‘You live on one continent and work on two others.’ You have ‘a firsthand knowledge of the sunrise over the Po, the sunset over Shenzhen, the crackle of the midday sun as the Acqua Alta wets your calves’. You might be a poor culture-ronin, but you have accidentally attained an enviable ‘air of weary cosmopolitan glamour’, which follows you back to your shabby, expensive flat. But with climate change… – Frieze
On The Edges Of A Huge South American Landfill, An Orchestra With Instruments Made Out Of Garbage
Most people who live near the Cateura dump outside Asunción, the Paraguayan capital, scratch out a living by digging out anything that can be resold, and buying a musical instrument would be an impossible dream. But local carpenter Nicolás Gómez and music teacher Favio Chávez decided that they could build musical instruments and give children there free music lessons — and so the Recycled Orchestra of Cateura was born. – Al Jazeera
UNESCO And The Fight Over “World” Literature
UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary shows how, when confronted with people across the globe who perceived their own lives “in ways radically antagonistic to the requirements of capitalist production,” UNESCO’s cultural programming was developed to “acknowledge, integrate, manage, and assuage” that antagonism. – Los Angeles Review of Books
At The Beginning Of The Decade, Celebrities Were Worried About Paparazzi
In 2011, “the industry itself was broken, transformed from a system of honor and veneration into one of shame and denigration, which treated its products as little more than commodities to be bought and traded.” Then Instagram happened. “In the end, the solution was so straightforward. Celebrities simply became their own paparazzi.” – BuzzFeed
French Theatre’s Conflicts Are Starting To Fray The Humans On All Sides
This is bad. “From Bethune to Dijon, noted directors landed in the National Drama Centers – devoted to theatrical creation – thinking they were touching the Grail: a place and means to make their work exist on a large scale in the service of the greatest number. They discovered companies that were cumbersome to maneuver, using tools that were often obsolete or to renovate, and subsidies at half mast.” Now it’s all lawyers and consultants. – Le Monde
Is The Internet Our Salvation Or Our Damnation? The 2010s Exploded Myths
“The second decade of the 20th century began at the apex of naivete about the potential for the internet to enhance democracy and improve the quality of life on Earth. By the end of 2019, very few people could still hold such a position with honesty.” – Wired
Why Some Pop Bands Are Giving Up Encores
The banality of encores has long been a frustration for some musicians, but, in recent years, a growing number of notable acts have taken a stand against performing them at all. – Toronto Star
The Man Who Made “Cats” And What He Was Thinking
“Like all stories, it’s just about cats, but none of these stories work without the big issues underneath. Eliot was writing as much about humans as cats; he was writing about humans through a feline prism. Ultimately, why I wanted human cats, not actual cats, [in the film] was that, if they’d been actual cats, it would have totally missed the point of the duality of the poetry.” – The Atlantic
Producing A Movie Is An Arduous Slog. It Just Is
“Writing is lonely; directing and acting, if you’re overlapping them, is challenging but fun. But producing is just pushing a rock up a hill. And sometimes it rolls over you on the way back down.” – Los Angeles Times
I Knew These Things I Bought Would Transform My Life! (A List)
“Every morning, I wake up before dawn to take a walk with my dog around the countryside, before I return to my home (still before dawn) to bake a loaf of bread and write for four hours in my notebook.” – The New Yorker
Boston Review’s Ten Great Reads Of The 2010s
From Noam Chomsky on the responsibility of intellectuals after 9/11, to our forum on why empathy can be a bad thing, the following were all ambitious efforts and help chart a decade of thinking. – Boston Review
Fifty Years Of The Community Museum Movement
“How should museums relate to their surroundings? What are the most meaningful ways for them to connect and work with their communities? … These questions date to the beginning of the community museum movement in the 1960s and remain foundational to the field.” Anna Diamond reports from a Smithsonian symposium on the subject. – Smithsonian Magazine
After Six Years, Broadcasters Of Syrian Exile Radio Station Marooned In Istanbul
Since 2013, Radio Alwan, which started as community radio in a Syria just breaking out in civil war, broadcast politically neutral news and other programming to Aleppo and Idlib on FM as well as online. The U.S. funding that supported the station has been withdrawn by the Trump administration, Radio Alwan is now off the air, and its staffers are stuck in a country that seems not to want them. – BBC
The Biggest Art World Controversies Of 2019
“This past year saw no shortage of controversies in both the art world and the real world. And perhaps more than ever before, the distance between those two worlds seemed to collapse, as artists and activists began demanding with unprecedented strength that patrons — both board members and corporate sponsors — answer for their actions outside the confines of the museum. We zeroed in on 11 hot-button issues that ignited heated debate in the art world this year, and the particular questions they provoked.” – artnet
Christianist Extremists In Brazil Firebomb Satirical Troupe That Made Holiday Special With Gay Jesus
A previously unknown groups calling itself the “Popular Nationalist Insurgency Command of the Large Brazilian Integralist Family” has claimed credit for a Christmas Eve incident in which Molotov cocktails were thrown at the Rio de Janeiro offices of Porta dos Fundos, the comedy group that created The First Temptation of Christ, which depicts a stoner Mary and put-upon Joseph throwing a 30th-birthday party for Jesus as he returns from his 40 days in the desert with a “close friend” named Orlando. – BBC
Opera Star Peter Schreier, 84
He performed at the Berlin State Opera in his native East Germany and at Milan’s La Scala, as well as a 25-year run at the famed Salzburg festival. One of his specialties was performing and recording the songs of composers Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann. – Washington Post (AP)
Burning Man Sues US Government Over Sharply Rising Fees
In 2012, Burning Man organizers reimbursed the BLM nearly $1.4 million in expenses, a 60 per cent year-over-year increase, though the event population increased by only 4 per cent that year, according to the lawsuit. The following year, the same bill was $2.9 million, according to the lawsuit. In three years, the cost recovery charges increased by 291 per cent, and the Burning Man event population increased by 39 per cent, Black Rock City attorneys said. CBC (AP)
Ten Books That Shaped And Changed The 2010s
From “The Big Short” to Naomi Klein to “Normal People,” a list of books that made an impact. – The Guardian
What’s Funny Changes. And So Does Comedy
Humor is about connection—shared references, shared emotions, shared perspectives. The best comedians both surprise and unite the audience. They create a moment. But moments keep coming. Over time, attitudes change, and humor has to change with them. When older comedians complain that they can’t perform at colleges anymore because the audiences are too “politically correct,” they are missing the point. – The New Yorker
The Year in CultureGrrl, 2019 Edition: Museums Become Easy Targets in Difficult Times
This was the year of our national discontent and contentiousness, as manifested in the artworld by the rallying cry, “Decolonize Museums!” – Lee Rosenbaum
Author Sarah Broom on ‘The Yellow House’ and putting New Orleans East on the map
“I felt moved and buoyed by the idea that I could write something that didn’t exist, and that there’s a little girl right now still living on the short end of the street in New Orleans East where I grew up. And I wrote it for her, so that there could be some history already in existence. And, you know, one of the striking things about New Orleans East is the way in which it doesn’t always appear on a map of New Orleans. So I wanted to quite literally put New Orleans East on the map.” – PBS NewsHour