“Indeed, a case can be made for greater government intervention in much of our cultural landscape. … Like it or not, public funding must come with public accountability. But defending the government’s right to interfere in the arts and museums becomes much harder when government funding keeps declining. Minority shareholders don’t get to tell a chief executive how to run their business.” – The Art Newspaper
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UK’s Culture Secretary Questions Continued Existence Of BBC And Other Public Channels
In an essay for The Telegraph, Oliver Dowden asks, “Is [the BBC] keeping the British public’s confidence when it comes to its impartiality, and does it truly represent the nation?” and writes that a panel he is convening will be “asking really profound questions about the role these broadcasters have to play in the digital age – and indeed whether we need them at all.” – The Telegraph (UK)
There’s One Place In The World Where A Major Art Fair Just Opened Normally
That’s South Korea, where the novel coronavirus is largely under control and Art Busan has now begun in the country’s second city. The fair didn’t begin on schedule (it was postponed from its usual date in May), but it is happening as other Asian fairs (such as the new Art SG in Singapore) are still being cancelled. – ARTnews
Keys To: A Long Life In Dance
When it comes to the secrets of longevity in a dance career, Linda Austin and Bobby Fouther had similar thoughts: you do what makes you happy, just keep going, and ignore the pressures to be liked. In an interview for a book called Beauty is Experience: Dancing 50 and Beyond, by Emmaly Wiederhold with photographs by Gregory Bartning, Austin said, “If you are stubborn enough and love it enough, you’ll find a way to keep going. You do need some outside validation from time to time. I’ve always gotten just enough to keep me going but not enough to make me comfortable. The carrot is always just ahead.” – Oregon ArtsWatch
The Smithsonian’s Slow Walk To Re-Opening
“The building is cleaner than it’s been since 1964. It’s fabulous,” said Anthea M. Hartig, director of the National Museum of American History. Daily attendance there is about a tenth of normal, Hartig said, creating a different experience. “Instead of doing the rush through, people are spending more time because they can.” – Washington Post
Virtual Cabaret That You Can Boss Around
“In addition to occasionally telling a performer what to do, audience members set the order in which the show’s components — short scenes (written by Bear), dances, musical bits, computer-generated poetry — were executed. We could raise a virtual hand to roll virtual dice, and the cast of six would perform whatever scene had been assigned to the resulting number.” – The New York Times
AI-Powered DeepFake Music Can Now Recreate Artists
Along with Sinatra, they’ve done what are known as “deepfakes” of Katy Perry, Elvis, Simon and Garfunkel, 2Pac, Céline Dion and more. Having trained the model using 1.2m songs scraped from the web, complete with the corresponding lyrics and metadata, it can output raw audio several minutes long based on whatever you feed it. Input, say, Queen or Dolly Parton or Mozart, and you’ll get an approximation out the other end. – The Guardian
How Choral Groups Are Finding Their Voices
“That sense of belonging you get while standing before a chorus of hundreds singing at the holidays isn’t just you feeling festive — it’s your body behaving like a body. If talking to a loved one over Zoom doesn’t feel quite the same as sharing a sofa or a coffee in person, it’s partly because — get ready for some science — you’re not feeling the same vibrations. It may be why I’m genuinely impressed but ultimately unmoved by the Zoom choruses that exploded in popularity this summer.” – Washington Post
The End Of Post-War Liberal Globalism?
“This narrative of a US-led global journey to the promised land was always implausible. Four years of Trump have finally clarified that between 2001 and 2020—and through such events as the terrorist attacks of September 11, intensified globalization, the rise of China concurrent with the failed war on terror, and the financial crisis—the world was moving into an entirely new historical period. Moreover, in this phase, many ideas and assumptions dominant for decades were rapidly becoming obsolete.” – New York Review of Books
How (And When) Humans Learned To Invent
“Something happened in the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens to cause an explosion of ingenuity orders of magnitude greater than anything seen in other species, including our big-brained cousins the Neanderthals. But what? And when?” – Literary Review