When he died in 1917, Rodin left his estate to the museum, including the original plaster molds of more than 100 sculptures. “Rodin gave the economical system so that the museum could live,” museum communications director Clémence Goldberger explains. The museum still uses these molds to recast new bronze sculptures and sell them — and with a projected loss of 3 million euros this year, the molds have never proved more valuable. – NPR
Tag: 08.08.20
Call For “Radical Shakeup” Of UK’s Cultural Sector
RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) and the British Council published a paper ‘Heritage for Inclusive Growth’ which says the sector’s potential has been stunted by “outdated” views of what – and who – it represents. – Arts Professional
How A Record 100 Years Ago Changed Music
With “Crazy Blues,” Mamie Smith opened the door to a surge of powerfully voiced female singers who defied the conventions of singerly gentility to make the blues a popular phenomenon in the 1920s. Indeed, the blues became a full-blown craze, with listeners of every color able to buy and listen at home to music marketed as “race records.” – The New York Times
How Do We Solve A Problem Like William Faulkner?
A question for everyone who loves to read his work: “How should we now regard this pathbreaking, Nobel Prize–winning author, who grappled with our nation’s racial tragedy in ways that at once illuminate and disturb—that reflect both startling human truths and the limitations of a white southerner born in 1897 into the stifling air of Mississippi’s closed and segregated society?” – The Atlantic
Weird 2020 Moments Continue, With A Booker Longlist That People Actually Want To Read
Novelist Candice Carty-Williams is astounded and, she says, in love with the list, despite the ways that “Book Twitter was excited but baffled that the offerings we usually expect to be on the list were not there.” – The Guardian (UK)
Some Creative Ways To Reopen Theme Parks Safely
Nothing will be the same, or at least for a long while, so why not try something new? “It’s easy to imagine many areas of a theme park resort being refashioned into a special-event space. I’ve been holding out hope that the outdoor grounds of the Disneyland Hotel would be utilized for a food and drink event featuring the talents of the staff at its tiki bar Trader Sam’s. But this is also a chance to re-imagine the theme park space, to view the entire grounds as something akin to a game board.” – Los Angeles Times
Theatre Kind Of Returns With (Of Course) Godspell
At Berkshire Theatre Group’s outdoor production of Godspell, things are different. “For the artists, it’s a brave new world. … They perform six feet apart in the musical about Jesus and his disciples, flanked by plexiglass shields on wheels that protect them and the audience as they sing. For good measure, in their pockets they also have masks, which they put on periodically during the show.” – Los Angeles Times
AI That Writes Prose And Poetry Is Getting Stronger (Uh-Oh)
“The more text to which an algorithm can be exposed, and the more complex you can make the algorithm, the better it performs. … The model that underpins [the AI software] GPT-3 boasts 175bn parameters, each of which can be individually tweaked — an order of magnitude larger than any of its predecessors. It was trained on the biggest set of text ever amassed, a mixture of books, Wikipedia and Common Crawl, a set of billions of pages of text scraped from every corner of the internet.” That means, alas, that GPT-3 has picked up some of the uglier material found in some of those corners. – The Economist
Mao Zedong’s Home Province Is Now The Hotbed Of Chinese Commercial TV
“Making waves is what Hunan Broadcasting System does best. … That is striking for an outfit run by the government of a province that is better known as China’s largest producer of rice and the birthplace of Mao Zedong — ‘red tourism’ centred on Mao’s formative haunts draws devotees of the chairman from around the country. But Changsha, the provincial capital, has become a font of China’s popular culture. It is home to over 12,000 companies involved in creating it. … At their heart in Hunan is a broadcaster with a knack for cranking out programmes that are watched throughout China.” – The Economist