What has happened in journalism in the twenty-first century is a version, perhaps an extreme one, of what has happened in many fields. A blind faith that market forces and new technologies would always produce a better society has resulted in more inequality, the heedless dismantling of existing arrangements that had real value, and a heightened gap in influence, prosperity, and happiness between the dominant cities and the provinces. – New York Review of Books
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Something Is Going Wrong At The Glasgow School Of Art After A Bad Fire. So Why Fire A Whistleblower For Talking?
More than 70 staff have left the GSA since a second fire devastated the Mackintosh building in June 2018. Last month Gordon Gibb was sacked for breach of contract for giving his views on failings at the GSA. When he gave evidence at the Scottish Parliament’s culture committee, he called for the iconic building to be taken out of the hands of its board following the two fires. – Sunday Post (Glasgow)
All Objects Have Meaning – So How Do Museums Contextualize Shame?
As museums face increasing pressure to be responsive to historical intersections and contradictions in their presentation of works, it can be risky to introduce audiences, who otherwise might not seek complexity born out of conflict, to objects that may provoke embarrassment or pain. Yet some institutions still believe generating this tension is a necessary step toward reconciliation. Perhaps there is no more powerful feeling provoked by a museum than shame, which extends beyond the initial encounter with an object and allows for an extended moment of recognition. – Lapham’s Quarterly
What If The Tech Revolution Was Just An Illusion Of Progress?
Ross Douthat: “What if the feeling of acceleration is an illusion, conjured by our expectations of perpetual progress and exaggerated by the distorting filter of the internet? What if we — or at least we in the developed world, in America and Europe and the Pacific Rim — really inhabit an era in which repetition is more the norm than invention; in which stalemate rather than revolution stamps our politics; in which sclerosis afflicts public institutions and private life alike; in which new developments in science, new exploratory projects, consistently underdeliver?” – The New York Times
Meaning Is More Important Than Happiness (The Path To One Is The Other)
Given that psychological pain is so ubiquitous, we should focus less on what might make us happy, and more on achieving a sense of meaning, regardless of how we’re feeling. – Aeon
Here’s How Hard It Is For Musicians To Make A Living From Streaming (Spoiler Alert: You Really Can’t)
For example, Taylor Swift’s song “Shake It Off” had a whopping 46.3 million streams in 2017 and earned between $280,000 and $390,000, according to one report. Swift, one of the world’s biggest pop stars, will generate more streams with one song than most musicians can accumulate in a lifetime. Another study by Digital Music News found that Pandora had the highest per-play royalty rate. At Pandora’s 1.68 cents per play, a musician would need about 114,149 plays to earn the U.S. monthly minimum wage ($12 per hour) of $1,920. – Seattle Times
Singing & Signing: How Christine Sun Kim Brought Her Whitney-Biennial “Rage” to the Super Bowl
After making a powerful impression at last year’s Whitney Biennial with her six drawings of pie charts plotting Degrees of Deaf Rage, deaf artist Christine Sun Kim reached a much wider, more diverse audience — at the Super Bowl. – Lee Rosenbaum
The Best of the “Black Symphonies”
Over the past decade, both William Grant Still and Florence Price have acquired new prominence. But the buried treasure is William Levi Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony of 1934. – Joseph Horowitz
Roberto Magris And Two Good Czechs
An Italian of Slovenian ancestry who grew up in Trieste, pianist Roberto Magris frequently tours in Europe and the United States. Here, we see and hear him and his colleagues in the Birdland Jazz Club in Neuburg a.d. Donau, Germany. – Doug Ramsey
Trump Versus Architecture Is Really Trump Versus Experts
The proposal would allow Trump to create a “President’s Committee for the Re-Beautification of Federal Architecture” which would enforce this design mandate, and this panel would exclude “artists, architects, engineers, art or architecture critics, members of the building industry or any other members of the public that are affiliated with any interest group or organization” involved in architecture. Speaking as an architecture critic, this is insane and borderline-totalitarian. – The New Republic