With local authority funding for culture now more than £236m lower than in 2010, and museums alone having lost £109m in annual funding over the past decade, the Government’s promise of £250m for culture over the next five years will at best put a sticking plaster on a patient with a life-threatening injury. – Arts Professional
Tag: 10.15.19
The Rehabilitation Of Marie Antoinette
“This week, 226 years since her execution on Oct. 16, 1793, a new exhibition in Paris aims to show how the queen’s image has been transformed in recent years. From reviled royal to pop icon, her face now appears on gift shop souvenirs at her former home at Versailles, on bars of chocolate, hairbrushes, mugs, shopping bags, fridge magnets and snow globes.” – Los Angeles Times
Shape-Shifting Screens: How Filmmakers Are Playing With Aspect Ratios
The proportions of movies’ height and width have changed several times over the course of cinema history, but, for practical reasons (projectionists don’t like changing equipment all the time), at any given time the ratios have been standardized. Until the rise of digital projection, that is. Now it’s fairly easy for filmmakers to play with aspect ratios, and that’s what they’re doing. Ben Kenigsberg looks at four examples from this fall’s releases. – The New York Times
There’s Doublethink At The Heart Of Arts Awards, And This Year’s Double Booker Prize Brought It To The Surface
“Everyone agrees that competition is the enemy of art. And yet, on the whole, there is also an agreement to conspire in the notion that it isn’t. This paradox, this doublethink, usually works fine, since it opens up the space in which the extra-artistic functions of prizes can be fulfilled.” Charlotte Higgins analyzes how this doublethink works — and how the decision of this year’s Booker jury to flout the prize’s rules messed it up. – The Guardian
Why We Define Ourselves By What We Own
With age (and lawyers), we develop more sophisticated ways of resolving property disputes, but the emotional connection to our property as an extension of our identity remains with us. – Aeon
How Apple Made Its Move Into TV Production
“After a few false starts and a little offscreen drama, AppleTV+ finally makes its big debut with a slate of shows, Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon, and a billion potential customers ready to see what original programming looks like from the world’s largest company, led by CEO Tim Cook.” – The Hollywood Reporter
Number Of Self-Published Books In U.S. Up By At Least 40% In One Year (And Probably Much More)
“According to Bowker’s annual survey of the self-publishing market … the total number of print and e-books that were self-published in 2018 was 1.68 million, up from 1.19 million in 2017. [This figure] does not include self-published e-books by Amazon’s Kindle division, … [which is the] largest publisher of self-published e-books.” – Publishers Weekly
Longtime San Francisco Chronicle Music And Dance Critic Marilyn Tucker Dead At 89
“Tucker’s primary love was music, a devotion that she first cultivated in the Lutheran church of her childhood. But over the course of her [three decades] at The Chronicle, which began in 1964, she developed a wide-ranging versatility that allowed her to write about theater, literature and especially dance.” – San Francisco Chronicle
In ‘Snatch-And-Run’, Salvador Dalí Etching Stolen From San Francisco Gallery
On Sunday afternoon, a man walked into the Dennis Rae Fine Art Gallery, walked up to Dalí’s 1966 hand-colored etching Burning Giraffe, picked it right off the easel, and walked out the open door while the staffer on duty had his back turned. – NPR
Five Women Sentenced For Plot To Blow Up Notre-Dame De Paris
“A French court on Monday sentenced five members of an all-female jihadist cell to between five and 30 years in prison over a failed bid to detonate a car bomb outside Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris. … The five women, aged between 22 and 42, were arrested after a car packed with gas cylinders was found parked near the bustling esplanade in front of the cathedral … on November 4th, 2016.” – The Local (France)