“With a list of conditions that will leave most venue operators scratching their heads, venues can reopen on the basis that a maximum of 30 people – including staff – are allowed in at any one time and they remain 1.5 meters apart. A reservation system must also be in place, with no walk-in customers admitted. Venue owners must discuss potential risks with visitors before they enter. The maximum number of visitors to cultural institutions will be increased to 100 in the following stage of the plan from 1 July, if the virus is kept ‘under control’.” – IQ Magazine
Tag: 05.07.20
Time To Do Away With The Meritocracy?
Meritocracy begins with the idea that people have to be measured on a scale of human value. So when we have decided that meritocracy is the way into higher education — or in particular into government, via higher education — it becomes an essential problem, because participation is then premised on the idea of achievement on a hierarchy of values which you may or may not have subscribed to in the first place. – Chronicle of Higher Education
Thomas Sokolowski, AIDS Activist And Beloved Museum Director, Dead At 70
“[He was] one of the four founders of Visual AIDS and an organizer of the first Day Without Art … [and] his nearly four-decade career in museums included tenures at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and concluded with a position, taken in 2017, as director of the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.” – Artforum
Why We’re Addicted To Nostalgia
Most kinds of longing can be settled in one way or another, if not necessarily to the satisfaction of the yearner. Nostalgia can only be lived in or abandoned: it is yearning distilled to its essence, yearning not really for its own sake but because there is nothing else to be done. – The Walrus
AI Program Scans Millions Of Historic Newspaper Images And Makes Them Searchable
Assuming the captions are at all accurate, these images — until recently only accessible by trudging through the archives date by date and document by document — can be searched for by their contents, like any other corpus. – TechCrunch
Bread, Jobs, And The Worth Of Stories
“What does it mean to be worth something? Or worth enough? Or worthless? What does it mean to earn a living? What does it mean to be hired? What does it mean to be let go? It’s May now. More than thirty million Americans have lost their jobs. What mattered in February hardly seems to matter now.” – The Paris Review
An Engineering Perspective On Art’s Transformational Potential On Technology
Domhnaill Hernon: “I believe that the arts could be (should be) more transformational in the way they inform more human-centric design. I believe that the arts should be deeply integrated into all companies but especially technology companies. I believe it is critical that the voice of the artist be heard and taken seriously in the context of business and in understanding the role that technology can play in influencing humanity. It is the role of companies to understand and embrace the unique perspectives of the artists, and it is the role of the artist to better understand the needs of industry.” – Americans for the Arts
In Search Of The Next Music Director Of The Fort Worth Symphony
With Miguel Harth-Bedoya stepping down after 20 “transformational” years, Tim Diovanni talks to musicians and observers about potential successors and finds that there is, as yet, no clear favorite. – The Dallas Morning News
How Being Bored Helps Us
We should not fear being bored, say psychologists James Danckert and John D Eastwood, the authors of Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom. Their research has revealed boredom to be widely misunderstood, perhaps even unfairly maligned. Boredom evolved to help us, says Danckert. It signals that we are unengaged, in need of an activity to satisfy us. “I think that’s a good thing, in a lot of ways. How we respond to it is up to us. I think you can minimise it. But do you want to totally eliminate it? I don’t think you do.” – The Guardian
We Might Need To Redesign The Backends Of Theatres
“The best analogy I can provide is the changes we’ve seen in travel since 9/11. Once it was clear that security screenings were here to stay, new airports were designed with that reality in mind. There is no finer example than the airport in Indianapolis where space for screening was designed into the original plan and has contributed to the airport being chosen as one of America’s ten best year after year. Contrast that with Newark Airport where security has been shoe-horned into hallways and gate areas that were not designed for it and aren’t the least bit conducive for it either. Nearly every performing arts venue of any scale in the world is the equivalent of Newark Airport.” – Dance Enthusiast