Creating a category that segregates popular films from more elevated fare hardly seems like an improvement or likely to keep the academy relevant, since it calls attention to the awards’ elitism rather than actually broadening their appeal. If the academy really wants to make the Oscars more appealing to a wider audience, it should consider just recognizing the artistic merit of deserving popular films instead of cordoning them off in their own category. After all, wasn’t that part of the justification for expanding the Best Picture category in 2009, that having more than five nominees would allow room for both obscure indies and more popular fare that might otherwise be squeezed out of the race?
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More Museums Look To Diversify Curatorial Ranks
Eager to attract a broader cross-section of visitors at a time when the country’s demographics are changing — and, in New York, facing an ultimatum linking city funding to inclusion plans — a growing number of museums are addressing diversity with new urgency.
Studies: Music Has A Significant Impact On Pain
“Most of the reviews found a significant effect of music on pain,” writes a team led by Colombian researcher Juan Sebastian Martin-Saavedra. It concludes music should be considered “a clinically significant complementary therapy to be used for the management of pain.”
Is QAnon Really An Activist Art Hoax?
In its fundamentals, the idea is that the QAnon conspiracy seems suspiciously similar to the plot of Q, a best-selling novel by a team of anarchist media activists collectively known as “Luther Blissett,” first published in Italian in 1999. The suggestion, evidently, originates with Twitter posts by the “Wu Ming Foundation,” the name of a present-day literary collective formed by former Luther Blissett members
When Algorithms Decide Your Creativity
Words matter to me. I am a professional writer, after all. But then Gmail made it tantalizingly easy to say “hi” instead of “hey,” and Google’s prediction, albeit wrong at first, became self-fulfilling. It wasn’t until two weeks after I began using Smart Compose that I realized I had handed over a small part of my identity to an algorithm.
Does The American Museum World Take Too Hard A Line On Deaccessioning?
The case of the Berkshire Museum “raises an existential question for museums as a whole: should an institution be allowed to die on the vine to preserve collections? … Are we as a field saying that museums are ethically bound to continue ‘business as usual’ and never change their missions?” Bob Beatty surveys the dilemma and lays out a possible solution.
Furtwängler and the Nazis — Take Two
I am returning to the topic of Furtwängler because my previous blog produced a minor miracle – a thread of responses that yielded heightened understanding of a complex topic. … I now feel impelled to revisit Topic A – not Furtwängler the man (B), but Furtwängler the conductor – and see what A and B put together look like today.
Why Do Actors Clamor To Play The Edinburgh Fringe? It Makes Careers
“It has done a lot for me,” says theatremaker Kieran Hurley, whose successes at Edinburgh include Beats and Heads Up, and who has Square Go, a collaboration with Gary McNair, at the Roundabout at Summerhall this August. But he is also troubled by the fringe’s dominance in launching careers.
An Opera About The Dr. Ruth Of 1920s England
“In 1918, six months before the end of the first world war, Marie Stopes published Married Love. … There’s nothing about sexual problems, nor contraception (apart from one chapter), but instead, she writes about the ecstasy of fulfillment.” (The book played a key role in an episode of Downton Abbey.) She then received tens of thousands of letters asking for advice – about sexual problems, venereal diseases, and above all, contraception. Composer Alex Mills and librettist Jennifer Thorp have turned a collection of those letters into a chamber opera.
We Need Public Scholars. So The NEH Is Helping To Support Them
It turns out that many biographers and historians need to eat — and pay rent and buy clothes for their children. Such earthly demands push most scholars into academic jobs at colleges and universities, where they’re rewarded for producing arcane work that remains cloistered in the hallowed halls of academe.The National Endowment for the Humanities is determined to break down those walls. Since 2015, the NEH has been funding the Public Scholar program, an annual series of grants designed to promote the publication of scholarly nonfiction books for a general audience.