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Internet Archive Ends Its Free Library Initiative Early After Publishers Sue

The Internet Archive announced the National Emergency Library project on March 24, in response to the widespread closures of libraries and schools during the Covid-19 crisis. The temporary initiative unilaterally removed the usual one copy/one user restriction on scans borrowed from the Internet Archive’s Open Library project, allowing unlimited borrowing of the roughly 1.4 million titles scanned, unless an author or publisher opted out. The NEL was set to last until June 30, or until the crisis is over. – Publishers Weekly

Director Of Art Basel: Online Galleries Won’t Replace Art Fairs

Marc Spiegler: “Fortunately, the Amazon art world won’t come to pass. For one thing, artworks are unique, and thus not so easily commodified. They have no utility value, no truly provable worth, no strict comparables. All of which makes buying art an act of trust. It goes both ways, too, because galleries build the reputation of their artists by selling to great collections, while avoiding the speculators who might rapidly “flip” works into auction.” – Financial Times

Arts Organizations Asked Patrons To Donate Their Tickets Instead Of Getting Refunds. Did They?

With the cost of tickets ranging from a few dollars to a few hundred dollars, calling for ticket donations is a strategy many performing arts organizations are using to stay afloat amid coronavirus-related show cancellations and postponements. But are audiences actually donating tickets? And if so, what impact does that have on venues? – Los Angeles Times

The Objectionable Flannery O’Connor

O’Connor is now as canonical as Faulkner and Welty. More than a great writer, she’s a cultural figure: a funny lady in a straw hat, puttering among peacocks, on crutches she likened to “flying buttresses.” The arc is not complete, however. Those letters and postcards she sent home from the North in 1943 were made available to scholars only in 2014, and they show O’Connor as a bigoted young woman. – The New Yorker

Dance On The Internet – Not Really The Real Thing, Is It?

George Balanchine rightly said that watching dance on TV was like reading about a murder in a newspaper—a poor approximation of the terror of the real event. And, for all its offerings, the new online dance world feels cramped and constrained. Dancers are a kind of urban wildlife, and as they crop their bodies to Zoom squares we can almost feel their horizons shrinking. They can, too. – The New Yorker

Cynthia Navaretta, Women Artists’ Advocate, 97

Navaretta was not an artist herself, nor a gallery owner, but she was a quiet force on the art scene in New York and beyond. In the early 1970s she was immersed in various efforts by women to secure a bigger voice in the art world, and in 1975, with Judy Seigel as founding editor, she began publishing Women Artists Newsletter, covering issues and events of interest to women in that world that often went unmentioned in mainstream publications. – The New York Times

Philosophy Born Of Isolation

“Social isolation has given me the clear stretch of time that Descartes says is required to do philosophy. Teaching has been cancelled or moved online; birthday parties have been abandoned; the spare bedroom is warm enough once I wrap a blanket round my shoulders. But disciplined reflection is difficult, and more so when one is surrounded by those who have a claim on one’s time and attention.” – Times Literary Supplement