With 3.71 million followers, Tate (which dropped its “the” when Tate Modern opened in 2000) has a bigger Twitter following than any other museum in the world. It makes millions from its shops and restaurants. But Tate has also helped rebrand London – and perhaps even Britain. Serota was part of a delegation that travelled to China with then Chancellor George Osborne in 2005.
Author: Douglas McLennan
How Deriding America’s Midwest Became A Thing (It Wasn’t Always So)
Books such as Edgar Lee Masters’s “Spoon River Anthology,” Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio” and Sinclair Lewis’s “Main Street” quickly exemplified what has been called “the revolt from the village.” City slickers like H.L. Mencken and magazines such as the New Yorker further ridiculed the Midwest as a backward, second-class culture of yokels and rednecks who lacked a dedication to the intellect, let alone sensitivity to the arts.
You’re Sadly Mistaken If You Think Libraries Are Just For Storing Books
“If a library is just where a society keeps its books, then it’s easy to see why many people no longer perceive libraries as relevant. In the days of yore, a building full of books was a clear metaphor for collective knowledge. But today, knowledge is no longer bound to the printed page, and electronic and non-textual forms of media proliferate. Our cultural knowledge is no longer represented primarily as text within books. Moreover, with the internet, we can access our multimedia cultural knowledge from virtually anywhere.”
Czeslaw Milosz: Poetry As Sunlight
Unlike many great twentieth-century writers, who saw truth in despair, Milosz’s experiences convinced him that poetry must not darken the world but illuminate it: “Poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, / under unbearable duress and only with the hope / that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.”
Why This Collector Paid $110 Million For A Basquiat
“You’re talking about a handful of masterpieces, which are distributed among a few collectors who are not sellers,” said the art dealer Brett Gorvy, a former Christie’s chairman. “You’re going to have to wait a long time if you are a major collector to see another extraordinary painting like this.”
The Physical Brain Versus Consciousness
“At its most general, the hard problem of consciousness is the expression of a familiar kind of puzzlement or mental cramp. We know that the brain is causally responsible, in some way or another, for consciousness – but we remain utterly baffled as to how its fatty, yoghurty matter could be up to the task. The puzzlement is not restricted to philosophers, neuroscientists or those who know a lot about the brain.”
Italian Court Cancels Appointments Of Five Museum Directors
“Italy has over the past two years recruited 20 highly-qualified new directors, seven of them foreigners, to shake up institutions which are richly-endowed with cultural treasures but often poorly run and badly promoted. But a regional court ruled that five of the appointments were null and void, saying that the selection process had not been transparent, that some interviews had been conducted via Skype and that the one foreigner appointed should never have been eligible.”
Jamaica Kincaid At 68: What I’ve Learned
“The thing that I am branded with and the thing that I am denounced for, I now claim as my own. I am illegitimate, I am ambiguous. In some way I actually claim the right to ambiguity, and the right to clarity. It does me no good to say, ‘Well, I reject this and I reject that.’ I feel free to use everything, or not, as I choose.”
What Beethoven Teaches Us About Hearing Loss
“The extraordinary thing about Beethoven’s hearing loss journey is that he found a way forward at every stage. Once he accepted his deafness at Heiligenstadt, it was no longer a source of shame, and he was open about it from then onwards. Even for the last 10 years of his life, when he could hear nothing, he kept composing. Many people will know the story of his conducting what seems to be an orchestra in his head at the premiere of his 9th Symphony. Eyes still shut, he had to be stopped and shown the smiling musicians, the appreciative audience applauding.”
At This Point, Education Is Technology
When I say that education technology is not new, I’m not arguing that technologies do not change over time; or that our institutions, ideas, experiences, societies do not change in part because of technologies. But when we talk about change – when we tell stories about technological change – we must consider how technologies, particularly modern technologies like computers, emerged from a certain history, from certain institutions; how technologies are as likely to re-inscribe traditional practices as to alter them. We must consider how technology operates, in Franklin’s words, as “an agent of power and control.”