A quarter of the respondents, nine of 35, said they are facing the permanent closure of their spaces in 2020 if the situation doesn’t improve quickly. An additional five galleries, or 14%, say closure is a possibility. The numbers are in keeping with a far more comprehensive study issued by the Comité Professionnel des Galeries d’Art, a French trade organization, which estimates that one-third of French galleries could shut down before the end of the year because of the steep losses in revenue. – Los Angeles Times
Author: Douglas McLennan
NPR Audience Soars, Underwriting Stalls, And Execs Take Pay Cuts
People are consuming more news than usual. Monthly readership of NPR’s website has more than doubled and average weekly streaming of its radio shows has gone up 31 percent since the crisis began. Podcast downloads have also increased. – The New York Times
Restarting New York Culture? It Will Take Years
The very features that make New York attractive to businesses, workers and tourists — Broadway, the subway system, world-class restaurants and innumerable cultural institutions — were among the hardest-hit in the pandemic. And they will take the longest to come back. – The New York Times
Adventure Wildlife Photographer Peter Beard, 82
Born into considerable wealth and privilege in New York, Beard, whose body was found yesterday in woodland in the East Hamptons, was a photographer whose love for the African wilderness and its fragile ecology was first expressed in The End of the Game, a 1965 photo-book that now seems extraordinarily prescient. – The Guardian
Uffizi Prepares For Onslaught Of Crowds
Museum director Eike Schmidt recalled that after the Arno River in Florence flooded in 1966 and shuttered the museum, the number of visitors to the Uffizi jumped from 1 million to 1.5 million in 1968. – Washington Post (AP)
Viro-Skeptics: Why Are Some Having Trouble Taking The Crisis Seriously?
It’s not entirely irrational behavior. And it can be explained. It’s the product of several longterm trends that encourage hyper-skepticism. – Good Company
The Cult Of Celebrity… In Perspective
As Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi recently noted, both capitalism and celebrity rely on the “lie of meritocracy:” that working hard will lead to ultimate success. The grips of COVID-19, with its fallout of the millions who have lost their jobs and the thousands who have lost their lives, has shined light on the tenuous nature of the meritocracy myth. Now that we know what essential work is, it seems the perfect time to reflect upon the not-so-essential work of celebrities. – The Conversation
How Technology Has Changed How We Analyze (And Understand) Shakespeare
The latest analysis is computer-aided quantitative analysis of the texts. It’s revelatory (in a way), and it adds something to our understanding. But it doesn’t replace our previous close contextual study. – Times Literary Supplement
Mozart Was A Brilliant Letter-Writer
Composers’ letters can make frustrating reading. Beethoven’s are brusque, practical affairs; Brahms hides behind a humour as impenetrable as his beard. But with Mozart, you get the whole personality — candid, perceptive and irresistibly alive. – The Spectator
Frontiers: We’re At The Junction Of Human Thought And Machine Computation
“On the one side is the human mind, the source of every story, theory and explanation that our species holds dear. On the other stand the machines, whose algorithms possess astonishing predictive power but whose inner workings remain radically opaque to human observers. As we humans strive to understand the fundamental nature of the world, our machines churn out measurable, practical predictions that seem to extend beyond the limits of thought.” – Aeon