There’s a lot going on right now. “Archivists, curators, and librarians nationwide are assembling the record of how the pandemic is impacting their communities in real time, collecting everything from makeshift masks to journal entries to protest signs. Their mandate is both urgent and sweeping.” – Wired
Tag: 08.20.20
The Ongoing Reckoning In The Publishing World
Publishing has rather a lot to do to catch up in the diversity, equity, and inclusion fronts. Lisa Lucas, the outgoing director of the National Book Foundation, who is Black, says, “What do you do with data that tells us we’re not diverse enough for the year 2020? We make the culture — we make books. If we are serving a whole country, then we need people within our publishing houses who reflect what our country looks like.” – GEN
What Democracy Looked Like, In Ballot Form
Even before the colorful public ballots of the early United States, actually, “people used the viva voce system, rooted in ancient Greece, where voters announced their candidate to a clerk. In some US colonies, voters would use objects, like corn and beans, to vote yea or nay; and in other states, people would line up on opposite sides of a road to signal how they were voting.” – Hyperallergic
Zoom Theatre After The Pandemic
Assuming that it ever ends – with a vaccine or some kind of terribly expensive, in human life terms, herd immunity – Covid-19 may leave a theatrical legacy that’s hard to shake, at least for a while. And there are some small advantages. “One benefit of staging productions on Zoom, Ridgely says, is the ability to reach a much larger audience than is generally possible with live theater.” – St. Louis Post-Dispatch
In France, Live Theatre Returns With Voiceovers And A Lot Of Acting In The Eyes
And then there are the outdoor performances, with masks: “When a performer speaks a lot onstage, … masks become damp and stick to the skin, so each cast member goes through four or five of them over a two-hour performance.” – The New York Times
Mass Layoffs Has US, UK Museums Rethinking Their Roles
The current crisis raises the question of what exactly a museum is. Is it a collection of objects, or the staff that bring those objects to life and makes them accessible to the public? ‘We need to think about museums not only as repositories for things […],’ Nicole Cook, a member of the Philadelphia Museum of Art Union organising committee, writes via email, ‘but rather as vital centers for scholarship, education, and community, all core activities that revolve around people – and more pointedly, activities that rely on fully staffed museums.’ – Apollo
Art Basel Goes Virtual, Charging Galleries For Virtual Booths
Art Basel organizers plan to present two new online viewing room initiatives in September and October, which they describe as “freestanding, thematic editions.” Unlike previous iterations of the Art Basel-branded viewing rooms, these will not be provided free of charge to exhibitors at the physical fairs. Instead, Art Basel will charge a flat fee of CHF 5,000 ($5,500) for each of the new editions. – Artnet
Theatre Reform: We Shouldn’t Work So Many Hours
“It’s this process that we have spent decades, centuries developing in theatre of how much time it takes to make the thing. In my experience, the process will expand to fill as much time as you give it. So we’ve put ourselves in a place where we say, it’s going to take this many weeks to rehearse and this many hours to tech, and we take that as gospel now.” – American Theatre
A Historical Disinclination To Theatre
One of the key facets of Jonas Barish’s argument is that, throughout history and across cultures, theatrical activity has almost always been met by vociferous opposition. From ancient Greece, when Plato wrote that acting and the theatre would be excluded from his ideal state, to the Soviet era in Russia, when strict governmental regulation dictated what type of work theatre artists were permitted to create, theatre has been subject to both philosophical criticism and material censorship. – Howlround
Is Resilience Overrated?
Here in New Orleans, for example, where I am a relative newcomer, my friends who are longtime residents and who survived Hurricane Katrina greet the word “resilience” with a fiery disdain. This is a city where people have been called resilient for years, and so many I talk to just seem exhausted by it. – The New York Times