“On Monday, the city’s arts agency added sweeping language to already approved grants requiring that artists and arts organizations avoid producing work that could be considered lewd, vulgar or political or be at risk of losing their funds. The arts community protested, saying the amended contract infringed on their First Amendment rights. The [D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities] capitulated.”
Blog
Court Finds Jeff Koons Liable For Plagiarizing Famous Fashion Ad
“The American artist Jeff Koons has been found guilty of plagiarising an iconic French clothing advertisement for one of his celebrated sculptures, Fait d’Hiver. Advertising creative director Franck Davidovici had sued Mr Koons, among the world’s most bankable living artists, for copyright infringement, saying he had produced what his lawyer called a ‘servile copy’ of a famous advertising campaign he ran in 1985 for French clothing brand Naf-Naf.”
Schoolteacher Leaves $4.7 Million To Philadelphia Orchestra
A beloved music teacher to generations of children in suburban Abington, Jane Kesson also spent decades as a volunteer for the orchestra. So when she passed away last year, it was anticipated that she had included the Philadelphians in her will. But no one anticipated a gift this big.
Longtime Champion Of Latinx Plays Named Long Wharf Theatre’s Artistic Director
Jacob G. Padrón, a Yale Drama alum (as both student and administrator) who has produced more than 100 new plays and who founded the Sol Project to support and promote Latinx playwrights, succeeds Gordon Edelstein, who was fired early this year following accusations of bullying and sexual harassment.
Chris Dercon, Director Driven Out Of Volksbühne Theatre, Will Head Paris’s Grand Palais
The 60-year-old Belgian had had very successful tenures running London’s Tate Modern and Munich’s Haus der Kunst when he was recruited to lead the former East Berlin’s “People’s Stage”; as an outsider and non-theatre person, he faced stiff local resistance and resigned after about a year. Now he’s been named president of the Réunion des musées nationaux-Grand Palais, which operates the Musée du Luxembourg as well as the Palais, Paris’s flagship art fair and exhibition venue.
Surprise Winner Of France’s Prix Goncourt: Nicolas Mathieu’s ‘Leurs Enfants Après Eux’
The novel, which will be published in the U.S. late next year under the title The Children Who Came After Them, is one of several widely successful recent works of fiction in France to deal with the lives of young people growing up in the country’s poor, de-industrialized towns.
LA MOCA Director Klaus Biesenbach’s Plan To Stabilize The Museum
Several people told him the MOCA directorship would be “the most difficult, if not the most impossible, job in the art world,” he says. “But after 10 years of working for and with [MoMA PS1 board chair] Agnes Gund, I follow one very important principle in decision-making: ‘It’s not about you, it’s about the difference you can make.’”
Cool: See A Beatboxer Performing In An MRI Machine
Under magnetic resonance imaging, they observed the mechanics of how the artists make the distinctive beats that sound like percussion instruments using only their mouths. In gritty black and white, their tongues leap and flip; a sound like a snare drum snaps out.
How YouTube’s Algorithmic Suggestions Work
YouTube wants to recommend things people will like, and the clearest signal of that is whether other people liked them. Pew found that 64 percent of recommendations went to videos with more than a million views. The 50 videos that YouTube recommended most often had been viewed an average of 456 million times each. Popularity begets popularity, at least in the case of users (or bots, as here) that YouTube doesn’t know much about.
Where The Creative Class Lives (Not Just In Cities)
Almost 90 percent of the class’s members, or 24 million workers, live in urban counties, with more than 60 percent of them in urban counties in large metropolitan areas with over 1 million people. Just a bit more than one in 10 members of the creative class live in rural communities. But these broad trends mask more nuanced patterns in the distribution of the creative class across urban and rural communities.