“Third-party guarantees at auction — the art market’s hybrid of a risk hedge and a speculative gamble — are on track to hit an all-time high of around $2.5bn in 2018. … Such deals are now the norm for high-value Impressionist, Modern and contemporary works. But experts warn that third-party guarantees, if misused, may precipitate a crisis.”
Tag: 11.12.18
An Argument Against The Concept Of Intellectual Property
The ubiquitous use of ‘intellectual property’ began in the digital era of production, reproduction and distribution of cultural and technical artifacts. As a new political economy appeared, so did a new commercial and legal rhetoric. ‘Intellectual property’, a central term in that new discourse, is a culturally damaging and easily weaponised notion. Its use should be resisted.
Research: Evidence That The Internet Isn’t Necessarily Polarizing Us
If the most polarized population uses the Internet and social media the least, to suddenly point a finger at technology says more about our anxieties about the rate of technological change than about what has actually happened to us. The fact is that this twenty-two-year-old dynamic of polarization can’t easily be associated with the Internet.
The “Irrelevant” Made Blindingly Relevant
Respect for children means respect for the adults that they will one day become; it means helping them to the knowledge, skills, and social graces that they will need if they are to be respected in that wider world where they will be on their own and no longer protected. For the teacher, respect for children means giving them whatever one has by way of knowledge, teaching them to distinguish real knowledge from mere opinion, and introducing them to the subjects that make the mind adaptable to the unforeseen. To dismiss Latin and Greek, for example, because they are not “relevant” is to imagine that one learns another language in order, as Matthew Arnold put it, “to fight the battles of life with the waiters in foreign hotels.”
How Will Students Know About Shakespeare If They Never Go To A Play?
If Shakespeare is the only named author on the national curriculum, how is it that 31% of those surveyed failed to recognise the playwright’s name? That only 53% had been on a school trip to a theatre is equally depressing, but the two stats might be related…After all, why should they know of him as a playwright if they have never experienced his plays as ‘play’?
Tales From Andy Warhol’s Factories: An Oral History (From Those Who Survived)
Fran Lebowitz: “When you walked in, there was a metal door. After that door opened, there was another metal door. On it, handwritten on a piece of paper torn from a legal pad, was a note that read, ‘Knock loudly and announce yourself.’ I knocked, and someone said, ‘Who’s there?’ I said, ‘Valerie Solanas.’ And Andy opened the door.”
The Show Must Go On? Really? Always?
Lyn Gardner: “Nobody thinks accountants should always put accountancy before everything else, so why is the ‘show must go on’ mentality, whatever the cost, so pervasive in theatre? In part, it is because jobs are hard to come by, and nobody wants to get a reputation for unreliability, but most of all I suspect it is because holding it together whatever the stress you are operating under is seen as a badge of honour, part of being a trouper. No wonder so many deal with the stress by self-medicating with alcohol.”
Sneaking Banned Iranian Writing Around Iran’s Censors
“[Azadeh] Parsapour is the founder of the London-based Nogaam Publishing, a press launched in 2012 to digitally produce Farsi writings that are censored in Iran. Nogaam makes them available free of charge under a Creative Commons license. Iranian readers can access more than 40 titles so far produced by Nogaam on topics controlled in Tehran including immigration, censorship, LGBT issues, underground music, women, relationships, war, and extremism.”
Why We’re Still Talking About Andy Warhol
Warhol didn’t make a mark on American culture. He became the instrument with which American culture designated itself. He was sincere. He could get away with practically anything because practically nobody believed in his sincerity: people haplessly projected cynicism onto his forthright will to surprise and beguile. The secret to his majesty is that he was a square citizen, untroubled by ambivalence and having no use for irony.
Ossie Davis And Ruby Dee — 60 Years Together Onstage, Onscreen, And At The Barricades
A reporter goes on a treasure hunt in the great African-American acting couple’s archives, newly acquired by the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.