Wallace Shawn: “America’s addiction to believing in its own goodness was quietly fading away, and the old words that President Kennedy used had become increasingly nauseating to a lot of people. People were not inspired, people were not breathing in self-esteem, when they heard the old phrases. And then Donald Trump came along and was elected, and he left that rhetoric far behind. He said goodbye to it.” – New York Review of Books
Author: Douglas McLennan
Reimagining The Art Of Fluxus In 2020
“Fluxus artists looked for value in the commonplace, believing that art can be anywhere and belong to anyone. Rather than eliminating art, they sought to dissolve its boundaries in order to infuse everyday life with heightened aesthetic awareness and appreciation.” – NewMusicBox
Galleries Experiment With Art On Subscription
Even before the silent spring of 2020, a growing number of sellers beyond the art world had already converted to the wisdom of subscription e-commerce. After all, why force your business to secure an endless string of one-off transactions with an ever-shifting consumer base in an uncertain market if you can lock in recurring revenue with a core group of faithfully committed clients? – Artnet
Tate Suspends Star Curator Over Guston Show Criticism
According to three sources close to the museum, managers took the decision to discipline Mark Godfrey, a senior curator of international art, after he raised objections on social media to the deferral of Philip Guston: Now, a major show which was due to include around 125 paintings and 70 drawings from 40 public and private collections. – The Art Newspaper
Want A Different Broadway? Fund A Different Broadway
These theatremakers are proposing a new way of thinking about funding and producing on Broadway, with the goal of creating more access points for BIPOC individuals interested in commercial producing. – American Theatre
The Play That Understood The Trump Era
Though researched and written during Barack Obama’s presidency, Sweat, which opened at New York City’s Public Theater days before the 2016 election, became a definitive work of Donald Trump’s. In a 2017 profile of Lynn Nottage, the New Yorker called the play “the first theatrical landmark of the Trump era.” – BBC
Investing In Artists Rather Than Just Buying From Them
One huge bright spot, for example, is Soho Rep’s Project Number One, which puts artists on salary through June 2021. The artists in this program have been moved from a project-based, transactional relationship with the theatre to a more holistic, sustainable one. I believe this is an incredibly important, perhaps transformative, shift for our field to make. – HowlRound
Paris’ Legendary Shakespeare & Co. Sends Out An SOS
“We’re not closing our doors, but we’ve gone through all of our savings. We are 80% down since the beginning of the first wave. We’ve now gone through all of the bookshop savings, which we were lucky to build up, and we have also been making use of the support from the government, and especially the furlough scheme. But it doesn’t cover everything, and we’ve delayed quite a lot of rent that we have.” – The Guardian
Why Being An Optimist Might Be A Liability During COVID
Most people have a tendency to overestimate the chances of experiencing a positive (like getting a promotion), and underestimate the likelihood of experiencing a negative event (like getting robbed or sick). Typically a benign — even beneficial — human quirk, the “optimism bias” could be contributing to the spread of coronavirus according to behavioral psychologists. – Big Think
The Cultural Cost Of Four Years Of Trump
Michelle Goldberg: “When I think back, from my obviously privileged position, on the texture of daily life during the past four years, all the attention sucked up by this black hole of a president has been its own sort of loss. Every moment spent thinking about Trump is a moment that could have been spent contemplating, creating or appreciating something else. Trump is a narcissistic philistine, and he bent American culture toward him.” – The New York Times