Author: Matthew Westphal

Post-Plague Poetry In Medieval England Could Be Downright Reactionary

With the huge drop in population following the Black Death, peasants and laborers were able to take advantage of the labor shortage to demand higher pay and improve their lives. Those who had been at the top of 14th-century society weren’t happy about that — and since they were the ones who were literate, such works as Langland’s Piers Plowman, Gower’s Vox Clamantis, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales reflected and reinforced their readers’ wish that the social order stay the way it was. – The Conversation

Venetians Are Loving This Not-Utterly-Overrun-By-Tourists Thing. Is There Any Hope Of Preserving It?

Residents and interested observers have been concerned for years about the local economy’s addiction to mass tourism and the ills that accompany it. Italy’s COVID lockdown has, at least temporarily, returned Venice to its own people, and many of them are wondering how they might be able to keep it. – The New York Times

These Ballet Dancers Are Calling Out Inequity At Their Companies

“Over the past few years, calls for the ballet world to become more diverse, equitable and inclusive have become a regular rallying cry. Most of the public complaints, however, have been about general, systemic problems throughout the field. But this week, as our entire country is reckoning with the devastating effects of racial injustice on the Black community, a handful of dancers have taken to Instagram to directly call out the problems they’ve seen in their own companies.” – Dance Magazine

Here’s One Area Of Publishing That’s Making Progress On Diversity: Audiobooks

“Audiobook publishers are increasingly offering opportunities to narrators of color, … a response to a broader range of stories and desire for the voice talent to reflect that diversity. … But the particular demands of the job, compared with film and stage acting, make this tricky. What does representation mean when actors can only be heard and not seen? What constitutes a black, Latino or Asian voice? And to complicate matters, in most audiobooks a single narrator voices multiple characters, who may have a variety of ethnicities and accents.” – The New York Times

€1 Billion For Arts In Germany’s New €130 Billion Corona-Rescue Package

“The funds, which will be made available this year and next year, will be widely distributed across cinemas, music clubs, memorials, museums, theaters, and festivals. €250 million will go to help cultural institutions reopen with new hygiene protocols, such as updated ventilation systems and new socially-distanced visitation arrangements. Some €30 million has been earmarked for galleries, cultural centers, and publishing. The package, called New Start, also decreases the tax rate on art by 3 percent.” – Artnet

One-On-One Corona-Concerts Are Now Spreading Through Germany

Last month, a few musicians in Stuttgart began giving intimate-yet-socially-distanced performances — one performer, one listener, a couple of meters of empty space between them — at the city’s currently-unused airport. Now two of the area’s publicly-funded orchestras, the Staatsorchester Stuttgart and the Southwest German Radio Symphony, have taken on the project. “The result has been an intense series of more than 1,100 encounters — first in Stuttgart, and now in five other German cities. And what began as a clever adaptation to coronavirus rules has since become something more profound — a means of establishing human connection, agency and meaning at a time when such concepts have been harder to foster.” – The New York Times

Bruce Jay Friedman, Satiric Author, Playwright, And Screenwriter, Dead At 90

“Mr. Friedman, who also wrote the screenplays for the hit film comedies Stir Crazy and Splash, was an unusual case in American letters: an essentially comic writer whose work skipped back and forth between literature and pop culture. … [His] early novels, short stories and plays were pioneering examples of modern American black humor, making dark but giggle-inducing sport of the deep, if not pathological, insecurities of his white, male, middle-class and often Jewish protagonists.” – The New York Times

Religious Art Belongs In Churches, Not Museums, Says Director Of Italy’s Most Famous Museum

“Eike Schmidt, the director of the Uffizi gallery in Florence, told the press [last week] that he thought many religious works of art currently in Italy’s museums and stores should be returned to the churches from which they came. … This idea is part of the Uffizi’s reaction to the coronavirus crisis, in which it is thinking about diversification and the distribution of its works of art in order to create a ‘wider’ [diffuso] museum beyond the immediate premises of the gallery.” – The Art Newspaper