Author: Douglas McLennan

Amazon Flooded With Fake COVID Books

The retailing giant has already been removing “tens of thousands” of listings from “bad actors” attempting to artificially raise prices on items such as face masks and hand sanitiser. Now it is fighting a losing battle against the writers rushing out self-published books to profit from coronavirus fears. Generally shorter than 100 pages, dozens have been published in the last few weeks, promising worried readers ways to prevent or avoid the virus. – The Guardian

We Need To Rethink Audience Development

The reality for most organisations is that their value and survival increasingly demand competence – and coherence – across all audience development. Many next-generation cultural organisations are developing as ingenious social enterprises, learning to manage this cultural triple bottom line. Of necessity, they have to do well to do good. What matters is that an organisation is clear about its public purpose and priorities, and that it knows how to achieve them. – Arts Professional

Egypt’s Oldest Pyramid Reopens After 14-Year Closure

Assembled between 2630 and 2611 B.C. in Saqqara, Egypt, the pyramid, where Djoser and 11 of his daughters were buried upon their deaths, contains roughly 11.6 million cubic feet of stone and clay. Looping through and around the burial chambers is a winding, maze-like network of tunnels that was likely designed to prevent theft but apparently weakened the building’s structural integrity. – Smithsonian

Does Democratization Of Culture Mean The End Of Audience?

“My current research situates audience development within work on culture as a vocation, and wider debates around the democratisation of culture and cultural democracy. Audience development both replicates and reproduces (rather than challenges) the dominant cultural hegemony – most notably in subsidised cultural institutions. As such, it has traditionally been seen as a management tool for the democratisation of culture.” – Arts Professional

Modernism And The African American Experience

Back at the beginning of the 20th century, artists such as Picasso, Braque and Matisse turned to African art for new ideas about how to represent the world, creating figures with masklike faces, flattened forms and backgrounds of vibrant patterning. They weren’t just borrowing visual ideas, however. Many of them believed in a connection between what they saw as primitive culture and the deeper wellsprings of psychological life, a way to reference and represent urges and emotional drives that had been suppressed by “civilization.” But they also were appropriating wholesale the visual material of people who were suffering colonial oppression, taking sacred objects out of context and imputing to them European-derived ideas about their purpose and meaning. – Washington Post

Needed: A Rethink Of The Digital Millennium Copyright Act And Creativity

The platforms are under no legal obligation to proactively seek out infringement and remove it, nor – most annoyingly of all – do they ever have to permanently remove an infringing work. “Notice and takedown” does not mean “notice and stay-down,” which results in an ongoing game of Whack-A-Mole for copyright owners who get a work removed, only to see it pop up again somewhere else on the internet… again, and again, and again…  – Creative Future