On the 1910 version of the painting, housed at the Munch Museum in Oslo, the cadmium yellow in the sky and the lake has been fading to off-white and flaking off for years, with light believed to be the culprit. A team of scientists has now found that light is not the problem: the dulling is caused by high humidity, particularly from the breath of many thousands of viewers. – CNN
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How And When Will Texas Arts Organizations Reopen? They Have No Idea, Thanks To The Governor
“North Texas arts organizations tuned in eagerly at 2 p.m. Monday to hear Gov. Greg Abbott’s address regarding ‘Phase Two’ of the effort to reopen the state’s economy, which, they thought, would include them. But the governor pulled off a bit of a stunner in not addressing performing arts organizations at all. He gave guidance to youth sports camps, summer camps, Little League baseball and professional sports” — even indoor rodeo. But not the arts. – The Dallas Morning News
Shakespeare’s Globe Warns It Could Go Bankrupt Without Government Help
“Despite being well-managed, well governed, and – crucially – able to operate without public subsidy,” says the statement, “we will not be able to survive this crisis,” the coronavirus epidemic, without rescue funding from the British government. In fact, it’s the lack of public subsidy that’s the problem: it means the Globe is not eligible for Arts Council England’s emergency support. – The Guardian
Both Venice Biennales Postponed For A Year
This year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, which had already been rescheduled from this spring to August, will now take place in the late summer and fall of 2021; next year’s (art) Biennale will be transferred to 2022, when it will coincide with Documenta. – ARTnews
What Comes Next? III
If we as a nation come out of the pandemic with a heightened awareness of and reaction to profound economic inequality and the systemic injustice in which it is rooted, it could be that the arts are in for a difficult time. If that is the case, I think of the Pete Seeger song, “Which Side Are You On?” – Doug Borwick
Making Art On Instagram During A Shutdown
The Strip may be closed, but Las Vegas is so much more than gambling – or at least that’s what its chroniclers show. “In the absence of take-my-hand influencers, creative control of Instagram is free to return to the first group who adopted it: artists and photographers. If you give an artist a tool like Instagram and a bunch of idle hours, he or she will find a way to build a project.” – Las Vegas Weekly
Los Angeles City Council Moves To Help Artists And Arts Organizations With Emergency Grants
The grants, which are also available for live performance spaces, “will take arts fees paid by developers in support of now-canceled or planned cultural events and instead make the money available as small-dollar grants.” One city councillor said, “Whether a poet, a painter or a dancer, Los Angeles needs its artists right now … and artists need our help.” – Los Angeles Times
A Boom In Pandemic Books
Publishing books about an unfolding calamity, when the duration and outcome remain uncertain, carries obvious risks for authors and publishers. With so many unanswered questions about the virus, how it spreads and when a vaccine might arrive, works that are reported and written over the next few months risk being out of date, or dangerously incorrect, by the time they are published. The severity of the economic and political fallout is also still a big unknown. – The New York Times
Historically There Have Been Very Few Polymaths
Goethe genuinely advanced fields of scientific inquiry such as geology and colour theory; Nabokov is always said to have been an eminent entomologist. Leonardo da Vinci, naturally, is an obvious candidate, with his speculative drawings about engineering projects, though Michelangelo (strangely not mentioned by Burke) was probably just as successful a polymath, achieving masterpieces of the first rank in painting, sculpture, architecture and poetry. Beyond a handful of freaks such as these, we find a lot of experts who dabbled in something else — and we are left trying to admire the paintings of Churchill and Strindberg or the novels of C.P. Snow. – The Spectator
Will The Pandemic Persuade People Cities Are Unsafe?
“In fact, no correlation exists between population density and rates of COVID-19 infection, according to recent studies examining the disease in China and Chicago. But if state and local governments still conclude that density itself is a problem, they are more likely to promote suburban sprawl as a matter of law—instead of making the accommodations, in their housing stock and their streetscapes, that allow people to live in cities safely and move about them comfortably.” – The Atlantic