For many professors, the sudden transition was a struggle. For Malan, it was the natural extension of a decade’s worth of experimentation. “Our team is fortunate to have been doing this blend of education for quite some time,” he told me recently. “For us, it was very straightforward.” – The New Yorker
Blog
Will Self: Zooming Into Dystopia?
“In the 15 years between the inception of a fully-integrated bi-directional digital medium—the internet—and the onset of the coronavirus pandemic bringing with it imposed social distancing, viewing the world through screens has become second nature to all of us. The terms of physical meeting have been more profoundly altered than they ever were by train timetables or wristwatches: the absolute location, together with the universal synchronisation afforded by mobile phones, enables both the place and the time of a prospective rendezvous to be continually recalibrated.” – Prospect
What NBC’s ‘World Of Dance’ Gets Right
Sarah Kaufman: “The throughline of WOD is: Show us something we’ve never seen before. As a dance critic, I want to see that, too, whenever I’m in the theater. What new revelation jumps out in a premiere, or in a reinterpretation of a classic work? What fresh response is there to the music, the setting, the story? Part of ‘new’ involves sheer novelty, but part of it is also framing — how the choreographer and the dancer set up a moment for the best impact.” – The Washington Post
Nyerges on the Purges: Virginia MFA’s Director Defends Bondil, Himself, Other Beleaguered Leaders
Already battered financially by the pandemic, many art museums now find themselves barraged by attacks from aggrieved staffers and former employees accusing the higher-ups of racism, harassment and micro-aggressions. But until Alex Nyerges candidly responded to my post about the firing of Montreal Museum of Fine Arts director Nathalie Bondil, I hadn’t come across any major museum officials who dared to publicly contradict the critics. – Lee Rosenbaum
A Bail-Out For The Arts? We Need More
What is needed is “not just a bailout” but a “long-term plan” that would enable the sector to “come out the other side. What we’ve seen is a lack of joined-up thinking across government,” he went on, suggesting “huge swathes of our cultural infrastructure” are at risk. – BBC
Stop Calling This Composer And Polymath ‘The Black Mozart’
His name is Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges. “Presumably intended as a compliment, this erasure of Boulogne’s name not only subjugates him to an arbitrary white standard, but also diminishes his truly unique place in Western classical music history.” – The New York Times
The Brain Science Of Being In Love
“We put over 100 people who were madly in love into a brain scanner using fMRI. We noticed those who had fallen in love in the first eight months had a lot of activity in brain regions linked with intense feelings of romantic love. Those who had been madly in love for a longer period of time—from eight to 17 months—showed additional activity in a brain region linked with feelings of deep attachment. That vividly showed us the brain can easily fall happily and madly in love rapidly, but feelings of deep attachment take time.” – Nautilus
All Those Anti-Racism Books Are Not Going To Fix Things
Saida Grundy: “While the crafters of anti-racist reading lists are mostly making an earnest effort to educate people, literature and dialogue cannot supplant restorative social policies and laws, organizational change, and structural redress. When offered in lieu of actionable policies regarding equity, consciousness raising can actually undermine Black progress by presenting increased knowledge as the balm for centuries of abuse.” – The Atlantic
Which Roles Can The Arts Fill Beyond COVID?
“While we never mind insisting that art can change the world, we get fuzzy when pressed on the details of how. In pursuing “usefulness,” the past decades have witnessed an increasing instrumentalization of art, one which, in most instances, falls short of our transformative aspirations. Perhaps, in an age of “utility” and “impacts,” the more radical vision is not the instrumentalization of art, but the aestheticization of the world.” – The Philanthropist
Annie Ross, Star Of ‘The Greatest Jazz Vocal Group That Ever Was,’ Dead At 89
A child star who was once dubbed “the Scottish Shirley Temple,” she “grew up to become one of the most dynamic jazz artists of her generation, writing lyrics and electrifying audiences with her daring, high-speed singing as part of Lambert, Hendricks and Ross.” Later in life, she had a brief movie career and then returned to singing; in between, she led “an often-troubled personal life, which included heroin addiction and a tumultuous relationship with taboo-breaking comedian Lenny Bruce.” – The Washington Post