“What I think we can learn from that example is that anti-racism, or facing up to your past, is not a vaccine. It’s not a one-shot option. It’s a process that you need to continue to go through, and it will change generationally. People will see history differently. Generations will have different needs. I also want to emphasize that it’s not just revision of textbooks. I really think popular culture is at least as important as what gets taught in schools, perhaps more so.” – The New Yorker
Blog
Britain’s Theatre World Banded Together And Got The Government To Provide Lockdown Rescue Money. Why Can’t American Theater Do The Same?
Jesse Green: “For months I’ve been waiting for industry groups to galvanize themselves into meaningful action, as they did in Britain — and as Black theater artists have proved can be done here, too. … But the American theater’s biggest failure is the one that renders it helpless in an existential crisis like this. In allowing itself to be cast as just another industry — a role it does not even play very well — it has disowned its true identity as a public entitlement. Will anyone make that argument now?” – The New York Times
Our Public Monuments Don’t Preserve History, They Rewrite It
Celebrating Mount Rushmore isn’t remembering history; instead it requires spectacular acts of forgetting. How could we honestly claim to see in this anything worth defending? – Chicago Tribune
An Art Critic Visits The Newly-Socially-Distanced National Gallery In London
Adrian Searle: “Visitors … have to follow one of three designated routes through the galleries, all of which are signposted, with arrows on the floor pointing up the prescribed flow. Quite how this will work, and how much one can deviate or jump between Route A, which begins in the Sainsbury Wing, and routes B and C in the main galleries, … defeated me on my press preview visit on Saturday. I get the feeling the few dozen of us wandering the galleries were guinea pigs for a system that needs to evolve in practice.” – The Guardian
What To Do With The Theatres And Concert Halls Now Sitting Empty? Use Them As Classrooms
Justin Davidson makes the case that New York City’s overburdened, underinvested-in school buildings simply can’t fit students in at a COVID-safe distance, but the currently-dark performance venues (and sports arenas and deserted malls, for that matter) can. – New York Magazine
Yet Again, Milan Kundera Denounced In His Native Land
While the Czech-but-now-French author is known in much of the world for his pointed depictions of how the Communist regimes of Europe twisted the lives of regular people, he’s been viewed ambivalently or worse by many in the Czech Republic — not least because he got out of Czechoslovakia in 1975 and didn’t have to suffer through the final years of the Communist Party’s misrule. Now a new 900-page biography of Kundera has reignited criticism of and debate over the most famous modern writer the country has produced. – Global Voices
Atwood, Marsalis, Steinem, Rushdie, Bill T. Jones Among 153 Signing Letter Warning Of ‘Intolerant Climate’ (Yup, There’s A Backlash)
“The letter, which was published by Harper’s Magazine and will also appear in several leading international publications, surfaces a debate that has been going on privately in newsrooms, universities and publishing houses that have been navigating demands for diversity and inclusion, while also asking which demands — and the social media dynamics that propel them — go too far. And on social media, the reaction was swift, with some heaping ridicule on the letter’s signatories … for thin-skinnedness, privilege and, as one person put it, fear of loss of ‘relevance.'” – The New York Times
Here’s The Full ‘Letter On Justice And Open Debate’
“The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. … The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.” – Harper’s
Big Three Movie Theater Chains Sue New Jersey For Right To Reopen
“In the lawsuit led by the National Association of Theatre Owners of New Jersey, naming Gov. Philip Murphy and New Jersey’s health commissioner, …, the plaintiffs” — which include AMC, Cinemark, and Regal — “argue that because churches and retailers have been allowed to open in the state, the movie theaters should be permitted to reopen as well.” – NPR
Artists’ Retreat MacDowell Colony Drops ‘Colony’ From Its Name (Because Colonial Oppression)
“MacDowell Board Chair Nell Painter … acknowledged that the word ‘colony’ can mean a country or given location under the control of an outside power or, as would apply to MacDowell, a community of like-minded people. But she said both definitions carry a sense of exclusion and hierarchy, and that … ‘in the language we speak today, colony is a word tied to occupation and oppression.'” – AP