LACMA’s crumbling infrastructure is a genuine predicament. But weak philanthropy, a longtime but misleading L.A. stereotype, is not the reason the museum’s funding campaign has stalled. Instead, the weakness is in a poor idea that has met escalating costs. – Los Angeles Times
Author: Douglas McLennan
China Gives Surprise Endorsement For Greece’s Campaign To Get Parthenon Marbles Back
Xi Jinping’s support is just one measure of the growing affinity between the countries, underscored by a two-day visit during which their leaders signed 16 new agreements, and China committed millions more in investments in Greece. – The New York Times
How Technology Has Changed How Comic Books Are Made
“I recall in the late ’80s, we were all so sure that every discipline of comics creation would switch over to being done with the aid of the personal computer. Well, 30 years later, people pencil and ink comics in relatively the same way that they have since the art form began. But the job of colorist and letterer has changed and been completely taken over by the computer.” – The New York Times
On Words Out Of Cultural Context And Banning Or Favoriting Them
“The United States has never been totally segregated, but this new world exposes everyone to everyone else in unprecedented intensity. Just like we sound like our friends, just like someone with a new friend group will inevitably find bits of new language and inside jokes slipped into their own speech, vernacular from here and there and wherever sneaks into conversations between people who’ve never been to those places.” – Public Books
Why Netflix Shouldn’t Give In To Movie Theatres For Its Releases
Netflix can deliver filmmakers a prospective audience of 300 million people (and growing) with each release. This film distribution strategy is enabling rich, diverse stories to reach a massive audience. And that should be celebrated as a win for movie lovers — and the movie business. – The Hollywood Reporter
A “Decade Of Reckoning” For Classical Music
Anne Midgette: “The music isn’t the problem, it’s the way we’re offering it.” Big, inflexible institutions take away the “oxygen and funds” from the smaller organizations, she argues, which typically have a stronger vision and take more risks. Audiences, she adds, prove time and again there’s no lack of interest. “I think the only reason orchestras are struggling is that not everybody wants to go and sit in a concert hall and have that experience. It’s not that people don’t want to hear Beethoven.” – NPR
Why Britain’s Working Classes Are In To The Classics
“Classical materials have been present in the identity construction and psychological experience of substantial groups of working-class Britons. Dissenting academies, Nonconformist Sunday schools and Methodist preacher-training initiatives all encouraged those who attended them to read widely in ancient history, ideas and rhetorical handbooks.” – Aeon
Why I Love “Bad” Movies
“We bad-movie watchers have our own anticriteria, the sorts of badness we prefer. Some of us use the term “bad movies” to mean, simply, films that emerge from a supposedly lowbrow genre, or films that are stylized in the manner we tend to label “camp.” (Road House from 1989 is this kind of bad movie, and is very good at being one.) Some of us prefer movies that are exploitative and tacky but, in a Nietzschean way, supposedly more alive than respectable ones.” – Hedgehog Review
The End Of The “Rude” Press
When I was growing up, every major American metro area had both a polite press—the local dailies—and a rude one: the alt-weeklies. The alt-weeklies were funded by advertisers the family-friendly media wanted nothing to do with. In the end, many of these publications were also simply killed by rich idiot owners or corporations that routinely purchase publications and ruin them out of both greed and incompetence. And so we (mostly) don’t have alt-weeklies anymore. – The New Republic
Pop Culture (For Good Or Bad) Unites Us Culturally. Will Streaming Wars Disrupt This?
“Pop culture is one of the things that unites us as Americans and a lot of our pop culture is bad. But the fact that a whole bunch of people watch The Masked Singer every week or that everybody watched the Game of Thrones finale, I love that aspect of our pop culture and I really worry about it going away.” – Vox