In one sense, “the end of Rookie represents another nail in the coffin of small, independent internet publishing. But in another sense, it is an object lesson in how voraciously creative writing is being absorbed by the online marketplace. Maintaining a publication’s integrity in that environment is an exhausting challenge.” – The New Republic
I Was An Unhappy, Aging Academic Until Flamenco Transformed My Life
Author and professor Catherine Taylor offers an impressionistic longread, with plenty of video clips, about how her midlife crisis moved her to travel to southern Spain for serious study of the form — and about how its aesthetic and mindset changed her way of being. — The Believer
Alas, Netflix Is Unlikely To Save Art Films
Netflix may seem like a savior to these filmmakers right now, but the promise is illusory. Streaming services are also under tremendous economic pressure of their own, such that they’re unlikely to commit for the long term to arty, mid-budget films like Roma and Buster Scruggs. They may temporarily slow the increasing homogenization of filmmaking in America, but they cannot reverse it. – The New Republic
What Happens When A City Tries For The Bilbao Effect And Fails? Here Are Some Cautionary Tales
“This proves to be a particularly timely question because exactly 10 years ago last month, two of the biggest arts venue headaches of recent times finally opened to the public.” Ike Ijeh looks at those venues and others, including a few that became successes after rather inauspicious beginnings. — Building (UK)
Boat People Of The Mediterranean Form A Theater Company In Sicily
Founded in 2013, Liquid Company, a troupe made up entirely of refugees and migrants from Africa and the Mideast who survived the dangerous sea crossing, has developed, scripted, and performed four plays about their journeys, the asylum system, and human trafficking. — Public Radio International
What We Learned Having AI Analyze A Book
Using AI tools to analyze this piece of literature shed new light on key elements of emotion and memory in the book – but they did not replace the skills of an expert or scholar at interpreting texts or pictures. As a result of our experiment, we think that AI and other computational methods present an interesting opportunity with the potential for more quantifiable, reproducible and maybe objective research in the humanities. – The Conversation
If The World Is On Fire, Is It OK To Talk About Books?
Rebecca Makkai, author of The Great Believers, has some questions – and some answers. “No one I know is unaware that this is a particularly weird time to make art, rather than to spend every moment calling your senators. But art has always had to exist alongside history.” – Electric Literature
Barrie Kosky: “Opera Is A Dream”
“Opera is an incredibly sophisticated art form that’s developed over 500 years. So there’s no one audience. If you want to just sit there without knowing anything about it and watch the pretty pictures with music at the centre, you are allowed to, great. If you want to do two years of research and study the programme and the libretto, great. And if you want to compare it to the 20 other productions that you’ve seen in the last five years, that’s great too.” – Bachtrack
Must Visit? National Geographic Puts Dundee’s New Waterfront And Museum On Its Worldwide List
Dundonians are said to have developed “a new kind of swagger” thanks to the opening of its V&A museum, which is hailed as “the crown jewel” of its £1 billion waterfront regeneration. The city was rated number 15 in National Geographic’s 2019 “Cool List,” which it says are the destinations set to “hit the headlines” next year. Other locations to make the top 19 included Oslo, Guyana, Bhutan, Corsica, Eritrea and Uganda. More than 250,000 visitors flocked to V&A Dundee in the space of just months after it opened its doors in September. – The Scotsman
Publishing Industry Demands UK End Sales Tax On E-Books
“Digital publications are currently taxed at 20% in the UK; printed publications have been exempt from VAT since its introduction in 1973, ‘on the general principle of avoiding a tax on knowledge’.” Now that new EU legislation allowing member states to cut VAT on digital publications, “a cohort of voices … is now urging the government to ‘axe the reading tax’.” — The Guardian
A YouTube Channel To Share And Promote New Opera
On the channel, called MyNewOpera, artists and fans will be able to watch and upload new operas, curate and share their own playlists and view other artists’ playlists. The initiative is the brainchild of UK-based opera production company Tete a Tete, however it is hoped the channel will encourage international collaboration. – The Stage
Doing Your Part? The Average American Household Has TV On Eight Hours Per Day
When Nielsen started measuring TV viewership, American households were averaging four and a half hours a day. This figure rose steadily over the course of the century, but the biggest jump came in the 2000s, when it peaked at almost nine hours. Now it’s a little under eight. – The Atlantic
Peter Brook On The Meaning Of Theatre
“And that to me is pure theater: the sharing through the imagination of something down to earth and concrete and appealing for the imagination, so that there’s always that sense of “and then what?”—that sense of wonder, which one needs so badly, and one has so little of in everyday life.” – Artforum
Could We Unite America Around Orchestras?
“As a secular American living in Manhattan, I’m a stranger to the senator’s world of church and picnics. I worry that religion may be as much divisive as binding in America’s map of red versus blue. My professional world is one of orchestras (with which I work) and cultural history (about which I write). My perspective suggests another opportunity for healing—regaining a lost “sense of place” and shared American identity via our history and culture. And, yes, I mean high culture.” – The Weekly Standard
The End Of Privacy? It Traces Back To The 1960s
The privacy warriors of the 1960s would have been astounded by what the tech industry has become. They would be more amazed to realize that the policy choices they made back then — to demand data transparency rather than limit data collection, and to legislate the behavior of government but not private industry — enabled today’stech giants to become as large and powerful as they are. – The New York Times
Embedding Artists In The Municipal Bureaucracy
This past summer, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission began a program that assigns artists-in-residence to work in county government agencies (to start with, the Registrar-Recorder’s Office and the county library system). Pauline Kanako Kamiyama writes about what she and LACAC learned from the programs’s preparation and launch. (For example, “‘Trust the artist-driven process’ does not easily translate to non-arts staff nor governmental management styles.”) — Americans for the Arts
Scorecard: The World’s 14 Biggest Mega-Galleries
With a new announcement about gallery expansion seeming to hit the art-industry newswire every day, it can be vexing to try to visualize just how physically large even one major dealer is in 2018, let alone how that dealer compares to some of their closest peers. – Artnet
The Notion Of “Sublime” Is So Old-Fashioned. Maybe It Should Be Reconsidered?
Responses to the sublime are puzzling. While the 18th century saw ‘the beautiful’ as a wholly pleasurable experience of typically delicate, harmonious, balanced, smooth and polished objects, the sublime was understood largely as its opposite: a mix of pain and pleasure, experienced in the presence of typically vast, formless, threatening, overwhelming natural environments or phenomena. – Aeon
The Best Free Movie Streaming Service You’ve Never Heard Of
“When the classic-movie streaming service FilmStruck shuttered last month, it caused a palpable panic among cineastes. Overstuffed with exceptional big-studio films and arthouse gems, the service represented a viable alternative to the big streamers, many of which offer relatively meager film catalogs. And FilmStruck’s demise was especially troubling when you realize just how many movies, from Oscar-winners to low-budget oddities, are completely missing from streaming services altogether. What are America’s raging Cocoon-heads supposed to do?” Ladies, gentlemen, and non-binary folks, meet Kanopy. — Wired
Art Of The Gig Economy: Better Keep Your Day Job
A new study by the JPMorgan Chase Institute seems to indicate life in the gig economy is not what it has been cracked up to be. The study didn’t rely on surveys or questionnaires. It used actual financial data. The company dug up 38m payments directed through 128 different online platforms to 2.3m of its customers’ checking accounts from October 2012 to March 2018. Its conclusions are pretty obvious: you may want to keep your day job. – The Guardian
A New National Theatre Company For, And By, The Disabled
“A group of disabled theatre artists have announced the creation of National Disability Theatre, a company that will produce fully accessible live performances. The company will exclusively contract actors, designers, directors, and staff who have disabilities.” — American Theatre
Justin Peck Explains How He Used Everyday Movement To Choreograph The Actors In His New Short Films
“For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been interested in how people move in everyday life. The way someone leaps over a puddle in the gutter to hail a cab or the way one person holds a door for another. Or even the way cooks in a restaurant kitchen work with synchronicity in their confined quarters. … That instinct became the jumping-off point for this series of Great Performers films simple gestures drawn from the everyday.” — New York Times Magazine
Watch Justin Peck’s Dance Films Choreographed On Some Of The Year’s Best Movie Actors
“Justin Peck, the New York City Ballet’s resident choreographer, created a series of dance films for the year’s best actors. The scenarios put everyday characters in familiar situations: packed into a subway car, stuck in a doctor’s office, caught in downpour. But once they start moving, the actors” — Julia Roberts, Toni Collette, Lakeith Stanfield, Glenn Close, Regina Hall, Yoo Ah-In, Ethan Hawke, Elsie Fisher, Yalitza Aparicio, and (together) Emma Stone, Olivia Colman, And Rachel Weisz — “turn our common experiences into welcome moments of enchantment.” — New York Times Magazine
MoviePass Tries To Get Itself Back Together With An Overhauled Pricing Model
“Despite becoming a trending topic for all the wrong reasons, the company that once planned to be the Netflix of moviegoing believes it can win back the trust of its customers after a bumpy year that’s led to a wave of articles predicting its imminent demise. … As part of that effort a chastened MoviePass is unveiling a new series of monthly plans, the prices of which will vary depending on geography.” — Variety
Will Customers Accept MoviePass’s New Pricing Plans, Especially After All The Company Has Put Them Through?
Brian Barrett offers an analysis of the company’s new monthly pricing plans vis-a-vis those of the competitors that sprang up this year to lure customers angered by MoviePass’s failure to live up to its wildly overgenerous initial promises. — Wired