The city’s mayor: “I say in all firmness that it is out of the question that we allow ourselves to be invaded by cars, and by pollution. It will make the health crisis worse. Pollution is already in itself a health crisis and a danger — and pollution joined up with coronavirus is a particularly dangerous cocktail. So it’s out of the question to think that arriving in the heart of the city by car is any sort of solution, when it could actually aggravate the situation.” – CityLab
Blog
How The NEA Is Responding To The COVID Crisis
With its relief funding, the NEA is switching tack from supporting individual art projects to ensuring that non-profit institutions and organisations are able to reopen. “We want to preserve as many jobs as possible—that’s number one,” says Mary Anne Carter, the chair of the NEA. “At some point the crisis will pass, and we want the nation’s art organisations to still be there to open their doors and welcome the community back in.” – The Art Newspaper
Turns Out Shared Danger Brings People Together
“It turns out that being in a dangerous situation with others fosters a new social identity. Boundaries between us, which seem so salient when things are normal, disappear when we perceive we’re locked in a struggle together, with a common fate, from an external threat. People go from me thinking to we thinking.” – Nautilus
‘Car Talk’ For Word Nerds
“The hosts [of the radio show A Way with Words], Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, are the Click and Clack of word talk. Barnette is a writer who has studied Latin and Greek (her books include A Garden of Words), and Barrett is a linguist and lexicographer with an ear for contemporary slang. They make a perfect duo. The show is modelled after Car Talk, though it is broadcast from San Diego, not Cambridge: the hosts laugh a lot, and when people call in they answer by saying, ‘You have a way with words,’ which is always nice to hear.” – The New Yorker
Arts: Rebuild What? And Why?
Given the scale of the national crisis facing all sectors of the economy in the months and years to come, the pandemic is a historic disruption that represents an existential crisis. What to do? I’ve come to think of it in the following frame: Restorationists versus Opportunists. – Douglas McLennan
Thank-you note
My beloved Hilary died a month ago tonight. I could not begin to thank enough people for saving my life, which is what all of you did by reaching out to me, generously and unhesitatingly. – Terry Teachout
Covid Obit: William Gerdts, 91, Distinguished Scholar of American Art (& my tipster)
He was a renowned expert on American Impressionism and 19th-century American still-life painting as well as author of more than 20 books on American art, notably his three-volume Art Across America: Two Centuries of Regional Painting 1710-1920. – Lee Rosenbaum
Breakfast With Bill
When I visited dish-besotted Bill Stern in his apartment in Los Angeles, we would make tea for breakfast in a gray pot designed in the 1960s by Edith Heath. At some aha moment, Bill decided to found The Museum of California Design. He died a week after our last breakfast. – Jeff Weinstein
Art Of The Silent Zoom Call
On paper, the practice of logging on to a video-conferencing site to sit with strangers for an hour without communicating may hold limited appeal. In practice, silent Zooms have become a lifeline in lockdown for users trying to focus on writing, reading, meditation and more. – The Guardian
‘Ballet Conductors Are The Hidden Heroes Of The Art Form’
Sarah Kaufman: “They can serve as guardian angels of the evening, controlling the musical universe and its atmosphere, smoothing over mishaps and delivering well-timed thunderbolts with a wave of the baton. They can even see the future, reading signs of trouble in a dancer’s hesitancy or hint of fatigue, and adjusting the tempo for what comes next. … Despite quieter profiles, ballet conductors arguably do twice the work of their symphonic counterparts.” – The Washington Post