“After initial COVID-19 shutdowns in March, many organizations made significant investments in reopening this summer or moving activities online, … ‘and now it appears they won’t be able to reap any impact from that investment, at least for quite a while.’ … For groups that showed resourcefulness in moving operations online and making attendance safe for visitors, the new restrictions feel like a step backward. More critically, the new constraints threaten an already fragile sector.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer
Blog
Why I Steal From Museums: Mwazulu Diyabanza Makes His Case
“These artefacts belong to me, because I am African and Congolese. But also because I am a descendant of Ntumba Mvemba, one of the royal families that founded the Kingdom of Kongo in 1390. … People have to understand that if someone stole their heritage they would react as I am now. Many of my ancestors died protecting these items: they were beheaded. … Their pain is inside me.” – The Guardian
France’s Anti-Colonialist Art Thief-Activist Acquitted On Free-Speech Grounds
Mwazulu Diyabanza and three accomplices were found not guilty of attempted theft by a judge at Marseille’s High Court over a July 30 incident in which the four men took a ceremonial ivory spear from its perch in the city’s Museum of African, Oceanic, and Amerindian Arts, carried the object to the museum’s courtyard, denounced the “plunder” of African art by European colonials during the 19th and 20th centuries, and awaited the arrival of the police. – Artnet
The Met Museum @150: Peter Schjeldahl
“The Met is our Home Depot of the soul. It has just about whatever you want, and it has a lot of it, very largely the harvest of past donations, en masse, of the collections of major benefactors—a New York tradition that, per a bequest in 1969, entitled the banker Robert Lehman to require the construction of a whole new wing, devoted to his gifts. (That was annoying, but the art was worth it.)” – The New Yorker
“Toy Story” Is 25 Years Old
Toy Story might have been the first fully digital production, but its exhibition depended upon recording those digital images onto analogue film strips. This was a technology that had been in use, largely unchanged, since moving pictures first appeared a century earlier. – The Conversation
Snapchat Offers $1M/Day For Content Creators To Compete With TikTok
Snap is launching Snapchat Spotlight, which will show users a stream of publicly submitted posts surfaced based on personalized content algorithms. Snapchatters who contribute to Spotlight are eligible to get a cut of more than $1 million daily, doled out based on popularity. It’s a bid by Snap to keep top creative talent on its platform — as it faces growing competition from short-form video rivals TikTok and Instagram. – Variety
The Remarkable Life Of The Notorious Art Thief
The privilege and social rank that Bridget Rose Dugdale repudiated gave her the trained intellect and discerning eye that made her the most notorious (and nearly the only) female art thief in history. – Washington Post
Remember Disruptive Technologies? There Are Way Fewer Of Them These Days
Since about the year 2000, disruption, or what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction,” has become less and less common in the US economy, according to a recent working paper by researchers at the Boston University School of Law. – Quartz
Relax and enjoy the show
Though we would all rather have the option of being able to gather together to see performances and exhibitions, there are real benefits of the relaxed atmosphere of watching from home, the power of which should not be underestimated. Here are a few tangible ways that our current mode of arts participation makes for a satisfying arts experience. – Hannah Grannemann
An -ing Life
You needn’t be old when you’re old. Sure, don’t trip, fall, break. But your brain was wrinkled when it was born, and eyeballs water and cry just like before. This particular flesh package squirms through, or tries, tossing waiting and dreading and with cooking and writing. With loving, as well. – Jeff Weinstein