The money, distributed by Arts Council England, is part of the £1.57 billion Culture Recovery Fund announced last week by the UK government. In addition, £103 million has been given to heritage sites, with another £650,000 divided between 42 cinemas. Grants to larger organizations that asked for more than £1 million in aid have yet to be announced. – The Guardian
Tag: 10.12.20
A Model? Geffen Playhouse Scores A Virtual Hit And Sells Out Box Office
“When all is said and done, “The Present” will have grossed more than $700,000, an astronomical figure for regional theaters scrambling, often blindly, to devise entertainment for a virtual audience.Cates compared that number to what a typical show in the Geffen’s 500-seat mainstage auditorium might gross during a nonpandemic five-week run — if heavily promoted and highly successful.” – Los Angeles Times
When Great Things Result From World Disasters
“History is studded with oddly salubrious side-effects to truly awful happenings. For instance, The Renaissance (worthy of a cap on the article surely), seems to have entirely ironic parentage. The fall of Constantinople in 1453? Terrible. But… to escape the Ottomans, classical scholars scurried off to Italy carrying armloads of ancient Greek and Latin texts. And suddenly Italy is rereading its past. . . and producing the present. Our present.” – 3 Quarks Daily
American Museums Are Being Challenged On All Fronts
In a year marred by forced shutdowns, decreased revenue, deaccessioned artworks, staff cutbacks and canceled exhibitions, many art institutions have been rocked by a national moment of reckoning and increasingly vocal calls to acknowledge their racist histories and adopt anti-racist practices. Some activists have even suggested completely dismantling museums, echoing demands to defund or abolish the police. – Washington Post
A Book Finds A New Audience In The Last Place On Earth It Hadn’t Gone Before
John Hersey’s Hiroshima, first a 30,000-word article in The New Yorker, became a book almost immediately, and has sold millions of copies in many different languages since. But “one of the few places Hiroshima did not appear in the year after its initial publication was Russia. That changed this past August.” – The New York Times
The Endless Hours Of Architecture Are Bad Enough, And Now There’s Constant Surveillance
From architecture firms that demand their employees log into webcams at 8:30 am and not log off until 10 pm to firms that fired pregnant workers and those who didn’t want to be exploited, architecture is starting to face a reckoning. “The pandemic has finally pushed it into the kind of extreme, exploitative territory where we must all stand up together and say enough is enough.” – The Guardian (UK)