“The exponential expansion of the culture sector rests entirely on a quite narrow demographic of white, middle class, educated staff and visitors who have signed a social contract on what and who constitutes value in the field of visual art. Until there’s radical change in the makeup of institutional bureaucracies and boards, that’s unlikely to change.” – Artnet
Author: Douglas McLennan
The Arts World Still Isn’t Good At Making Accessible Spaces For Art
“In 2019, inclusive spaces that are comprised of voices from the neurodiverse and disabled community are still extremely rare. Despite the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) 29 years ago, neurodiverse and disabled communities continue to face collective discrimination from failures to accommodate in access, transportation, employment, education, and many other arenas. Unfortunately, the art world is no exception.” – Hyperallergic
Library Of Congress Puts Out A Call For Help Transcribing Suffragist Stories
Nearly 16,000 pages of letters, speeches, newspaper articles and other suffragist documents are now available on By the People, a crowdsourcing platform launched by the library in 2018. The project seeks to make the library’s collections fully word searchable and easier to read, for both scholars and lay historians alike. – Smithsonian
Dance-As-Job-Creator
In Nigeria, 65 percent of the population is under the age of 18. Unemployment is endemic. One community organization created a jobs program through dance. “At the end of the day, dance is a business.” – BBC
What Psychopaths Can Teach Us About Ourselves
Psychopaths are sick, deranged, lacking in moral conscience. In other words, they’re nothing like you or me. But this is false. Rather than freakish outliers then, psychopaths reveal important truths about human morality. But are we ready to accept what they might teach us? – Aeon
Unlikely Success: How Small Publisher Faber & Faber Got To Be 90 Years Old
“The Faber story certainly speaks volumes about the mix of passion, shrewdness, and luck that it takes to keep such an operation afloat; it also raises the question of who, ultimately, a publishing house like Faber & Faber really belongs to. Is it the stockholders, whose involvement in the day-to-day life of the company is sometimes remote? Is it the staff—publishers, editors, and others—who set the tone and direction during their tenure? Or is it the writers, whose work is the company’s real raison d’être and lifeblood?” – The New Yorker
Boris Johnson Plans Ten Tax-Free Freeport Zones To Shelter Art, Assets
The UK’s international trade secretary, Liz Truss, announced on Thursday that she hopes to launch “the world’s most advanced freeport model” as soon as possible, promising it will create “thousands of jobs.” The move was immediately criticized by the opposition Labour Party. Peter Dowd, the shadow chief secretary to the treasury, said that creating tax havens, where the super-rich can store their “art, wine, and gold,” is “payback for Tory funders and their mates.” – Artnet
The Professional Aesthetic Response
“Everyone has these experiences. We all see pattern. We see what we like, or feel spurred on by. Some of us see the lineaments of social life like a bright line connecting the texts of an archive; some see the hand of God, or serendipity, or conspiracy, or energy, or 11:11 on the clock more often than seems consistent with chance. For some people, such experiences become, for probably unfathomable reasons, the center of life.” – 3 Quarks Daily
Scientists: Bach Had An Anatomical Advantage For Music
In a study published in a German scientific journal, anatomist and musician Andreas Otte deduced that Bach—a gifted organist and harpsichordist—had an exceptional reach at the keyboard. – National Geographic
Ruth Reichl On The Power Of Food Journalism
“I honestly think there’s almost no story you can’t tell through food. If you want to read about women’s lives throughout history, you can do it through cookbooks. If you want to teach math, you want to teach history, there’s nothing you can’t get to through food. It is one of the major forces in the world. When I went to Gourmet, I knew it couldn’t just be about fancy restaurants and taking trips to have a good time.” – Columbia Journalism Review