic was elected Orchestra of the Year, the only honor awarded by public vote. Pianist Víkingur Ólafsson was named Artist of the Year and countertenor Jakub Józef Orliński was chosen as Young Artist of the Year, while Dame Emma Kirkby was given a Lifetime Achievement Award. – Gramophone
The Inimitable Mr. Bloom (Last Of His Kind?)
Harold Bloom “read like a man picking up crumbs with a moistened index finger. He often considered loneliness in literature. You felt he was attracted to loneliness as a theme for the same reasons that Ishmael, in “Moby-Dick,” liked to join funeral processions. It made him feel more open, invigorated and alive.” – The New York Times
Barcelona Dance Group Traveling To LA, Stopped, Deported, Even Though They Had Visas
The four were forced to sign a document agreeing to deportation, Marta Carrasco said. She said Customs told her group, “If you don’t sign, you will not be allowed to enter the U.S. for five years.” The artist added that they were “accompanied like criminals by five immigration officers all the way to the airplane door.” – Los Angeles Times
Trying To Cope With Crowds, Louvre Creates The VR Mona Lisa Experience
The virtual reality tour will be a more intimate encounter. The VR tour, designed to remedy the problem of crowds and distance, will be housed in a small gallery room near the main Leonardo exhibition and apart from the “Mona Lisa.” – The New York Times