There’s an idea in vogue that if an artist or writer can just talk to enough different people about their experiences in the city, they can give us a clear vision of San Francisco as it is now, as it was, and perhaps even as it will be. We may approach something like the Platonic ideal of the city’s so-called “soul.” – The Baffler
Tag: 06.05.19
America’s First Poster Museum Is Opening
How is it then that the US has never had its own poster museum? “We have a lot of cultural institutions in New York, and there’s a lot of competition between them,” Knight said. “Many of them have poster collections, but they use them as supplemental material. They don’t look at posters first. We think it’s really important to do that because it’s the bottom-up view of history as opposed to the top-down upper-echelon fancy art looking down.” – Hyperallergic
Questions About The Future Of The Vancouver Art Gallery After Its Longtime Director Leaves
The museum has been trying to raise money for a new building for the past ten years and is still a long way from its goal. Kathleen Bartels, who was director for 18 years until last week, had been laboring to get the project done without success. So now what? – CBC
Hartford Stage Gets New Director
Cynthia Rider, who was executive director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival from 2013 to 2018, will begin her new job at Hartford Stage July 1, the theater announced Wednesday. – Hartford Courant
Study: In 18th,19th Century Clusterings Of Writers Made Them More Prolific
Belonging to the London cluster made writers substantially more productive. The study found that “the average writer in London saw their productivity go up by 12 percent. By comparison, writers in smaller clusters, in Dublin, Edinburgh, Oxford, and Cambridge, saw no such gains. Furthermore, being part of the London cluster increased the likelihood of an author having their work published in any given year by 24 percent.” – CityLab
An Explosion Of Concerts And Music Venues In America
The concert business, according to Pollstar, set records in 2018 with more than 152 million tickets moved and $10.4 billion in sales nationally. The live industry’s growth was necessary to offset lost record sales. Those peaked in 1999 at $40 billion and were less than half that last year at $19.1 billion, with just under $9 billion coming through streaming. – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Attacking The Financial Industry: These Artists Bought Debt With Art And Blew It Up (Literally)
They sold money they printed themselves as art works, and used the funds to buy up £1.2 million of debt on the secondary market, where lenders sell bad debts. – The New York Times
Neuroscience: How Using GPS Is Shrinking Our Brains
“When people are told which way to turn, it relieves them of the need to create their own routes and remember them. They pay less attention to their surroundings. And neuroscientists can now see that brain behavior changes when people rely on turn-by-turn directions.” – Washington Post
What If Hollywood Pulls Out Of Georgia? There’s Lots Of Money At Stake, But…
“Although entertainment-industry protests have previously helped derail socially conservative legislation in Georgia, studios didn’t voice significant opposition to the new abortion law while it was being considered by the state legislature. Now, according to the University of Georgia political scientist Charles Bullock, it’s unlikely they can meaningfully impact the law’s future, which is up to the courts.” – The Atlantic
Mona Lisa’s Smile? She Was Faking It, Say Researchers
“Our results indicate that happiness is expressed only on the left side. According to some influential theories of emotion neuropsychology, we here interpreted the Mona Lisa asymmetric smile as a non-genuine smile, also thought to occur when the subject lies,” the authors write in their study published recently in the April 2019 issue of the journal Cortex. – EurekAlert