“The idea of public support for the arts, and especially for individual artists, is a pretty progressive idea. It takes some convincing, even in a largely Democratic place. And despite the fact that just last year Cuyahoga County voters overwhelmingly renewed the cigarette tax for the arts, distrust by artists of the organization they worked to establish could erode that support pretty quickly. The tragedy of that—besides the obvious—is that the individual artist program is, at three percent, a tiny fraction of Cuyahoga Arts Council’s grant making.”
Tag: 12.30.16
NY City Opera Attempts To Rise From The Dead
“It was less than a year ago that it emerged from bankruptcy under new management after a bitter court fight and began staging operas again. Now it must woo back audiences and skeptical donors, and navigate a cultural landscape that has changed dramatically since the heyday of the old company.”
Diversifying: Eighteen Curators To Watch In 2017
“Over the past year, a number of African Americans have accepted prestigious appointments at important art and cultural institutions across the country. These curators and cultural leaders to watch are in positions to drive exhibition programming, acquisitions, innovations in what is considered art, influence hiring, fellowship and internship opportunities, and how institutions grow their audiences.”
Fake News? Try Fake Conferences And Fake Scientific Journals
“There are real, prestigious journals and conferences in higher education that enforce and defend the highest standards of scholarship. But there are also many more Ph.D.-holders than there is space in those publications, and those people are all in different ways subject to the “publish or perish” system of professional advancement. The academic journal-and-conference system is subject to no real outside oversight. Standards are whatever the scholars involved say they are.”
2016 Was The Year That Book Sales Turned A Corner
“The notion that owning a bookstore is akin to an act of altruism has become a little outdated. In fact, 2016 offered encouraging evidence that after years of dire news stories about the literary industry selling books has once again become sensible business. To be fair, the past year was less a book boom than a hold-steady.”
Is Experience Neurological? So What’s Real?
“Neuroscientists can correlate activity in the brain with specific kinds of experience, but they cannot say this activity is the experience. In fact, the neural activity relating to one experience often seems nearly indistinguishable from the neural activity relating to another quite different experience. So we remain unsure where or how consciousness happens. All the same, the internalist model remains dominant and continues to be taught in textbooks and broadcast to a wider public in TV documentaries and popular non-fiction books. So our questions today are: Why this apparent consensus in the absence of convincing evidence? And what new ideas are internalists exploring to advance the science?”
Critics, Writers, Bookstores Push Back Against Simon & Schuster For Signing White Nationalist To Big Contract
Many in the publishing world reacted with outrage over the S&S signing. “Soon, however, pushback against the publisher transitioned from simple outrage to calls for organized resistance. One literary journal announced a boycott on coverage in 2017.” Authors announced they’d leave S&S and others were contemplating boycotts.
What Are The Most Important Books Of The Last 20 Years (The Experts Don’t Agree)
“I reached out to some of my favorite contemporary writers and asked them to name the most important books published over the last two decades. To my surprise, there wasn’t a lot of overlap in their respective choices: only 14 titles were chosen by more than one author.”
The Showbiz Folk We Lost In 2016
Playbill helps us bid farewell to David Bowie and Brian Bedford, Patti Duke and Patrice Munsel, Edward Albee and Zsa Zsa Gabor, and all too many more.