Whichever way the 2018 Cannes Film Market is taken, heartening signs of continued market traction have to be placed in a context of a longer-term attrition in the independent theatrical market affecting both many mid-sized English-language movies and arthouse titles alike. The bottom hasn’t fallen out of either market. But their theatrical space, in domestic and international, looks decidedly smaller.
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A New Project Gives Access To Digital Scans Of Endangered Or Destroyed Cultural Site. What Could Be Wrong With That?
War, natural disasters and climate change are destroying some of the world’s most precious cultural sites. Google is trying to help preserve these archaeological wonders by allowing users access to 3D images of these treasures through its site. But the project is raising questions about Google’s motivations and about who should own the digital copyrights. Some critics call it a form of “digital colonialism.”
Museum Sues, Wins, Fighting Brazilian Airport Fees Of $66k/Day To Store Art
In a new interpretation of the existing rules, the Campinas airport attempted to charge the museum 243,000 reais ($66,000) per day to store six paintings—Dorelia in a Black Dress (1903-4) by Gwen John, Coming Out of School (1927) by L.S. Lowry, The Bride (1949) by Sylvia Sleigh, Seated Figure (1961) by Francis Bacon, They Always Appear by Ibrahim El-Salahi (1964), and Head of a Man (1965) by F. N. Souza—based on their market value because they were deemed “import cargo of high specific value”. The museum avoided the charge after a court ruled that the works were of a “civic-cultural nature”
Technology Has Changed How Dance Gets Made And Preserved. But…
“I am trained in the classical Indian dance of Kathak, a tradition passed on through non-technological means, carried in the memory, the body and the mind. So each time we share it, it’s evolving. It’s like telling a story – no one ever tells it the same way twice. It changes each time you tell it, because you are human, because you are alive. By contrast, digital preservation of work and its perfect, infinite reproducibility – freed of context – potentially creates a more sterile transmission mechanism for ideas and art.”
Is Bonhams Auction House For Sale?
The financial advisory group NM Rothschild has reportedly been drafted in to oversee the possible sale. Bonhams declined to comment.
Reasons Why We Might Not Want To Find Intelligent Life Out In The Universe
Hidden civilizations offer one possible answer to the Fermi Paradox, which raises the question of why we haven’t found evidence of intelligent alien life if many such races exist out there. Rather than support Enrico Fermi’s theory that intelligent life is unique to Earth, Dark Forest Theory raises the possibility that alien life is too intelligent to be detected, either because it’s hiding and/or because it’s plotting another race’s destruction.
‘The Sound Of Music’ – The First Critic-Proof Movie Musical?
As beloved as the film was and is, The Sound of Music was not rapturously received by the critics back in 1965: Joan Didion despised “its suggestion that history need not happen to people … Just whistle a happy tune, and leave the Anschluss behind,” and Pauline Kael called it a “sugar-coated lie that … makes a critic feel that maybe it’s all hopeless.” Pamela Hutchinson explores how the critics lost that particular argument, paving the way for everything from Mamma Mia! to The Last Showman.
Why Is “Design Thinking” Taking Over Education?
If design thinking (for short, let’s call it the DTs) merely involved bilking some deluded would-be entrepreneurs, well — no harm no foul. The problem is that faddists and cult-followers are pushing the DTs as a reform for all of higher education.
Uh-Oh – There’s More Grey Gardens Footage On The Way
In 1972, three years before Albert and David Maysles made their now-famous documentary about “Big Edie” and “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale (Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s aunt and cousin) and their rapidly decaying Long Island mansion, Lee Radziwill (Jackie’s sister) hired the Maysles brothers to visit the Beale homestead, where “they shot an hour of Big Edie and Little Edie squabbling with each other and the health officials threatening eviction.” That footage is now coming out in a documentary titled That Summer.
The Complete Von Karajan – Does Anyone Care About This Deluge Of “Complete” Recordings?
It has long been considerably less expensive to spiff up and repackage an existing recording than to make a new one. The first stereo albums of Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony, for example, sound as though they were recorded yesterday, although some of them are nearly sixty-five years old and every person associated with them is either dead or long retired. Brilliant young performers now have to compete not only with their contemporaries but also with a host of legendary ghosts. Through technology we have established a permanent pantheon of great performances, one that can be very difficult, perhaps impossible, for newcomers to crack.