Elizabeth Kendall remembers: “SoHo was dance spilling out into life. It was a grimy laboratory of the future. … In SoHo you could get a turnip soup with an asymmetrical bread chunk at an exotically rustic cafeteria named Food. You could climb leaning stairways to see free-form jazz men riffing in lofts. And you could meet other dancers on street corners and converse with them in the deadpan physical vernacular of [Yvonne] Rainer’s Trio A. Somebody would start those opening arm swings of the sloppy-tidy, faux-plebeian dance, and somebody else would cross the street and join in with the next move.” – The New York Times
Blog
Will The Art Gallery System As We Know It Survive?
There’s no reason why the art gallery as we know it, a 19th century invention, should last forever. But there’s also no sign of an alternative on the horizon. As with other small New York businesses that’ve been closed since mid-March, it’s not clear how many galleries will be able to hold out long enough to reopen. – The Nation
Why Theatres In England Are Opening Up When They Can’t Present Plays
They’re showing movies in their auditoriums (social distancing observed, of course), opening their cafes and bars, presenting art exhibits — anything that can offer a place to (safely) gather. As the artistic director of a theatre in Chester put it, “People are desperate for contact again, to get back into community spaces, where they feel safe and connected. [Putting on plays is] not our mission. We put on plays in service of our mission.” – The Guardian
Natural History Museum’s Removal Of Roosevelt Statue Is A Good First Step
At a moment when the world’s museums are being called out for ingrained and unexamined inequalities, the American Museum of Natural History is one of the few to take decisive action. Art institutions, by contrast, have largely engaged in hollow gestures. – The New Yorker
A TV Critic Considers The Most Compelling Villain On Our Screens This Summer: Karen
Hank Stuever: “As soon as one Karen flames out across the Internet, another apparently more unhinged Karen rises in her place. … Amid a culturally fractious and largely failed attempt to quell a killer pandemic, paired with a stirring surge in support of civil rights and police reform, there’s a strange sort of solace that comes from watching these Karen … videos spring up like summer dandelions across the regulation-green lawn of the fragile, white American psyche.” – The Washington Post
Artist “Pirates” Ten Years Of Sotheby’s Data, Offers It As Art Online
Paolo Cirio scraped over 100,000 auction records from the past ten years of Sotheby’s sales and is now offering digital reproductions of the auction lots for 1/100,000th of the price they sold for. – Artnet
That Statue Of Teddy Roosevelt That’s Coming Down In New York? This Russian Collector Will Buy It
Andrei Filatov, a rail transport and investment magnate (who is also chairman of the Chess Federation of Russia), has offered to purchase the long-controversial statue in front of the American Museum of Natural History that depicts Theodore Roosevelt on horseback flanked by half-naked American Indian and African men on foot. He’d made a similar offer for a statue of Alexander Baranov, the Russian colonial governor of Alaska, in Sitka that activists want relocated. – The Art Newspaper
A Theater-Within-A-Theater, Modeled On Shakespeare’s Globe, Will Divide Socially Distanced Patrons With Partitions
The Wilma in Philadelphia plans to construct and install what it’s calling The Wilma Globe. “It would be built within the current Wilma Theater and would place audience members, individually or by small groups, into two tiers of stalls separated by wooden dividers and facing the stage. With a flexible configuration it could seat as many as 100 people or as few as 35.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer
Appeals Court Upholds Actor Geoffrey Rush’s Win Of Largest Defamation Award In Australian History
“Three Federal Court judges ruled that articles published by Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph newspaper in 2017 conveyed the imputation that Rush was a pervert and that the trial judge had correctly included the actor’s loss of earnings in calculating damages” of $2.9 million (Aus). – AP
Geoffrey Rush: Trial By Media (A Drama In Ten Parts)
“This story is about reckless journalism. About one desperate Murdoch newspaper that sacrificed tried and true practice to grab a scoop. About the damage inflicted on two people, their families and friends by that scoop, the subsequent defamation trial and the newspaper’s failed appeal. About how this reckless act set back the Me Too movement in Australia and tarnished an industry dedicated to telling the truth.” – Crikey (Australia)