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Michigan Opera Theatre Picks Yuval Sharon As Its Next Artistic Director

Sharon’s presence elevates MOT immediately to international relevance in the opera world and brings to Detroit the kind of innovative artistic leader unique among the city’s cultural institutions. His hiring is a bold but risky choice for a company with a largely conservative artistic profile that has historically lived on razor-thin financial margins and struggled to forge a post-DiChiera identity. – Detroit Free Press

Burning Knowledge – It’s Happened Before. In The Digital Age, Even More A Threat

Ovenden notes that, in 2019, 18.1 million text messages were sent every minute, as well as 87,500 tweets. Wikipedia has five to six thousand hits per second. A California-based digital service, the Wayback Machine, has archived 441 billion websites. “Archiving the datasets created by the big tech companies, such as the advertisements on Facebook, the posts on Twitter, or the ‘invisible’ user data harvested by the adtech companies is one of the major challenges facing the institutions charged with the preservation of knowledge.” – Literary Review

‘She Has Developed A Completely New Video Language That Warms This Cool Medium Up’ — On Pipilotti Rist

“She has done more to expand the video medium than any artist since the Korean-born visionary Nam June Paik. Rist once wrote that she wanted her video work to be like women’s handbags, with ‘room in them for everything: painting, technology, language, music, lousy flowing pictures, poetry, commotion, premonitions of death, sex, and friendliness.’ If Paik is the founding father of video as an art form, Rist is the disciple who has done the most to bring it into the mainstream of contemporary art.” – The New Yorker

K-Pop Supergroup Tops Global Billboard Charts, Suggests Different Direction For Pop Music

The song topped Spotify’s Global Top 50 chart and rose to number one on the iTunes charts in over 100 countries. It also set a YouTube record for the most views in 24 hours. BTS’s success, particularly on the Billboard Hot 100 recently, highlights the need to re-examine how we define pop music within the global music industry. – The Conversation

At 84, David Gordon Learns To Choreograph For, And Via, The Internet

“An Obie Award-winning director and founding member of the 1960s collective Judson Dance Theater, [he] may not grasp the ins and outs of TikTok, but it seems as though he’s been preparing for digital dance … his entire career.” Gia Kourlas talks with Gordon about The Philadelphia Matter — 1972/2020, a video collage, commissioned for this year’s virtual Philly Fringe festival, of 30-odd Philadelphia dancers performing various segments from three of his works from the 1970s. – The New York Times

Comic-Con Went Virtual This Year. Critics Said It Flopped. Fans Weren’t So Condemning

Comic-Con@Home inevitably drew comparisons to the in-real-life event, but some critics promptly branded it a failure — perhaps most prominently in Variety, the entertainment industry trade magazine. But calling Comic-Con@Home a flop for not having enough exclusive movie reveals or failing to produce enough social media buzz assumes too much. – The Conversation

A New Yorker Writer Watches Herself And Her Mother Get Turned Into Chinese Propaganda Grotesques

Jiayang Fan: “I find a story about my mother and me in the Global Times, a state-controlled Chinese newspaper with twenty-eight million followers on Weibo. It has been picked up by the country’s most popular news aggregator and then energetically disseminated on various platforms. The more I read, the more fascinated I become by the creation of this alter ego. I am watching a portrait of myself being painted, minute by minute, anonymous hands contributing daubs and strokes, the more lurid the better.” – The New Yorker