“The difference between an art-fair business and a gallery business is our costs are fixed way ahead of time, and our revenue is also predictable because we’re not taking a percentage of the sales. We have a very stable business in terms of forecasting six months out. So by definition, we’re going to come in between the most successful and the least successful galleries. We have to maintain a fair model that allows us to stay in business and allows galleries to do business at the shows. For us to cut costs drastically would make our business precarious, which wouldn’t be in anyone’s interest.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Edinburgh Book Festival Becoming “Incubator For New Theatre”
“The book festival is becoming an incubator for new ideas, not only in books but also in the theatre. We are an experimental stage for theatrical ideas and we are very proud of that new emerging role.”
A Theory Of How Early Humans Developed Language
Somewhere on the timeline between the long run of the Oldowan and the more rapid rise of Acheulean technologies, language (or what’s often called protolanguage) likely made its first appearance. Oren Kolodny and his co-author, Shimon Edelman, a professor of psychology at Cornell University, say the overlap is not a coincidence. Rather, they theorize, the emergence of language was predicated on our ancestors’ ability to perform sequence-dependent processes, including the production of complex tools.
That Instantly Iconic G7 Image: Renaissance Painting Or Internet Meme?
Some have described the image by Jesco Denzel, an award-winning photographer with many stunning compositions, as a Renaissance painting or the work of a Dutch master. Indeed, its composition resembles famous artistic portrayals of contention, from Caravaggio’s The Calling of Saint Matthew to Edward Degas’s Rehearsal Hall at the Opera. Its ambient quality speaks to the work of Johannes Vermeer, who so skillfully blended light and color to tell a story. Indeed, the image is otherworldly and surreal, in many ways more like a painting in a museum than a photograph from a geopolitical summit. But the photo reminded me of something more mundane: Yanny vs. Laurel, a debate spurred by an audio clip that was shared widely online last month.
Survey: More People Are Reading Poetry
The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, a collaboration between the NEA and the Census Bureau, found that 11.7 percent of the U.S. adult population in 2017 — or about 28 million people — had read poetry in the last year. Which admittedly may not seem like much on the surface — until it’s compared with the 6.7 percent found during the last survey period, in 2012.
New Study: 80 Percent Of Movie Critics Are Male
The research was conducted by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, which released its findings Monday. Researchers studied the reviews of the 100 top-grossing films of 2017 that were posted on the aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes. Of the 19,559 reviews studied, 77.8 were by male critics and 22.2 were by female critics. Stacy Smith, founder and director of the Inclusion Initiative, said film critics are “overwhelmingly white and male.”
UK Lottery Sales Improve, Bolstering Arts Funding
Total National Lottery sales for the 2017/18 financial year increased by £26.4m to £6.95bn. Returns to National Lottery Good Causes were up £27m to £1.66bn, translating into a £331m return to the arts – a 1.7% increase on the year before. But the upswing is not strong enough to return to the highs of 2015/16, when £380m in lottery funding was directed to the arts.
Science Fiction’s Contentious Battles For The Future
Long before anyone coined the terms “hard sci-fi” and “soft sci-fi” or used them as badges of pride or disparaging slurs, long before the “holy war” between old school pulp and the ’60s era New Wave, we have this demand from the cranky old school to the squishy new school: “Show me this metal.” HG Wells, whose social activism permeated his fiction, would no doubt claim that Jules Verne was rather missing the point. But what becomes clear from a survey of science fiction’s history is that, if there’s one thing these authors love more than cosmic wonder and terror, it’s petty fights about what constitutes “real” science fiction.
Do We Still Need Theatre Critics?
“The question for arts journalism is, what is the role of the critic in contemporary society?” Charles Whitaker said. “Critics are no longer the influential arbiters of taste that they once were. People are turning to Facebook and their friends to determine where to spend their arts dollars. The role of the critic has been democratized by the fact that everyone has an opportunity to be an influencer, via their own media channels.”
Justin Davidson’s Brilliant Personal History Of New York’s New Music Scene
“I sometimes wonder why New York still has a new music scene at all, now that composers can go hunting for influences by meandering through YouTube and form a social circle on Twitter. And yet they continue to rely on the happenstance and physical proximity that only a major city can provide. Many do what they must to live here, others pay the electric bill in other states or countries but keep converging here. In music, New York is finally living up to its reputation for globalism, transience, and cosmopolitanism.”