“Do you want to win that tennis match? It is outside of your control. But to play the best game you can is under your control. Do you want your partner to love you? It is outside of your control. But there are plenty of ways you can choose to show your love to your partner – and that is under your control. Do you want a particular political party to win the election? It is outside of your control (unless you’re Vladimir Putin!) But you can choose to engage in political activism, and you can vote.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
The Great Violin Collector Of Seattle
“Over the years he has owned eight Strads, eight del Gesùs, and 14 other instruments (violins, violas and cellos) with names such as Bergonzi, Guadagnini, Amati, Rugeri, Montagnana and Testore. His bow collection included 17 Tourtes, 14 Pecattes and seven others, most collected with the help of bow experts Paul Childs and Charles Beare.”
Why We Lie – Turns Out We’re Hardwired To Do It
Lying, it turns out, is something that most of us are very adept at. We lie with ease, in ways big and small, to strangers, co-workers, friends, and loved ones. Our capacity for dishonesty is as fundamental to us as our need to trust others, which ironically makes us terrible at detecting lies. Being deceitful is woven into our very fabric, so much so that it would be truthful to say that to lie is human.”
Mysterious Chemical Reaction Is Destroying Famous Masterpieces
Conservation scientists say that tiny formations of lead-based soaps—each about a tenth of a millimeter in diameter—are threatening to mar paintings by artists ranging from Rembrandt van Rijn to Georgia O’Keeffe. A team of experts has spent years researching why these microscopic white pockmarks appear—but they can’t figure out how to stop them.
New Trump Budget Again Eliminates Culture Funding (But It’s Unlikely To Happen)
A spokesperson for the NEA confirms that the president’s 2018 budget proposes the elimination of the department, and includes a request for $29 million from Congress to shut down the agency in an orderly fashion. The spokesperson says that the organization is fully funded for the fiscal year, and will continue to make 2017 grant awards and “honor all obligated grant funds made to date.”
Claim: Boston Theatre Critics Reward Unadventurous Most Popular While Art (And Artists) Suffer
“Technological change, along with its radical re-structuring of the American economy, is decimating the business of culture and throttling artists, particularly those just starting out. Jonathan Taplin’s excellent new volume Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy explores the ways that the mind-boggling concentration of power in the hands of internet monopolies is widening the gulf between the haves and the have-nots, especially those in the arts. The major players (stars, etc) benefit from centralized control of eyeballs. The big names are raking in bigger bucks than before, while those lower down on the food chain — artists and groups who decades ago were able to make a middle class living through their efforts — are getting less and less.”
How Cultural Facilities Could Better Support Artists
“The evolution of ticketing systems and related analytical tools provides a tremendous opportunity for facilities to support artists. Facilities can provide subsidized access to these systems and additional modules that producing organizations can use to advance audience development and fundraising efforts on their own.”
An Arts Administrator Questions The Adoption Of Activist Language In The Arts
“These were folks doing really impressive work to address racism in the arts and outside of the arts. But a discomfort crept up for me in that discussion that has been a bit of gadfly in my life for some time now. In talking about my own work as an arts administrator, I was borrowing the language of activism. I also have noticed others in the field — artists, curators, administrators, philanthropic organizations — do the same thing. How might the use of activist rhetoric be a bit…complicated?”
Amazon’s New Book Charts Measures What’s Read Rather Than What’s Bought
Amazon Charts might open up a whole new set of bestsellers based on books actually read rather than books bought as coffee-table status symbols. But will this carry more weight with the publishing industry – and readers – than the venerable New York Times bestseller tag, which has been the go-to example of bragging rights since 1931?
How The Royal Academy Came This Close To Selling Off Its Prized Michelangelo
In December 1978 the academy’s secretary, Sidney Hutchison, wrote to Drummonds Bank (with which it had a £675,000 overdraft): “Very confidentially, if this official attempt for subsidy from the Government through the Arts Council should fail, my view is that the Academy would then have no alternative but to sell the Michelangelo Tondo for its worldwide market price, ie in the region of £6,000,000.”