Lessons On Coping With COVID From A Bankrupt Opera House In 17th-Century France

The Lyon Académie de Musique officially went bust on New Year’s Day 1693, but it was back in business two years later. “How did Académie musicians transform hardship into productive creativity?” writes musicologist Natasha Roule. “How did they assert their relevance in the local community? What worked — and what didn’t? The answers to these questions could fill a book, but we can break them down into three key takeaways.” – Early Music America

How Spain’s National Dance Company Made It From COVID Lockdown Back To The Stage

Marina Harss: “When the Compañía Nacional de Danza took the stage at the Festival Internacional de Música y Danza de Granada in southern Spain on Wednesday, it was in many ways like any other dance performance. … [Yet] it was the culmination of months of careful planning, involving the development of protocols, testing and a careful, minutely orchestrated return to the studio.” – The New York Times

Charismatic Leaders, For Good And Evil

Anyone concerned with the question of charismatic political leaders necessarily stands in the shadow of Max Weber, the great German sociologist who wrote sketches of the subject not long before his death, a century ago, from a case of pneumonia brought on by the Spanish flu. For Weber, charisma was one of three basic forms of political authority, along with traditional rule based on custom and rational rule based on law and bureaucracy. – The Point

Rick Brettell, Texas Art Critic, Museum Director, Fundraiser For The Arts, 71

In 2014, he secured $17 million from Mrs. O’Donnell to create the institute of art history. In 2017, UTD partnered with the late Margaret McDermott to create the Richard Brettell Award in the Arts, which, every other year, bestows $150,000 upon an artist “whose body of work demonstrates a lifetime of achievement in their field.” – Dallas Morning News

How The Influential New-Play Conference PlayPenn Blew Up

PlayPenn doesn’t have new leadership yet, but its old leadership is gone. Earlier this week the organization’s board accepted the resignation of its founding artistic director, Paul Meshejian, and dismissed associate artistic director Michele Volansky, after a firestorm on social media, amplified in the Philadelphia press, brought to light longstanding practices many artists and former staff identified as racist and exclusionary. – American Theatre

A New Idea For Artist Resale Royalties Contracts

Joseph del Pesco, International Director of KADIST: “Sales of art in the US reached $29.9 billion in 2018 … Imagine if just 2 percent of that $29.9 billion did some good. That’s 600 million dollars reaching charitable organizations, about four times the yearly budget of the National Endowment for the Arts. Now imagine if that $600 million was controlled by non-profits run by artists …” – Artnet

Illegal Trade In Antiquities Is Not As Big As We Think It Is: Study

A new report [by the RAND Corporation] claims that … the true size of the market in illicit antiquities may be ‘much smaller’ than is regularly reported. Perhaps more controversially, the report claims that ‘fuelling this disconnect between reported looting and assumed markets for these goods is the problem that bloggers, journalists and advocacy groups, although often producing high-quality research, are rewarded for sensational headlines and claims that bring attention to their issues and readers to their pages or sites’.” – The Art Newspaper