The obvious case of a language being brought back to full life is Hebrew, which was used in Jewish religious ceremonies and texts but hadn’t been a full-fledged spoken language for about two millennia when a conscious decision was made to revive it for use in what would become Israel. Yet there was a couple of key conditions present for Hebrew’s success that weren’t there in the case of, for instance, Irish. – JSTOR Daily
How Consolidation Is Killing Good Art
“The lack of options marketed to consumers has created a missing middle: the zone between mass market and niche market where experimentation is supposed to proliferate and engender variety. Worse, the consolidation of the country’s vast creative sector into fewer, more powerful production and publishing companies has come at the direct expense of the quality of their product.” – The New Republic
How Rich Corporate Publishers Are Gouging Public Schools
Over the past decade, Silicon Valley’s tech behemoths have discreetly and methodically tightened their grip on American schools, and the pandemic has given them license to squeeze even tighter. – The New Republic
By The Pronouns, Who Designs And Directs In Major Regional Theatres?
Well … yes, it’s mostly he/him types. But also, 2020 was a real career killer. “Most designers, just like most artists in the field, have no work right now. They are hanging on by their fingertips. They have been forgotten or ignored by most of the theatres that called themselves ‘artistic homes’ for the artists. Many theatre designers I know are considering leaving the theatre—not just until it comes back, but forever—or have already left for good.” – HowlRound
Capturing The Music Of The Northern Lights
Scientist Karin Lehmkuhl Bodony, who lives in rural Alaska, realized some years ago that, if she could get at least four miles away from human-created electrical sources, she could record the sounds that the aurora borealis makes on a very low frequency receiver. Now she’s worked with composer Matthew Burtner to, in a way, transcribe the aurora’s music: “Rather than a composer writing the notes on the page and the musician playing the horn, the northern lights were playing the horn and writing the notes on the page. So I took myself out and let the lights paint that.” – The Guardian
Why Has Spotify Been Moving So Heavily Into Podcasts?
To corner the audio ad market, of course. But execs insist that the company is not going to be evil: “Having watched how companies like Facebook and Google built up the digital ad ecosystem, Spotify’s Jay Richman, who heads the company’s ads business and platform, says the streamer is determined not to focus on scale over quality.” – Axios
Village Voice To Be Revived By New Owner
“Brian Calle, the chief executive of Street Media, the owner of LA Weekly, said on Tuesday that he had acquired the publication from its publisher, Peter D. Barbey. … [Calle] added that he planned to restart The Voice‘s website in January and would publish a ‘comeback’ print edition early next year, with quarterly print issues to follow.” – The New York Times
Auction Houses Surprised How Well Their Business Went Online
“Despite the technological challenges, Europe’s leading auction houses say they have weathered the crisis well as customers adapted quickly, in some cases making online purchases in the millions for art they had only viewed virtually.” – The Art Newspaper
Trump Threatens To Veto COVID Funding If Funding For Cultural Institutions Isn’t Removed
He “reeled off items he deemed to be egregious, including foreign aid and wildlife research. Prominently featured on his list was “$40 million for the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, which is not even open for business; $1 billion for the Smithsonian, and an additional $154 million for the National Gallery of Art—likewise, these facilities are not open.” – Artnet
Legislation For A New Federal Writers Project?
David Kipen started lobbying for a new Writers’ Project in opinion columns and letters to lawmakers. One US congressman—Rep. Ted Lieu, a California Democrat—wrote back to Kipen expressing interest in the idea, and now hopes to introduce a bill in the next Congress. The timing and exact details of the bill have yet to be finalized, but Lieu’s office says that a new project could be anchored within the Department of Labor or a cultural agency, and run as a grant program administered through existing community institutions, including news outlets. – Columbia Journalism Review
A James Baldwin Music Playlist
Ikechúkwú Onyewuenyi, a curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, hopes to rouse a new generation of writers with “Chez Baldwin,” a 478-track, 32-hour-long Spotify playlist based on Baldwin’s vinyl record collection. – Hyperallergic
Tutus: A Brief History
“What is the history of this strange protruding skirt which allegedly gets its name from the French children’s word cucu, meaning ‘bottom’? Pointe took a look back at some important moments in innovation,” from Marie Taglioni’s bell-shaped skirt in the 1832 premiere of La Sylphide to the ten-foot-wide social-distancing tutu that the Dutch National Ballet developed this year. – Pointe Magazine
Conan Doyle Estate Settles In Enola Holmes Copyright Case
“The Enola Holmes case hinged on Sherlock Holmes’ complicated copyright status. Most Holmes stories sit in the public domain, and stories like Enola Holmes — which reimagines Holmes (played by Henry Cavill) having a younger sister — can freely repurpose their elements. But 10 of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories are still protected by copyright, and the Doyle estate argued that they depict a meaningfully different version of the character.” – The Verge
What I Learned From Spending 2020 Working, Learning, And Entertaining On The Same Screen
Alissa Wilkinson: “In a strange, unexpected way, this year made me appreciate the richness of experience we’ve normally enjoyed both offscreen and on and, along with it, the importance of context in those experiences. Reality seemed to collapse because the context for everything was the same: a brightly lit rectangle in my house.” – Vox
How Hollywood Negotiated The Pandemic, Studio By Studio
“One studio’s delayed theatrical title became another studio’s new original streaming film. While some focused on remounting pipeline productions, others fast-tracked new productions that allowed for contained stories with minimal casts. Big-ticket packages were purchased with the hope of a future return to theaters and franchise films rejiggered to allow for back-to-back production of installments. Ahead of 2021, The Hollywood Reporter takes a closer look at how each studio’s film division is traversing the new landscape.” – The Hollywood Reporter
Christian Lawyers’ Group Sues Director Of Madrid’s Reina Sofia Museum For Blasphemy
Last week the institution opened a major retrospective of the iconoclastic Argentine artist León Ferrari, whose work often riffs subversively on Christian imagery. Within a few days, the Asociación Española de Abogados Cristianos filed a legal action against Manuel Borja-Villel, the museum’s director, arguing that the show “insult[s] Jesus” and “mocks the Gospel.” – ARTnews
The Erasure of the Arts
To me the most salient feature of The Upswing, the important new book co-authored by the sociologist Robert Putnam (who also wrote Bowling Alone) on the disappearance of “social capital,” is incidental: the authors completely fail to consider the arts. In fact, I have the uncomfortable feeling that The Upswing may partly be a symptom of the shortcomings it observes. And it is not alone. – Joseph Horowitz
“No Duty to Police Clients”? The Continuing Saga of NY Attorney General’s Sales-Tax Suit vs. Sotheby’s
Having reviewed the court papers to date, I have an opinion about what they indicate regarding auction-house business practices, but … – Lee Rosenbaum
How The Choir Of King’s College, Cambridge Prepared Its Lessons And Carols Service For This Year Of Pestilence
Just as the boy chorister who sings the opening solo never knows that he’ll be the one to do it until immediately before the service (and its worldwide broadcast) begins, so — with a new strain of coronavirus raging around England — the choir and its director didn’t know until a week before Christmas Eve whether they’d be able to to the worldwide broadcast live. Here’s how they prepared for either eventuality. – The New York Times
Can Dudamel’s New Virtual Reality Film Make The Young’uns Think Orchestral Music Is Cool?
“The film” — titled Symphony in Madrid — “is split into two, 12-minute sections. The first, shown on a giant screen, follows three young musicians in Spain, the US and Colombia as they practise their instruments and move through landscapes and soundscapes that range from the Mediterranean coast to the streets of New York and a coffee farm on a tropical mountainside. For the second, visitors are invited into the other trailer, given a virtual reality headset and headphones, and urged to take leave of their senses.” – The Guardian
A Terrible New Copyright Law Got Inserted Into The COVID Relief Bill That Just Passed
“The Electronic Frontier Foundation has argued that it could mean huge fines for individuals sharing copyrighted material on social media. ‘The CASE Act could mean internet users facing $30,000 penalties for sharing a meme or making a video,’ it wrote earlier. ‘It has no place in must pass legislation.’ It noted that if an individual is hit with a CASE claim, they would need to reply to the Copyright Office ‘in a very specific way, within a limited time’ to avoid a steep fine.” – Engadget
Plans For Smithsonian Museums Of Women’s And Latinx History Saved By COVID Relief Bill
Hopes for the two long-discussed projects appeared crushed earlier this month when Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) blocked the legislation that would have authorized them. But other lawmakers managed to get that bill attached to the omnibus spending and relief measure passed late Monday night. – The Washington Post