“Arts and culture organizations across the country are estimated to have lost a combined $4.5 billion because of the health crisis so far, according to an ambitious new survey conducted by the Americans for the Arts. And that’s just the start.” – Artnet
Blog
New York State Fines Christie’s $16.7 Million For Not Collecting Sales Tax
“Christie’s auction house has agreed to pay $16.7 million to the Manhattan District Attorney for failing to properly collect New York sales tax between 2013 and 2017. The bombshell settlement, which follows a lengthy investigation into the company, was announced by the DA’s office today.” – Artnet
One of UK’s Top Book Wholesalers Had To Stop Shipping. It’s Started Again — One Order At A Time
At the end of March, Gardners announced that it could not keep staffers at a safe distance from each other and still pack and send out books. Four days later, the company was back at work — shipping orders to home customers, a skeleton staff standing well apart. – Melville House
Big Thinking For The Post-Pan
There are valid reasons to look at historic crises as moments for dramatic urban change. Nineteenth-century pandemics helped usher in developments in water and sewage systems. And there can be no doubt that, in the immediate future, the economic and demographic health of major cities will suffer enormously. But if we are to look forward optimistically, we must start by grappling with a difficult pattern: Urban history may be more about continuity through crises than about transformation. – CityLab
Home Alone: What We Know About Solitude And Its Healing Power
Steadily, slowly, research interest in solitude has been increasing. Note, solitude – time alone – is not synonymous with loneliness, which is a subjective sense of unwanted social isolation that’s known to be harmful to mental and physical health. In contrast, in recent years, many observational studies have documented a correlation between greater wellbeing and a healthy motivation for solitude – that is, seeing solitude as something enjoyable and valuable. – Aeon
Archeologists Arrested In Peru For Violating Lockdown
The team, led by archeologist Pieter van Dalen, were caught digging at the Macatón cemetery in the town of Huaral during the state of emergency on Sunday, April 4. The group from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos were taken into custody for breaching Peru’s strict lockdown measures, despite their claim that they were simply securing the national heritage that was left exposed at the site as agreed with the ministry of culture. – Artnet
Emergency Aid To Artists (Without Lots Of Paperwork)
The emergency package has an initial pot of $10 million for 2,000 grantees. The funds are culled from the operations budgets of the seven US-based organizations: Academy of American Poets, Artadia, Creative Capital, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, MAP Fund, National YoungArts Foundation, and United States Artists. With most of the arts programming cancelled, the grants-giving organizations formed a group to design a mechanism that will allow them to give money to artists directly. – Quartz
What Explains Why Millions Are Tuning In Online To Watch Orchestras?
What explains why the Philadelphia Orchestra’s BeethovenNOW concert, with two full symphonies webcast from an empty Verizon Hall on March 12, is up to 771,000 YouTube views? Or why the Rotterdam Philharmonic’s abbreviated Beethoven 9th video — with each instrumentalist playing separately from home, titled From Us to You, is closing in on 2 million views since its March 20 posting? – Philadelphia Inquirer
Theatre Moves Online
It has been difficult at times, looking at the closed doors of theatres and remembering there are no productions to leave the house to go see or participate in. But if the last couple of weeks of new art, streamed productions, and archival releases (and Andrew Lloyd Webber giving everyone a full weekend of Donny Osmond’s Joseph) have shown anything, it’s that there is still an absolutely overwhelming amount of art out there to consume. Theatre artists may be stuck inside, but it’s certainly hard to argue that they’re not as vibrantly creative as ever. – American Theatre
A New Non-Toxic, Natural Blue Pigment Made From (Of All Things) Beets
“No matter how much people enjoy looking at it, blue is a difficult color to harness from nature. … Plants seldom produce blue hues. When they do, their pigments rarely remain stable after extraction.” (There’s indigo, of course, but any friction on the fabric causes it to fade.) Molecular chemist Erick Leite Bastos writes about how he and colleagues found a way to derive the pigment he named BeetBlue from the red root vegetable. – The Conversation