Snap is launching Snapchat Spotlight, which will show users a stream of publicly submitted posts surfaced based on personalized content algorithms. Snapchatters who contribute to Spotlight are eligible to get a cut of more than $1 million daily, doled out based on popularity. It’s a bid by Snap to keep top creative talent on its platform — as it faces growing competition from short-form video rivals TikTok and Instagram. – Variety
Author: Douglas McLennan
The Remarkable Life Of The Notorious Art Thief
The privilege and social rank that Bridget Rose Dugdale repudiated gave her the trained intellect and discerning eye that made her the most notorious (and nearly the only) female art thief in history. – Washington Post
Remember Disruptive Technologies? There Are Way Fewer Of Them These Days
Since about the year 2000, disruption, or what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction,” has become less and less common in the US economy, according to a recent working paper by researchers at the Boston University School of Law. – Quartz
Charli D’Amelio Is The First To Get To 100 Million Followers On TikTok (And Here’s What You Can Learn From It)
While this year has been rough for most, D’Amelio has had an extraordinary 2020 by anyone’s standards — never mind a teenage schoolgirl who little over a year ago was just filming dance videos in her bedroom. Not only has her profile on the app grown exponentially from just 1 million followers a year ago, but her career outside of TikTok has also exploded. – CNET
Calling In Cancel Culture
“I think you can understand how calling out is toxic. It really does alienate people, and makes them fearful of speaking up.” – The New York Times
Philadelphia Museum Of Art Closes, Furloughs Staff
The PMA reopened on September 6 after almost six months of closure. In August, the museum laid off 85 of its employees; an additional 42 workers accepted voluntary separation agreements. The decision to reduce staff was announced two days before the outcome of a union vote at the museum in which 89% of workers voted “yes.” The August layoffs followed a reduction of over 20% of the museum’s workforce (100 employees) in June through a combination of furloughs and voluntary separation agreements. – Hyperallergic
City Of Seattle Creates A New Real Estate Company To Buy And Manage Arts Spaces
The city is taking the rare step of creating a “mission-driven” real estate development company so that it can create, purchase, manage and lease property for arts and cultural spaces — which could include a wide range of venues and organizations, including galleries, bookstores, nonprofit dance companies and cultural community centers. – Crosscut
Many Arts Groups Are Getting More Donations Than Usual During Lockdown
In Seattle, arts organizations report that their fundraising is up — sometimes dramatically — over what they typically raise. – Seattle Times
Banks Have Continued To Collect Art As Museums Retreat
As pandemic-related shutdowns have entered their ninth month, and as public collections around the world dramatically scale back programming—if not the collections themselves—banks and other large corporations have continued to collect, lend, and exhibit art. By comparison, 1 in 3 American museums never reopened after shutting down in March, according to a survey released on Tuesday by the American Alliance of Museums. – Bloomberg
“Wonder Woman” Plan Threatens Movie Theatres
“By now, you’ve read a million paeans to the magic of sitting in a darkened theater, but it’s not just the evanescent experience of the silver screen that’s been whisked away. On a purely practical level, theaters act as a filter, a way of separating out a small handful of the hundreds of movies released every year, and although the system by which they end up there is riven with biases and blind spots, on balance, the movies that end up there are better than the ones that don’t, and their limited runs create a sense of occasion and urgency that the boundless availability of streaming can’t match.” – Slate