Aubrey Bergauer: “Giving it away for free, whether by regularly scheduled programming or by striking or locked out musicians, is not getting the job done. It’s not growing audiences, it’s not building tons of new support, and — please hear this — it hurts us when people don’t see how much it costs to produce this art. [Here] are five reasons why free concerts are not serving us well.” – Medium
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Oldest Known ‘Last Supper’ Painted By A Woman On Public View After 450 Years
Plautilla Nelli’s 23-by-6½-foot depiction of Jesus and his disciples was painted for her sisters at a convent in Florence in 1568. When that convent was shuttered by Napoleon’s forces in 1808, the canvas was moved to a nearby monastery, where it was hanging in a (very) humble refectory when it was discovered by an art historian in the early 1990s. And it’s actually thanks to Napoleon that the painting is now on view in a museum. – Atlas Obscura
Alicia Alonso, Cuba’s (Very) Long-Reigning Doyenne Of Ballet, Dead At 98
“Alonso received recognition throughout the world for her flawless technique and her ability to become one with the characters she danced, even after she became nearly blind. After a career in New York, she and her then-husband Fernando Alonso established the Cuban National Ballet and the Cuban National Ballet School, both of which grew into major international dance powerhouses and beloved institutions in their home country.” She remained director of the company until her death, serving for 71 years, and named a successor only this past January. – Pointe Magazine
James Wood: Harold Bloom’s “Anxiety Of Influence”
“You mistook him for no one else: the late, popular style was a faded fan, but it was still recognizably Bloom’s old peacockery. The leaping links, hieratic cross-referencing, and amusingly camp self-involvement—the sense you got that everything made sense inside Bloom’s head, that everyone connected with everyone else within the huge Oedipal family he had made of literature—had been there from the beginning, somewhat masked by the scholarly density and relative propriety of his early work.” – The New Yorker
Why Are Instagram Experiences Referred To As “Museums”
These immersive experiences are branded as exhibits, but that might be where the link to traditional museums ends. The companies are, after all, for-profit businesses that sell experiences that have been expressly created for social media postability. – CityLab
How Different Languages Describe Color
Cultures seemed to build up their color vocabularies in a predictable way. Languages with only two color categories chunked the spectrum into blacks and whites. Languages with three categories also had a word for red. Green or yellow came next. Then blue. Then brown. And so on. – Nautilus
Nobel’s Literature Prize Debacle Exposes Fault Lines Between Art, Politics
Brett Stephens: “We live in an age that is losing the capacity to distinguish art from ideology and artists from politics. “I’m standing at my garden gate and there are 50 journalists,” Handke complained on Tuesday, “and all of them just ask me questions like you do, and from not a single person who comes to me I hear they have read any of my works or know what I have written.” He has a point. He didn’t win a Nobel Peace Prize or some other humanitarian award. His art deserves to be judged, or condemned, on its artistic merits alone.” – The New York Times
Librarians Protest Publishers’ Plan To Limit Their Access To E-Books
Beginning Nov. 1, Macmillan Publishers, one of the so-called Big Five publishing companies in North America, will only allow libraries to purchase one copy of each new e-book for the first eight weeks after it has been released. Librarians who say the decision is unfair to readers are campaigning against it. – CBC
South Korea Wonders: Is Video Gaming A Mental Health Disorder?
Video games are practically the national pastime, played by the majority of adults and more than 90% of adolescents. Rising concerns over the effects of games on mental health have been met with skepticism and disdain by the $13-billion gaming industry. – Los Angeles Times
36 Pieces Of Computer Code That Changed The World
“We construct top-10 lists for movies, games, TV — pieces of work that shape our souls. But we don’t sit around compiling lists of the world’s most consequential bits of code, even though they arguably inform the zeitgeist just as much. So Slate decided to do precisely that. … The editors polled computer scientists, software developers, historians, policymakers, and journalists. They were asked to pick: Which pieces of code had a huge influence? Which ones warped our lives?” – Slate