As we reported earlier this year, the collateral damage caused by AB 5 was nearly instantaneous, as numerous smaller arts organizations that didn’t have the wherewithal to meet the new requirements felt it was safer to cancel seasons and shutter venues than it was to risk potential penalties. – San Francisco Classical Voice
Author: Douglas McLennan
Oscars’ New Diversity Rules Ignite A Debate
Predictably, the backlash has already begun. The Academy’s announcement was greeted on its own website by comments including: “You ruined the Oscars. It’s no longer about a cinema as a genre of art. Now it’s totally about politics,” and “forced diversity lowers quality of the product”. – The Guardian
Andrew Lloyd Webber Warns Theatres Are At The Point Of No Return
“We simply have to get our arts sector back open and running … We are at the point of no return, really,” he told Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee by video. “There comes a point when we really can’t go on anymore. Theatre is an incredibly labour-intensive business.” – HuffPost
Are Parking Lots A Solution For Live Venues?
There are other pop-up drive-in theaters in North Texas, but none are as focused on bringing back the performing arts as Tin Star. “I’ve lived my life in theaters,” Nolan McGahan says. “Just because there’s a pandemic doesn’t mean you have to give up on your dreams.” – Dallas News
How Disney’s New “Mulan” Is A Travesty Of China’s History
The rotten heart of Mulan as a film, rather than its production process, is the accidental regurgitation of China’s current nationalist myths as part of a messy, confused, and boring film. The title card fades into a location said to be the “Silk Road, Northwest China.” This is, of course, Xinjiang—here set up by the narrative frame as an inalienable part of China that Mulan must defend for her father, her family, and her emperor. That’s not the historical reality—or even the reality of the original poem the stories are based on, which depicts Mulan as the servant of a khan of the Northern Wei dynasty, not an all-powerful Chinese emperor. – Foreign Policy
The Music Of Biology And The Biology Of Music
The argument that there is both an aliveness and a wholeness to organic life which is potentially recognizable to musicians in musical terms has in the past been easier to make for those immersed in the invisible, mycorrhyzal webs of oral traditions than in the architectural solidity of art music, with its notations, institutions, theories and formal pedagogies. But let’s not get stuck in these academic distinctions. – Resilience
Restarting Broadway Is Going To Be A Challenge
The task has proved far more daunting than anyone could have imagined, amounting to a struggle of wrenchingly complex proportions with no reliable end in sight. And at this point, though, Broadway — the ultimate land of make-believe — is holding on to a hope that early 2021 is still feasible. – Washington Post
Report: State Of The Arts Audience During COVID
Organizations who balance growing the number of younger patrons engaging with alternative artistic product while also retaining older generations’ philanthropic support seems to be an emerging best practice for finding resiliency through COVID-19. – TRG
Michigan Opera Theatre Picks Yuval Sharon As Its Next Artistic Director
Sharon’s presence elevates MOT immediately to international relevance in the opera world and brings to Detroit the kind of innovative artistic leader unique among the city’s cultural institutions. His hiring is a bold but risky choice for a company with a largely conservative artistic profile that has historically lived on razor-thin financial margins and struggled to forge a post-DiChiera identity. – Detroit Free Press
Burning Knowledge – It’s Happened Before. In The Digital Age, Even More A Threat
Ovenden notes that, in 2019, 18.1 million text messages were sent every minute, as well as 87,500 tweets. Wikipedia has five to six thousand hits per second. A California-based digital service, the Wayback Machine, has archived 441 billion websites. “Archiving the datasets created by the big tech companies, such as the advertisements on Facebook, the posts on Twitter, or the ‘invisible’ user data harvested by the adtech companies is one of the major challenges facing the institutions charged with the preservation of knowledge.” – Literary Review