One example: The LACMA, in an effort to reach underserved populations, announced plans to transform an 84,000-square-foot building in South Los Angeles into a center for a variety of community-targeted arts programming. “If you look at a map of L.A.’s public schools, the dots representing the neediest students are all through South Los Angeles,” MichaelGovan said. “You start thinking, where can the value of your collection and program be the greatest? When you’re behind a big fancy fence on Wilshire Boulevard, or out in the community?” – Inside Philanthropy
Author: Douglas McLennan
Habits Can Make Us Better (Or Worse) But We Should Understand How They Work
The fact that the brain is plastic and changeable allows habits to inscribe themselves in our neural wiring over time by forming privileged connections between brain regions. The influence of behaviourism has enabled researchers to study habits quantitatively and rigorously. But it has also bequeathed a flattened notion of habit that overlooks the concept’s wider philosophical implications. – Aeon
Sports Coaches’ New Problem: Their Players Are Obsessed With “Fortnite”
“It was something that players were talking about during warmups or while they were dressing in the locker room rather than focusing on the actual hockey game that we were getting ready to play. Part of the issue was just the inability to put it aside. I did even on occasion hear the odd reference on the bench in the middle of the game.” – CBC
Culture Shift: How Women Conductors Are Changing Orchestras
In a world that expects hierarchy and venerates individual genius, some musicians prefer to see their conductor not as a collaborator, but as a dominant, almost dictatorial leader. Many male conductors have been not only famous for their musical prowess, but infamous for their unflinching ways and bad tempers. A sexist double standard makes such shows of “temperament” taboo for women. – New York Review of Books
Bill T. Jones On The Artistic Struggle To Make Art Useful
“I wanted to make a piece about a man who saves himself through art. I don’t want people to think he’s just a train wreck. The most important thing an artist has is the will to do something — it’s evidence of life and a spiritual wellness, even if the body is decrepit.” – Washington Post
Successful Public Art Projects Can Transform A City (Sometimes In Not Good Ways)
Take San Antonio, Texas: Advocates say that the “Decade of Downtown” policies launched under the administration of Mayor Julián Castro—who is now running for president in part on his mayoral record—aren’t working for marginalized communities. New developments like the Latino High Line, plus the city’s rising economic fortunes, are putting inadvertent pressure on the Mexican and Mexican-American communities that these projects celebrate. – CityLab
Prescribing Art As Medical Treatment
The museum prescription was inspired by a movement in what’s called social prescribing. This has kind of taken off more in the UK. And in looking at the literature, we see that doctors were prescribing, in addition to things like eat better and get out there and walk more often, they were prescribing social activities within the patient’s community, with the belief that that was going to accelerate their healing and give them opportunity for more agency, that I am a participant in my healing. I’m not just waiting for something to be fixed for me. – Hyperallergic
TV Exec And Collector Blake Byrne, 83
Before he got into collecting, Byrne “didn’t even know what I liked,” he recalled in a 2015 interview with Art+Auction magazine. New York dealer Jack Tilton suggested that he attend Art Basel, and after two trips to Switzerland, he bought six pieces in 1988 on a budget of $60,000. “That was the beginning of the collection,” he said. “After I got those first six, I was bitten.” – The Hollywood Reporter
Tchaikovsky – Experimentalist Avant Gardist?
The idea that Tchaikovsky anticipated the experimentalism of the Symbolists and Surrealists runs counter to his conservatism as a person and as an artist, his reverence for the music of eighteenth-century composers, reliance on the number format in his operas, general adherence to the diatonic system, and predilection for German augmented sixth chords. But he embraced these things in order to counter them, or to highlight and enhance them with his own unmistakable signature. – Times Literary Supplement
Why Everyone Is Hating On Hudson Yards’ “Vessel” (Or Whatever We’re Calling It)
The Vessel has invited nearly universal vitriol, even amongst the politest architecture critics. It is an object lesson teaching us that, in our neoliberal age of surveillance capitalism—an era where the human spirit is subjected to a regime of means testing and digital disruption, and a cynical view of the city as an engine of real estate prevails—architecture, quite frankly, sucks. – The Baffler