Author: Douglas McLennan

Inside The War Room: NY Arts Orgs Deal With Catastrophe

As the covid-19 disease has escalated, turning New York into a crisis epicenter, the resolve of a multibillion-dollar arts community has intensified to try to temper panic and pool advice. And what was once a routine monthly call among 34 arts and cultural organizations that receive significant money from the city has ballooned into a daily emergency call-in with as many as 170 anxious arts administrators and advocates. – Washington Post

Is COVID A Wakeup Call?

We do not yet know what effect the current pandemic will have on worldwide demographics. But it is actually slightly more likely to increase future populations than decrease them. If the actions of governments, or at least of most governments, make people feel more insecure, economically and socially, then younger people may in the near future have more children than they would have had; and the pandemic will, counterintuitively, very slightly increase the total future population. – The Guardian

Classical Music Activity Explodes Online As Shutdown Closes Stages

In-person performances have been replaced by a deluge of digital ones — live streams and recently unlocked archive recordings — that have made for a calendar hardly less busy than before concert halls closed. It’s enough to keep a critic happily overwhelmed, yet also wondering whether the industry is making a mistake by giving away so much for free. – The New York Times

What’s Missing While Looking At Art Online

It is increasingly common for people to buy art, like everything else, online. So online presence is obviously vital. Perhaps the Covid-19 emergency, while directing attention onto the virtual world, will also indicate its limitations. It has been argued by several commentators that, rather than bringing people together, digital technologies and social media contribute to the creation of a generation of disengaged narcissists under the spell of surveillance capitalism. Other people, places and things are reduced to the status of props in a theatre of selfhood. Yet it seems a little unlikely that the person who checks out galleries online fits that profile. – Irish Times

How Public Libraries Are Adapting To The Virus

When libraries closed their doors abruptly, they immediately opened their digital communications, collaborations, and creative activity to reach their public in ways as novel as the virus that forced them into it. You can be sure that this is just the beginning. Today libraries are already acting and improvising. Later, they’ll be figuring out what the experience means to their future operations and their role in American communities. – The Atlantic

Is Smell Our Most Powerful Sense?

Increasingly, loss of the sense of smell is being treated as a serious harm in clinical settings. Besides, the sense of smell is key to flavour perception. Indeed, most of what you perceive as the taste of food and drink is actually smell, being caused by volatile chemicals travelling from the cavity of your mouth through the open space of the pharynx up to your nasal epithelium. And there’s no way around it: the spice trade, with its growth following the Silk Road, has shaped the modern global socioeconomic landscape as much as – if not more than – philosophical discussion on reason and morality. – Aeon

The Role Of Homes In Shaping Writers

The description of a house can vividly reveal the experience of childhood or the story of a relationship: “How a house is lived in can tell you everything you need to know about people, whether it’s the choice of wallpaper, the mess in the kitchen, the silence or shouting over meals, doors left open or closed, a fire burning in the hearth”. – The Guardian

Critical Thinking About Indigenous Art

So far, the best Indigenous-authored texts about Indigenous art are not reviews but catalogue and academic-essays, which are critical in that they explicate the context, intent and meanings of Indigenous artworks, but do not offer evaluations. They do not ask, for instance, if one work is better than other work, nor why considering a work as art is a more productive approach than considering it as a work of culture, an elaborate utility, or a trade good. – Momus