Tag: 01.22.20

Expanding Best Picture To More Than Five Nominees Was ‘One Of The Best Moves The Oscars Have Ever Made’

Kyle Buchanan: “Of course, the decision to blow up the best-picture category wasn’t greeted with nearly as much enthusiasm in June 2009 … Industry veterans worried that the expansion would sap a nomination of its prestige factor, and many of the publicists and producers who had won previous best-picture fights felt particularly aggrieved, like high achievers learning that the SAT had become easier after they took it. … [Even so,] I’d go so far as to say it saved the show.” – The New York Times

Tim Crowley Saved Marfa, Texas And Built It Into An International Destination. Is He Now Ruining It?

When Donald Judd, the artist who came to the West Texas desert village and attracted other artists there, died in 1994, he left his foundation with $400 in the bank and Marfa faced doom. Then Crowley, a Houston attorney and developer, and his gallerist wife came to town and pumped a lot of money into it, buying properties, building businesses and bringing in new and prosperous residents. But over the last few years, as Crowley’s plans have gotten bigger and more commercial, many Marfans think that this man who owns the whole town has started messing it up for everyone else. – Texas Monthly

Examining The Arguments Over Jeanine Cummins’s ‘American Dirt’

The author got a seven-figure advance, the first print run is half a million copies, the book jacket features gushing blurbs by famous writers, and the book got loads of coverage in The New York Times. But then the Twitterverse came after it, observers called out plot points that strain credibility, and even Cummins herself said, “I don’t know if I’m the right person to tell this story.” And then Oprah got involved. – Vox

NEA Releases Results Of Latest Survey Of Public Participation In The Arts

Among the key findings: 74% of American adults engage with the arts via electronic media, 54.3% attend arts events, and 53.7% create or perform art themselves. Three states, D.C. and metro Cleveland have particularly high rates of attendance at performances, while Vermont, Montana, and metro Dallas lead in art show attendance, and nearly 90% of adults in greater Philadelphia and Baltimore engage with the arts via electronic media. – National Endowment for the Arts

Klimt Thief: “We Have Given A Gift To The City”

Last Friday, when art historians confirmed its authenticity through X-rays to see if the original painting was there, Ermanno Mariani got the curious call, and the voice was oddly familiar. The man on the phone said he was the person Mariani had previously interviewed about the theft. Mariani also received a letter claiming, “We are the authors of the theft of Klimt’s Portrait of a Lady, and we have given a gift to the city by returning the canvas.” He turned the letter, written in large block writing, over to police. – The Daily Beast

An Extraordinary Boots-On-The-Ground Arts Philanthropist In Atlanta

“My desire to give evolved from going to a lot of museums, art galleries and live performances,” he says. “It took years to develop my taste, but once I was on the ground, seeing what these entities could do, it was easy to want to step up and help. I actually wonder why more people don’t do it because I can’t imagine anything more satisfying.” – ArtsATL

Stories Are An Oral Tradition. They Work Differently When You Don’t Hear Them

Once upon a time, none of these stories had yet been fixed on a page (or a clay tablet), but were carried in the physical bodies of the people who committed them to memory. Long before Johannes Gutenberg and his printing press, and 1,000 years before cloistered monks and their illuminated manuscripts, the principal storage facility for history, poetry, and folktales was the human head. And the chief means of transmitting that cultural wealth, from generation to generation, was the human voice. – LitHub

A New Museum That’s Betting You’ll Pay For A More “Experience” Experience

The museum is betting that in a city where tickets to the Museum of Ice Cream cost $38, visitors will be willing to pay for the privilege of experiencing photography in a way that feels more like socializing than doing homework. (Admission for adults is $28; more than at the Museum of Modern Art, which charges $25, but less than for MOIC.)  – Artnet

One Of The Last Full-Length Interviews Of Monty Python’s Terry Jones

“The BBC came very close to erasing all of the original Python tapes, at least from the first season. What happened was that we got word from our editor that the BBC was about to wipe all the tapes to use for more ‘serious’ entertainment — ballet and opera and the like. So we smuggled out the tapes and recorded them onto a Philips VCR home system. For a long time, these were the only copies of Python‘s first season to exist anywhere. If these were lost, they were lost for good.” – Vulture