Carla Hayden is about to take over as the Librarian of Congress. She’s “aware of but undaunted by the library’s challenges, including outdated technology, a storage crisis for its rapidly growing collections and a demoralized staff. A 2015 government report found widespread mismanagement of its IT systems, which wasted millions of dollars and hampered operations at the Copyright Office and elsewhere.”
Tag: 09.13.16
Robert Gottlieb: My Life As A Reader
“Not since Max Perkins worked with Hemingway and Fitzgerald has there been a more admired editor than Robert Gottlieb. His has been, he would admit, a privileged and enviable life, which is really just another way of saying that it has been a life filled with books.”
Some Art Dealers Who Are Experimenting With Models Other Than The Gallery Norm
“Metaphors aside, it is clear how the current art fair-driven system has created a fixed pattern, with little room for negotiation: Small galleries from the periphery can participate at small fairs, and hopefully sell to collectors they would never meet otherwise. Meanwhile, big galleries, such as Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Marian Goodman, and David Zwirner but also Thaddaeus Ropac, Almine Rech, Perrotin, and Massimo De Carlo, become bigger and bigger—from ship to galleon, from galleon to fleet—opening new branches all over the world. But what about the middle sized galleries?”
Want More Diversity In The Film Industry? First You Need Numbers…
To women in an international industry with a depressing record on job equity in the key creative roles, the sunny but no-nonsense Serner is a guru delivering a message of cheerful determination. To hear her tell the story, at a recent TIFF industry panel about how to get more women working as film directors, all it takes is willpower to overcome systemic discrimination and unconscious bias. The Swedish numbers now vary from year to year, but in the best years, half of publicly funded film projects are lead by women, not because the institute set quotas but because it insisted that the individual commissioners who decide on funding become aware of the issue.
Alexis Arquette, The Lady Chablis, And The Barriers They Broke
“In the 1990s, if you wanted to see a trans actor on the big screen, you had remarkably few options. Despite a plethora of films with large transgender roles, … trans actors were almost entirely sidelined from major productions. … But that wasn’t even a conversation in the 90s, when Arquette and Chablis became two of the first trans actors to play trans roles in major mainstream films.”
‘Disruptive And Insulting’: Berlin State Ballet’s Dancers Are Furious That Sasha Waltz Was Made Their New Director
“Berlin’s mayor Michael Müller had last week appointed Waltz and Swedish ballet chief Johannes Öhman as co-directors of Germany’s largest ballet company from the 2019/2020 season on. But in a scathing petition posted on the company’s homepage on Sunday, the dancers said: ‘Unfortunately, the appointment has to be compared to an appointment of a tennis trainer as a football coach or an art museum director as an orchestral director.'”
Alec Baldwin Sues Art Dealer For Fraud For Selling Him The Wrong Ross Bleckner Painting
“The suit asserts that [Mary] Boone deceived [Baldwin] by promising a painting, Sea and Mirror, by the artist Ross Bleckner, that had been sold at Sotheby’s to a Los Angeles collector in 2007, but in fact supplied another similar Bleckner painting, also called Sea and Mirror.”
The Cultural Appropriation Wars Ambush A Literary Festival
“Officials in charge of an Australian writers festival were so upset with the address by their keynote speaker, the American novelist Lionel Shriver, that they censored her on the festival website and publicly disavowed her remarks. The event, the Brisbane Writers Festival, which ended Sunday, also hurriedly organized counterprogramming, billed as a ‘right of reply’.”
Here’s The Full Text Of Lionel Shriver’s Speech About Cultural Appropriation
“I’m afraid the bramble of thorny issues that cluster around ‘identity politics’ has got all too interesting, particularly for people pursuing the occupation I share with many gathered in this hall: fiction writing. Taken to their logical conclusion, ideologies recently come into vogue challenge our right to write fiction at all. Meanwhile, the kind of fiction we are ‘allowed’ to write is in danger of becoming so hedged, so circumscribed, so tippy-toe, that we’d indeed be better off not writing the anodyne drivel to begin with.”
BBC Chair To Quit After Four Months On The Job, Following Strong Hint From Prime Minister
“The chair of the BBC, Rona Fairhead, is to step down after Theresa May indicated she would have to apply again for the job she was reappointed to by David Cameron just four months ago. In a statement, Fairhead said that after ‘much thought’ she had concluded it was appropriate not to re-enter the appointment process.”