The Oregon Bach Festival, which last year fired its artistic director amid accusations of racism and sex discrimination, has hired a conductor for this summer’s festival who was reportedly dismissed from a guest conducting job with the Oberlin Baroque Orchestra in 2015 after complaints he used racial slurs at a rehearsal. Just two days later, his name was removed from the festival’s website.
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The Berkshire Museum Problem
Nina Simon: Why wouldn’t they make the rational choice to get as much money as possible for their sins? Because their choice has consequences beyond their own self-interest. It exposes the fragility of the rule of deaccessioning, the thin line between “treasured public asset” and “hard cold cash.” The rule is built on a sleight of hand, a conceit that says that museums won’t acknowledge the market value of objects — until they will. As cultural theorist Diane Ragsdale put it, “When communities become markets, citizens become consumers, and culture becomes an exploitable product.”
Playwright’s Estate Accuses “Shape Of Water” Studio Of Stealing
David Zindel, son of the Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright Paul Zindel, told the Guardian “he believes his father’s work Let Me Hear You Whisper, a play about a female janitor in a research laboratory who bonds with a captive dolphin and tries to rescue the creature, is a source of inspiration for The Shape of Water. Del Toro’s film was nominated on Tuesday for 13 Oscars, including best picture, best director and best original screenplay.”
Why Returning Indigenous Artifacts Is More Difficult Than An Agreement
“The University of Toronto embarked on a fourteen-year process of repatriating the bones of more than 1,700 individuals in its possession. But until recently, such agreements tended to be the exception, not the norm. In the meantime, the legal status of artifacts—which can serve as evidence in land claims negotiation—remains a long-standing sore point.”
America’s Decline Is Accelerating (Are People Noticing?)
American collapse is much more severe than we suppose it is. We are underestimating its magnitude, not overestimating it. American intellectuals, media, and thought doesn’t put any of its problems in global or historical perspective — but when they are seen that way, America’s problems are revealed to be not just the everyday nuisances of a declining nation, but something more like a body suddenly attacked by unimagined diseases.
Reading Linda Nochlin And Pretty Much Wanting To Boot Jeff Koons From The Museum
This is what happens when you go to the Art Institute of Chicago, or pretty much anywhere, after being trained by Nochlin to truly see. “How ought we read these works? Now that we know the assumed universality they project is specious, what do we do? Nochlin’s answer, in part, is to see the works in their own time, to lay bare their assumptions and examine them for ourselves. Meaning needs context. By looking at how artworks were situated in their own historical moment, how they resonated then and now, Nochlin takes charge of the interpretation.”
The Black Market Bot Factory That Inflates Celebrities’ Twitter Followers (By The Millions)
This doesn’t sound shady at all: “Devumi sells Twitter followers and retweets to celebrities, businesses and anyone who wants to appear more popular or exert influence online. Drawing on an estimated stock of at least 3.5 million automated accounts, each sold many times over, the company has provided customers with more than 200 million Twitter followers” – and at least 55,000 of the accounts are basically identity theft.
MoviePass Abruptly Canceled Some Big AMC Theatres, But AMC Shouldn’t Be Worried
Seriously, MoviePass, this supposed negotiation tactic doesn’t look like a good idea: “n fact, doing the math, it looks like MoviePass may account for less than 5 percent of the revenue AMC makes from ticket sales.”
Step Into The Artwork And Listen To The Tracking Signal Of 19 Satellites Orbiting The Earth
The mysterious, metallic nautilus shell is only one of the artworks that NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs team of artists has produced. The artist team has “made travel posters for planets in distant galaxies, and they’ve simulated Jupiter’s churning atmosphere in a small room. They once drilled a hole in a grain of sand, then displayed it alongside six rooms filled with sand to give a sense of how tiny we are in the vast universe.”
So, Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Mosaic’: What Was That?
He insisted it wasn’t a “Choose your own adventure” TV miniseries/app. Instead, “it’s both a dazzlingly experimental work and a totally conventional murder mystery. It’s frank and secretive, flooding viewers with information without giving them the tools to make sense of it. The story has multiple different paths to follow but they all end up in the same place. Less a show than a television experience, it’s brilliant and exasperating.”
