“They are places for people, made by people. We might like to consider them logical places, centred on facts, but they can’t tell all the facts – there isn’t room. … Museums are a product of their own history, and that of the societies they are embedded in. They are not apolitical, and they are not entirely scientific. As such, they don’t really represent reality.”
Tag: 12.13.17
Afghanistan’s Lost Ancient Cities Are Being Discovered By Spy Satellites
“For archaeologists, Afghanistan is virtually off-limits for fieldwork, as Taliban forces battle the Kabul government in far-flung provinces and security remains tenuous even in the capital. Yet U.S. and Afghan researchers are now finding thousands of never-before-cataloged ancient sites in the country, which for more than a millennium served as a crucial crossroads linking East and West. The discoveries promise to expand scholars’ view of long-vanished empires while giving the battered nation a desperately needed chance to protect its trove of cultural heritage.”
How Berkshire Museum Leaders Got To The Idea Of Selling Art
The story told by the newly released papers, which were made public on Monday, starts in April 2016. That’s when the board of the Berkshire Museum was presented with a detailed report from TDC, a group of museum consultants in Boston. In their “summary of capitalization needs,” TDC concluded that the museum needed about $2 million to pay down debt and about $6 million to improve the facilities. They also penciled in about $23 million in permanent endowments, a sum much greater than the museum’s existing $7.3 million endowment. Altogether, they concluded, the museum needed “an additional $25.61 million in new funds” to “stabilize its operations on multiple dimensions.”
Celebrity Book Clubs Are Hokum Writ Large On Instagram
Or they’re both useful AND ridiculous: “I follow the Instagram accounts of all of the book clubs listed … for reading recommendations—and, of course, for their ‘bookish mood posts.’ It’s a colorful and easy way to keep a following; as users browse Instagram on the subway, we’ll scroll across a picture of Witherspoon reading next to the window, in perfect lighting. She just looks like she has a Nature Box subscription and separate moisturizers for morning and evening. Doesn’t that sound lovely?”
Do You Have Questions About Netflix’s Fairly Creepy ‘Christmas Prince’ Tweet?
Also, what even is The Christmas Prince? And is this a secret Netflix marketing plan? And really, who ARE the 53 people who watched it 18 times in 18 days?
A Requiem For The Victims Of The Khmer Rouge, Created By Survivors
Reporter Joshua Barone meets Rithy Panh and Kim Sophy, the director and composer of Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia, which uses both Western and Cambodian instruments as well as traditional smot singing in a memorial for the two million people – and the huge parts of Cambodian culture – wiped out by Pol Pot’s dictatorship in the late 1970s.
After #MeToo, What Next For Theaters And Actors?
“To fix a broken system is a daunting challenge. But many individuals and institutions around the country have been stepping up to the plate to do just that, in big and small ways.”
After Sale Of Entertainment Assets, What Will A Smaller Fox Look Like?
“The biggest and most immediate changes are likely to be felt at Fox Broadcasting, which will be divorced from studio 20th Century Fox Television. Fox will thus become the only broadcast network not affiliated with a television studio.”
Why Classical Music Audience-Building Strategies Don’t Work
“Working toward greater diversity in new music is necessary and right. The problem is that we’re putting the cart before the horse. Greater inclusivity isn’t an audience-building strategy—it’s an audience-building outcome. Making inclusivity the focus of strategy actually hurts our efforts. All we do is muddle classical music exceptionalism with easily disproven assumptions about musical taste, in the process blinkering ourselves to certain truths about how people use music in pretty much any other context.”
How Our Neurological Wiring Informs Our Aesthetic Taste
“Scientific evidence suggests that most of what we think we see comes from visual processing, perhaps just 20% comes from the actual input to the retina. Again, what is the evolutionary purpose of this? If we encounter a predator and had to construct what we’re seeing from scratch each time, we’d get eaten. So the brain searches the closest match that is already constructed in memory and modifies it with new input from the eye so we can figure out fast if we need to run for it. Looking at art exercises our ability to innovate images.”