Category: issues

For instance, there’s “an avatar that could be programmed with biographical information on W. E. B. Du Bois, whmo users could ask questions to find out about his history. In the surrounding blocks Ethel Waters might be singing the debut performance of ‘Stormy Weather’ at the Cotton Club, and crowds are gathering at the Apollo Theater.”

“Here is the truth: Chastity belts, made of metal and used to ensure female fidelity, never really existed. … Or, as the British Museum puts it: ‘It is probable that the great majority of examples now existing were made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as curiosities for the prurient, or as jokes for the tasteless.'”

“But like its 86-year-old leader” – outgoing Librarian James Billington – “the James Madison Council is a throwback to a different time. Although its mission is outreach, the group is insular and exclusive. Membership is by invitation and individual donations go undisclosed. … Although they’ve raised millions, they’ve spent almost half of their recorded contributions on private parties, exhibition receptions, travel and employees and consultants, financial statements from the council and the library show.”

“The thrust of this argument is simple and bleak: that the digital economy creates a kind of structural impossibility that art will make money in the future. The world of professional creativity, the critics fear, will soon be swallowed by the profusion of amateurs, or the collapse of prices in an age of infinite and instant reproduction will cheapen art so that no one will be able to quit their day jobs to make it — or both.”

“We must be grateful to him for describing in a relatively orderly manner the chaos of hypocrisy and emptiness into which our globalised culture has plunged and to which we seem to have little option but to subscribe.”

“Performing artists across genres say the situation can be just as bad offstage, where cellphones are increasingly intruding on rehearsals, auditions and backstage culture. ‘I’ve had to scream at dancers in rehearsal,’ said choreographer Anthony Rue II … ‘The moment they have a second to breathe, they run to their phone. It takes them four or five minutes to mentally get back.'”

The Broad Stage, which has seen a serious decline in box office income and donations over the past three years – even as it prepares to open a third performance space next year – has hired Stanford Live director Wiley Hausam. He says, “My sense is that this is a community willing to take artistic risks and do stuff that’s more interesting.”

“Julia M. Stasch … explains in the organization’s annual report that the emphasis going forward will be on a smaller number of bold and even risky ‘big bets.’ These will be results-oriented, defined-time projects, as opposed to the more open-ended organizational support it has provided in the past.”

Trinity College Dublin needs funds for the upkeep of the famous illuminated manuscript and the other items in its rare book collections. So they applied for a worldwide trademark – only to get objections from a fast-food giant.