When Maar died at 89, Le Monde forgot to give her an obit until 10 days later, and The Independent said she’d be remembered forever as Picasso’s muse and his Weeping Woman. Now the photographer is getting her own shows, and they’re big – and meaningful: “The sense is of a curtain being pulled back. Forget those Picasso portraits: here is how Dora Maar actually wanted to be seen.” – The Guardian (UK)
Tag: 11.15.19
Carol Brightman, The Chronicler Of The Dead, Has Died At 80
Brightman first published an acclaimed biography of Mary McCarthy, and edited the letters between Hannah Arendt and McCarthy, before she started to become fascinated by the world of the Grateful Dead and the band’s fans. “‘Deadheads are everywhere and nowhere,’ she wrote, ‘so much a part of American life as to appear almost invisible.'” – The New York Times
Disney Spent A Lot Of Money And A Quarter-Century Getting The Internet Wrong
Kara Swisher has been writing about companies and the internet for even longer than Disney has been trying to figure out how to deal with the contemporary world. Swisher: “Forget the dashing Mandalorian. Do you remember Starwave? Infoseek? Go? Daily Blast? Spoonful.com? Club Penguin? Tapulous? Maker Studios? I’d like to say I don’t either, but I know them very well. They were among the many failed efforts by Disney that I have covered as a reporter since the mid-1990s, when it became clear to Disney that this internet thing just might be a big deal.” – The New York Times
Will The New Streaming Landscape Help Or Hurt The Movies?
“Abundance can be its own kind of scarcity. Without a sense of occasion, without the idea that a given experience is special, even rare, all experiences become equivalent, and our attention follows the path of least resistance.” – The New York Times
City Of Seattle Is Reorganizing Support For A “Creative Cluster.” Movie And Music Unions Aren’t Happy
Seattle is losing music and movie production. The City is “reorganizing” its film and music office into a a larger office that broadens the definition of creative industries to software and gaming. Workers in the film and music industries say they fear support for their work will diminish. – Crosscut
Fans And The False Intimacy Of Podcasts
All across the podcast realm, from the heights of self-help to the depths of true crime, imagined relationships are blossoming. Listeners may press play for the content, but many of them eventually come to nurture something like a one-way friendship with the hosts. – New York Times Magazine
‘Setting Us Up To Fail’: More Than One-Quarter Of Australia’s Arts Organizations To Lose Federal Funding
This week is the application deadline for the next four-year round (2021-24) of Australia Council for the Arts funding for small-to-medium organizations, a category which includes all groups but the largest (such as Opera Australia, the Australian Ballet, and the state capitals’ major symphony orchestras and theatre companies). Hundreds of those organizations have already been eliminated, and of those remaining, the Council says that up to 60% will be unsuccessful. Project-to-project finding will still be available, but it has been slashed in recent years. – The Guardian
Yeast Never Dies
Yeast isn’t a food; it plays on food, like a conductor, or a cook. So when you realize that yeast floats in the air and lives almost forever, you may have more respect for its governance, its fungal baton. – Jeff Weinstein