Tag: 07.11.20

This Exhibition Invited Visitors To Steal The Art. How Long Did It Take For The Place To Be Stripped Bare?

Roughly nine minutes. In famously low-crime Japan, no less. Organizer Tota Hasegawa, owner of the Same Gallery in Tokyo, had expected the “Stealable Art Exhibition” to run for ten days, but so many aspiring thieves showed up for the midnight start time last weekend that he had to open the doors half an hour early. (The cooperative Japanese crowd did obey the requests to take only one artwork per person and to steal quietly.) – Yahoo! (AFP)

Seattle Singer Lady A Sticks Up For The Right To Keep Her Name

The black Seattle blues singer has been in talks with the band [formerly known as Lady Antebellum] for weeks about using the name, maintaining that she doesn’t want to share the Lady A brand and that she shouldn’t have to fight to keep a name she’s used for more for 20 years. With a newly filed lawsuit from the band, she now may have to fight in court for it. – Rolling Stone

LACMA’s Plans For Its New Home Seems To Be Deeply Unpopular. Can Anything Be Done?

COVID-19, unfortunately, has given the nation pause, but for LACMA it may be a blessing, a reason to apply the brakes: the pandemic has opened up time, offering the museum board, the LA County supervisors, and the public the chance to reconsider what everyone already knows is a mistake. According to a recent survey (conducted by a group with which I am involved), only a shocking five percent of 2,750 people polled want the Zumthor design. LACMA’s stubbornly entrenched board of directors steadfastly refuses to acknowledge that this is the most unpopular public project ever to have been proposed for a major cultural institution in Los Angeles. – Los Angeles Review of Books

Britain’s Choirs Are Conducting Tests To See If It’s Safe To Sing

This week, in an operating theatre at the government’s science facility at Porton Down, a small group of guinea-pig choral singers, some professional and some amateur, are taking part in experiments to measure what happens to those aerosols — droplets measuring five-thousandths of a millimetre or less — when they are emitted by the singing voice. – Spectator

Olympic Ideals Are Great – The Reality Much Less. Is It Time To End The Games?

For the first time, anti-Olympics activists from around the globe are now joining to stand against the Games. Their slogan is “No Olympics anywhere,” and after 200 of them met last summer in Tokyo, one attendee — American Jules Boykoff, who teaches politics and government at Pacific University in Oregon — summed up the ills of the Olympics in a neat list: “overspending, militarization of police, citizen displacement, greenwashing and corruption.” – Washington Post

NYC Nightlife Shut Down And It’s Hard To See It Coming Back Any Time Soon

“Even if you had a hundred people in a space that’s supposed to be 200, are they really going to keep six feet apart? A lot of people expect a nightclub to feel a certain way and have a certain kind of energy. If we are going to reopen at a reduced capacity it will have a different feeling, it will have a different vibe to it.” – Politico

Washington Ballet Artistic Director Julie Kent Says She’s Recovering From Covid-19

The former American Ballet Theatre star didn’t elaborate, but “at least three ballet employees became sick after the Washington Ballet’s online gala June 18, according to several people.” The gala was mostly online, and ballet officials say they followed CDC guidelines in filming the preparation for the gala. In her Instagram post, Kent wrote, “I have joined hundreds of thousands of people around the world that took every precaution, and still contracted this virus. No matter how careful we all are, this can happen to anyone. There is no stigma.” – The Washington Post

USC Will Remove John Wayne Exhibit

The actor, who attended USC on a football scholarship in the 1920s, said some intensely racist things in a 1971 interview. So why did an exhibit honoring him go up at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts … in 2012? In any case: “School officials first responded to the protests in December by expanding the exhibit to include Indigenous filmmakers as well as feminist and critical race theory” – but now it’s coming down entirely. – Variety