ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

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The Towering Intellect Of Richard Taruskin

People with encyclopedic minds are often paralyzed by the sheer quantity of what they know. Taruskin could step back from the crowd of facts and marshal them into mobile lines of thought. - The New Yorker

Australia Is Working On A New National Arts Policy. Here Are Artists’ Demands:

Battered by rolling lockdowns, key figures in the sector have said COVID-19 disruptions exposed job insecurity, poor remuneration, and a thinning of government grants that made a career in arts, entertainment and culture untenable for all but a lucky few. - Sydney Morning Herald

Musicians Of The Defunct San Antonio Symphony Have Formed A New Orchestra

The San Antonio Philharmonic will perform ten classical programs and three pops programs from September to next May at the city's First Baptist Church (rather than the Tobin Center, built for the SA Symphony) as well as 36 youth concerts in city schools. - San Antonio Report

Towards The Collective: Redefining Intelligence

We have become too used to thinking of intelligence as the private skill of individuals, vying against one another in a neoliberal world of relentless competition. What is needed, especially in an age of irredentist warmongering and climate disaster, is a greater emphasis on our ability to reason together, our “collective intelligence”. - The Guardian

Can Museums Survive If They Stay Politically Neutral?

“The democratic battles fought worldwide in the name of human rights urge museums to take an active stance towards a fair advancement of civil society. Believing that the cultural sector can remain neutral in the face of exclusion and discrimination would endanger museums’ own relevance.” - The Art Newspaper

Why It’s So Hard To Define Who Is A Millennial

A Pew Research Center poll from 2015 found that, regardless of the parameters, only 40 percent of millennials say they identify with their generation’s label (compared with 58 percent of Gen Xers and 79 percent of baby boomers). Does a generational cohort really exist if only a minority feel they belong to it?  - LA Review of Books

The Remarkable Carpenters Of Medieval Practice Rebuilding Notre Dame’s Roof

“There are people outside of here who can do it now, but I tell you they all came here to learn how. If this place didn’t exist, perhaps the experts would have said: no it’s not possible to reproduce the roof of Notre Dame. We it is. - The Guardian

Benin Gets Its Art, And Its Artistic Groove, Back

Says one sculptor, the descendant of a king of Dahomey, "The artistic awakening of our population was switched off from the end of the 19th century to 2022. ... We are now waking up." - The New York Times

A Mystery In The Desert, Solved

Michael Heizer's megasculpture in the Nevada desert is called City and is a mile long, half a mile wide, and the artist's masterpiece. "It had become the art-world version of ancient Atlantis, a chimera. Art-world Atlantis will shortly be accepting reservations." - The New York Times

Writing Women Back Into The Film History That They Made

"Long before talking movies became the norm, women ran wild in movies. And I mean, really wild. They riotously schemed, fought and defied convention, racing and laughing their way to liberation." Then? They got left out of film history books. - The New York Times

A First: Streaming Tops Cable TV For The First Time

It was only a matter of time before the milestone was reached, as streaming usage has continued to climb while traditional TV declines amid the steady drip-drip-drip of cord-cutting losses. - Variety

Gallery 249 At The Met Is Full Of Stolen Art, Says Cambodian Government

"The Cambodians have enlisted the help of the U.S. Justice Department to press for the return of dozens of artworks, basing their claim in part on the account of a reformed looter. ... But the dispute (with the museum) has evolved into something of an odd standoff." - The New York Times

Writing Workshops (An American Invention) Aren’t Bad. They’re Just Limiting

It is not that I think we should scrap existing syllabi, but rather that we must make room for other storytelling traditions in these programs. And this must start with reading... What is being taught as universal rules of good writing in these programs is nothing more than a highly narrow understanding of literary taste. - The Millions

More And More Libraries Are Censoring Books From Children

“This is a state-sponsored purging of ideas and identities that has no precedent in the United States of America. We’re witnessing the silencing of stories and the suppressing of information the next generation less able to function in society.” - Washington Post

How Google Search Has Evolved, Subtlely Undermining Democracy

By adding all of these features, Google has effectively changed the experience from an explorative search environment to a platform designed around verification, replacing a process that enables learning and investigation with one that is more like a fact-checking service. - Wired

Mounting Evidence? People Are Stopping Listening To Music

For the last few years, I have felt the inescapable disappearance of music from my friends’ lives. Even people with whom I have longstanding relationships that were born from a shared love of music have simply let it go, or let it fade deep into the background.  - The Guardian

Architectural Digest Airbrushed Cambodian Antiquities Out Of One Of Their Fabulous-Home Photo-Spreads — And Why?

The feature on the San Francisco mansion of Roger and Sloan Lindemann Barnett includes an image of an interior courtyard with empty pedestals.  Those pedestals aren't actually empty: they hold Khmer statuary that the Cambodian government says was looted in the 1990s. Here's how they identified it. - The Washington Post

A Warhol Copyright Case With Potential Big Implications For Artists

On Oct. 12, the justices will consider whether he violated the federal Copyright Act by basing a portrait of the musician Prince on a prominent photographer’s work. In the process, they will have to decide whether Warhol’s alterations of the photograph transformed it into something different. - The New York Times

Evidence Howard Carter Stole Some Of King Tut’s Treasure

An accusation that Carter handled property “undoubtedly stolen from the tomb” has emerged in a previously unpublished letter sent to him in 1934 by an eminent British scholar within his own excavation team. - The Guardian

Seattle’s ACT Theatre Board Has Resigned En Masse (No, It’s A Good Thing)

“The question we asked most pointedly was: ‘If you can do this all over again, what would you have done differently? And the outcome of that meeting was: We have to disrupt the status quo.” - KUOW
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