Just last September, the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA) opened in a repurposed grain silo on the Cape Town waterfront. And just last week, the Norval Foundation, funded by real estate financier Louis Norval, opened in a new building on a suburban estate near Table Mountain. What’s more, both the executive director and the chief director of the Norval came from Zeitz MOCAA.
Blog
Top Posts From AJBlogs 05.02.18
Hearts for Hartwig: My Appreciation for Getty’s Soon-to-Retire Communications Head
It’s not like me to sing the praises of museum communications officials, even though I constantly rely on them for help (and they often are extremely helpful). As a critic and investigative journalist intent on clarifying what’s been blurred by PR spin, my relationship with spokespersons is often more adversarial than collegial. Not so with Ron Hartwig, … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2018-05-02
Is Information Our New God?
Information technology and its effect on the way we think and feel is a crucial issue in our time. In his 1979 book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Lyotard wrote, “It is conceivable that the nation-states will one day fight for control of information, just as they battled in the past for control over territory, and afterwards for control of access to and exploitation of raw materials and cheap labor.” This has come true. The information technology at a certain historical moment must determine, to some extent, the way that we communicate with each other.
We Need A New Model For Our Social Media
Ultimately, to challenge Facebook, Google, and the many unknown players of the data economy, we must devise new business models and structural incentives that aren’t rooted in manipulation and coercion; that don’t depend on the constant surveillance of users, on gathering information on everything they read and purchase, and on building that information into complex dossiers designed to elicit some action — a click, a purchase, a vote. We must move beyond surveillance capitalism and its built-in inequities.
How Max Hollein Got To The Met Museum
The museum advertised for a successor with “a highly developed EQ”, and Hollein seems to fit the bill. In San Francisco, as in Frankfurt, he is credited with energising curators, pushing the Fine Arts Museums to organise exhibitions in-house. Despite recently staging shows of paintings by Georg Baselitz and Julian Schnabel himself, he says: “I see myself as an artistic director, not as a curator.”
Poland’s Theatres Kick Back Against A Hard Nationalist Turn
If, as Dostoevsky contends, ideas are demons, they are also nourishment that can forge collective bonds and reinvigorate human connectivity. Contemporary reality, in Poland and elsewhere, has flown off the rails. Click, rewind. Start again.
“Avengers” Has Crossed Over To Being REALLY Expensive TV
Viewed in a vacuum, Infinity War is meaningless. As a standalone film, it’s a mess. Characters pop up for one scene and then vanish again completely. Nobody has any meaningful screen time. The antagonist swans about with an entirely unearned sense of motivation. And there’s no emotional weight to the ending. It’s just a lot of stuff happening to people we’ve barely met. We may as well be watching it happen to extras. But, with 10 years of context behind it, Infinity War is deeply impressive. We’ve watched these characters grow and change and their relationships evolve in several ways.
When Music Critics Could Kill: A Look Back At The Glory Days Of Pitchfork
Amos Barshad: “It’s been years since the site had the kind of cultural cachet on which it built its empire. But music fans of a certain age can still rattle off the acts that landed notorious reviews and landmark 0.0 ratings – Travis Morrison! Robert Pollard!! Liz Phair!!! … A few months ago, I decided that I wanted to look back at those last moments when critics could kill. … I would talk to Black Kids and to Travis Morrison and to the other targets of Pitchfork‘s most infamous reviews, asking them: How did it feel? What did those reviews do to you?”
Will MoviePass Disrupt Movie Theatres Out Of Existence?
MoviePass has taken the sector by storm, attracting nearly 2 million new subscribers over the past year. But as its executives claim to be sending droves of new customers to theaters, MoviePass has prompted worries in the industry about a devaluation of the movie ticket and a monopoly on customer data.
Another Reason The Whole Shakespeare-Couldn’t-Have-Written-Shakespeare Argument Is Ridiculous
Most of the Will-Shakespeare-of-Stratford skeptics, such as Mark Rylance, seem convinced that no one from a 16th-century small-city artisan-marchant background could possibly have written such artful and erudite drama. That’s ridiculous because, points out Oxford historian Jonathan Healey, “many, perhaps most, of the greatest minds of the age were people of ‘middling’ origins.”