Category: issues

Maria Marshall, whose work incorporated her children and treated many of parents’ deepest fears, was somehow discovered by the guy who runs the #Pizzagate YouTube channel – so now she has a pack of conspiracy theorists convinced she’s involved with pedophilia. Philip Kennicott talks to Marshall about the real intentions behind her videos and looks at how they get misinterpreted: “Marshall’s art may have succeeded all too well, agitating an anonymous art-phobic audience in almost the same way they are meant to agitate their intended audience in the cosmopolitan art world.”

Basically? Watch out for rich people. Oh, OK, here are a few other things that will help: “Science of Us talked to a number of experts and compiled this advice about how to spot bullshit, how to avoid falling victim to it, and how to call it out online and in person.”

“Under the American Arts Revival Act,” introduced by Nydia Velázquez, “arts workers would qualify for $10,000 of student loan forgiveness. The program would be open to ‘cultural workers, museum professionals, artistic professionals and certain arts and humanities professors’ who work full time to provide services to seniors, children, or adolescents.”

“A stairwell fire early Tuesday has closed Vox Populi, the artists’ space at 319 N. 11th St., displacing the artists and businesses in the entire building for an undetermined time, forcing tenants to find new locations.” Among the events affected: the Philadelphia Bad Theater Fest, scheduled for this weekend.

“The National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal Opera House and the Southbank Centre will all lose 3% of their [Arts Council England] national portfolio organisation grant throughout the next funding period, which runs from 2018 to 2022. … [The cuts] will allow funding for other London-based companies to remain the same and for smaller companies to be brought into the portfolio. … An additional £170 million will be spent outside London across the next four years, and more than 60% of all investment will be beyond London” – this after years of complaints that too much of the national body’s money was spent in the capital.

Men’s rights “swamp monsters” hastened to chastise the store for one of its Facebook posts, giving it a ton of one-star reviews overnight. Then customers, and a flood of others, overwhelmed the one-star reviews with five-star reviews. The bookstore has a special ethos: “‘We are first and foremost a community space with a strong set of beliefs and values, with a community who shares those values. We sell books we love to people who appreciate them,’ said Currie. (One of those regular customers turned up to the bookstore on Tuesday morning having baked them an ‘anti-troll sour cream and walnut cake.’)”

Why? Because they care? Because they’re not doing evil? Ha! No: Because, even though the practice is only for personal email and not corporate email, the scanning “has made it difficult for Google to find and retain corporate clients for its cloud services business … due to general confusion over Google’s business tactics and an overall apprehension to trust the company with sensitive data.”

The podcast, originally a discussion between host Brian Reed and a man in the town he calls “S-Town,” is now a genuine phenomenon. But what are the ethics of so many of knowing so much about the life of someone we’ve never met? “None of this is easy. Or ethically clear. But it is moving in a way that I haven’t felt in a long time. One of the things a large and pluralistic society denies us is proximity. And with that denial, the lives of our fellow citizens are harder to imagine, creating a kind of empathetic poverty that erodes our shared life.”

What (the heck?!) happened between The Joy Luck Club and the just-wrapped Crazy Rich Asians?

As performance art becomes more popular, it is changing. Many are embracing elements of dance, film, theatre and sculpture, even street theatre and rap music. “Performance art was stuck in the 1970s: protest, people cutting themselves,” RoseLee Goldberg, the founder of Performa, said last year. “Some years ago I wondered: why don’t we have visually dazzling, emotional and intellectually challenging performance? Why does everything have to be a single gesture performed on the Lower East Side?”