This isn’t even about COVID. According to the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art, the austerity measures that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador introduced in May of 2019 have led to budget cuts of 50% in the capital’s museums and 75% in regional museums; many staffers haven’t been paid for weeks or even months. And museum directors won’t raise this with the public or high officials for fear of reprisal. – Artnet
Vox Media’s CEO Doesn’t Want It To Be Like Condé Nast. He Wants It To Be Like Disney.
Jim Bankoff: “Disney makes money by bringing its properties to consumers in different ways. … We have everything from programmatic advertising to podcasting, to creating TV shows to having a magazine, to affiliate e-commerce to subscriptions. So we have our own way of making money off our creative franchises.” – Vanity Fair
Arts Ed Group Calls For Resignations At Americans For The Arts
In a letter released December 11, members of the Arts Education Advisory Council, an elected advisory board representing arts educators from across the country, outlined a series of demands for Americans for the Arts, including the immediate removal of its most senior leaders. – Hyperallergic
New York City’s Arts Groups May Start Performing Again This Spring — Outdoors
“The City Council passed legislation on Thursday that allows any [city- or borough-] funded artist and cultural organizations, venues or institutions to be able to utilize public outdoor spaces for ticketed events and performances. And any artist and venue can partner with an eligible organization for permits as well.” The program, called Open Culture, begins March 1. – Gothamist
Controversial Korean Filmmaker Kim Ki-Duk, 59, Dead Of COVID
“[He] was known as the bad boy of Asian art-house cinema and made his name with a series of visually stunning but extremely violent films, including The Isle (2000) and Bad Guy (2001). … Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter … and Spring (2003), .. a sharp contrast with Kim’s previous work, was an international art-house hit. Pieta (2012), a story of redemption featuring a loan shark mobster (and more of Kim’s trademark visceral violence), won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Kim’s directing career was derailed in 2018 when three women came forward accusing him and his Bad Guy star Cho Jae-hyun of rape and sexual assault.” – The Hollywood Reporter
How Notre-Dame’s Enormous Grand Organ Was Taken Apart For Cleaning
Amazingly, the 8,000-pipe, five-keyboard instrument escaped serious damage in last year’s catastrophic fire. But all the pipes and mechanisms were covered in lead dust from the collapsed roof, and they require decontamination and repair. The organ’s disassembly was recently completed, nearly two months ahead of schedule (!), and it’s expected to be back in place in April of 2024. (But will it be?) – Smithsonian Magazine
Could The Streaming Wars Hit Their Peak In 2021?
The problem with all this growth is that eventually streaming services will just run out of households to sign up. This year, video-on-demand services have seen more growth than any other time in their history… But in 2021 the industry could see a massive cooling. Everyone will have tried everything and pretty much decided which ones they’re sticking to. – Wired
Dancing on Stone and in Water
I’ve said it before, and forgive me if I say it again: Dancers can’t not dance. There they are on my laptop’s window — at work in their apartments, in parks, on piers, and in empty streets. Maybe partners and roommates have filmed you performing; maybe you just attached your cell phone to a music stand and shooed the cat away. Dušan Týnek’s Quarry Dance IX is nothing like that. – Deborah Jowitt
By The Numbers: Just How White Publishing Is In America
By the end, we had identified the race or ethnicity of 3,471 authors.We guessed that most of the authors would be white, but we were shocked by the extent of the inequality once we analyzed the data. Of the 7,124 books for which we identified the author’s race, 95 percent were written by white people. – The New York Times
The Best Architecture of 2020
The editors of Dezeen have chosen their favorites. – dezeen
Calling 2020 ‘The Year The Music Died’ Is Far More Truth Than Cliche
Where should musicians go, and what should they do? “Everyone in the live music business has asked that question since the pandemic decimated the industry. The damage was relentless and comprehensive, and it’s nowhere near over: tours grounded, beloved venues shuttered, layoffs made permanent and lifelong dreams vaporized. An industry at the crest of a hugely profitable decade has plummeted off a cliff.” – Los Angeles Times
The History Of Sexism And Classism In British Science Underpins Everything About The Movie Ammonite
When Francis Lee first read about Mary Anning, he felt a connection to her. Then he did the work to make gritty Lyme come to life. “I did extensive research to make sure that not just the facts about Mary but the facts about the day and how people lived their lives and what it meant to have no money in this time. … All of that is very, very factual.” But the film’s detractors have fastened their (homophobic) outrage on the relationship at the heart of the film between paleontologist Anning and geologist Charlotte Murchison. – Los Angeles Times
Alert: Painted Portraits Are Not Photographs
Just in case you were inclined to think they were, which … apparently, people are. And by “people,” we’re talking about scientists. But there’s an issue: “Changing ideas about accuracy relate to an even deeper problem with these supposedly scientific approaches: The researchers are unaware that both portraiture and the ideas portraits express have a history.” – Hyperallergic
Designing The Ideal Library
You know, for when we can be together in person again. – The New York Times
LA’s Museum Of Latin American Art Defends Its Big Deaccession Auction
The museum had 59 works from its permanent collection on the auction block, but it says that was in pursuit of a larger goal. The museum’s chief curator claimed “the sale was not a response to economic hardship but part of a long-term initiative to diversify the collection, making it stronger, more relevant and balanced.” – Los Angeles Times
The Loss Of Print, The Rise Of Fan Culture, And What’s Happened To Reviews
This is, on the surface, about a game. But it’s about so much more, including “scores” in reviews, the authority of “major” sites, gatekeeping, industry PR, and loud voices screaming on YouTube. – Kotaku
Black Booksellers Question Tattered Cover’s Self-Anointing Media Coverage
Having a Black venture capitalist in your ownership group isn’t exactly the win Tattered Cover’s PR claimed. Danielle Mullen of Semicolon Bookstore in Chicago: “It’s hurtful to Black booksellers who have been doing the hard work—and then they take the same credit without real Black representation. It’s disappointing and almost unbelievable. Especially with the history they have around the BLM protests and why they lost so many customers. It’s ridiculous. … It’s like if Jeff Bezos partnered with a Black person and then said, ‘Amazon is the biggest Black-owned business in the world.'” – Publishers Weekly
While 2020 Fell Off A Cliff, TV Stayed Suspended In Midair
Or so says one of Slate‘s TV critics. Read the whole series of posts if you can – you can start here and work your way back – but there’s a serious discussion to be had about TV in 2020. “For so much of this year, watching TV felt like watching these weird remnants of another world. They would resonate or fail to connect just like TV always does, but they’d be reaching out to a completely other world than the one they originally intended to reach.” – Slate
That Time Italian Futurists Declared War On Pasta
You see, pasta wasn’t “virile” enough for these guys, the poets and artists of Italian Futurism. That’s right, “a heavy, bloated stomach does not encourage physical enthusiasm for a woman, nor favour the possibility of possessing her at any time.” – Open Culture
A Glimpse Inside Hanukkah Related Medieval Manuscripts
Illuminated manuscripts are, well, filled with light. For instance: “A full-page rendering of a menorah surrounded by Temple implements, in color and gold.” – LitHub
Othella Dallas, Who Kept The Flame Of Katherine Dunham’s Dance Technique Burning, 95
Dallas taught Dunham’s dance style, “a polyrhythmic style rooted in early Black dance that Dunham developed through her ethnographic research in the Caribbean in the 1930s,” well into her 90s at her studio in Basel, Switzerland. “You feel it like a religion. … It’s in our bloodline. You live with it when you teach it. You respect it. And then you give it to someone else, so they may have the honor of teaching it and seeing the genius of Dunham.” – The New York Times
US Senator Mike Lee Blocks Legislation To Create Smithsonian Women’s, Latinx Museums
“The last thing we need,” Lee said, “is to further divide an already divided nation with an array of segregated, separate-but-equal museums for hyphenated identity groups.” – NPR
How NY Bars And Restaurants Found Ways To Start The Music Again
Birdland, and a number of other noted jazz clubs and piano bars across the city, were quietly offering live performances again, arguing that the performers were playing “incidental” music for diners, and that the music was therefore permitted by the pandemic-era guidelines set by the State Liquor Authority. – The New York Times
No Wonder We’re Skeptical Of The Future – It’s Scary
Isn’t the ‘crisis of democracy’ old news? Absolutely. It’s as ancient as democracy itself. Still, present circumstances raise the question as to whether we can look ahead to a time after the crisis. What does it mean to be ‘forward-looking’ in times like ours? The fear that drives much of contemporary political culture is caused by the disruptions that global complexity and a destabilised planet introduce into what was once called the body politic. – Eurozine
AMC Raises $100M, Slams Warner, And Says It’ll Be Out Of Money By January
In its latest warning cry, it said it needs $750 million “to remain viable” through 2021. Even if it raises that, it still risks bankruptcy next year if moviegoing doesn’t pick up — and Warner Bros. may have made that harder to accomplish. – Deadline