– Eater
According to Steve and Wendy, Tin House is gone ... And Sydney Symphony Is altruistic to its own detriment ...
Sister Wendy, 88
After obtaining permission to study art in the 1980s – largely through books and postcard reproductions of the great works obtained from galleries – Sister Wendy decided to write a book to earn money for her convent. Contemporary Women Artists, published in 1988, was followed by more books and articles. In 1991 the BBC commissioned her to present a television documentary on the National Gallery in London. Dressed in black nun’s habit, Sister Wendy stood in front of paintings, and without script or autocue discussed them to the camera. – BBC
Sydney Symphony Gives Back A Million-Dollar Grant
Why? Because the money was stripped from smaller arts organizations in New South Wales, and the SSO wasn’t into that, despite needing the money for relocation during renovation. –Sydney Morning Herald
Liverpool Crowdsources A New Logo Design. Designers Decry Exploitation
The authority shared the call for submissions on Twitter earlier this month, asking: “Do you have a passion for design and creative branding development? Can you create a simple but visually impactful logo that captures the spirit of an exciting cultural and creative programme?” But the message attracted more than a dozen critical responses, with several users seeing the competition as a request for design work at below market rates. – Arts Professional
An Argument For Collecting As Many Books As Possible
An antilibrary is a powerful reminder of your limitations — the vast quantity of things you don’t know, half-know, or will one day realize you’re wrong about. By living with that reminder daily you can nudge yourself toward the kind of intellectual humility that improves decision-making and drives learning. – Fast Company
Sure, the site, and its books and workshops, will continue, but losing the literary magazine is a real blow. Karen Russell: “Tin House was so inviting, so beautiful and so playful. … You sort of felt like readers all are welcome here, and these are your people. These are the lovers of language, the super weirdos, the poets and the wizards that you want to be with.” – NPR
Stendhal Syndrome Gets Lethal: Tourist Finds Botticelli’s Venus Literally Heart-Stopping
An Italian man broke down and suffered a heart attack after gazing at Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (ca. 1485) at the Uffizi Galleries in Florence over the weekend. The unnamed man was treated by a group of four visiting doctors with a defibrillator and was rushed to a hospital where he is currently recovering.” — Artnet
A Successful Novelist Who Spends Her Capital Helping Others Up The Literary Ladder
The community-minded Celeste Ng found wide success with her 2014 debut Everything I Never Told You, and absolutely wild success withLittle Fires Everywhere, her novel of race, class, and adoption in an idealistic suburb. Her fans – and broadcast adapters – include Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington. Her focus is on lifting others with her: “Ng’s strategic benevolence is aimed at promoting her peers, of course, but also at fixing skewed, reductive notions of representation.” – The New York Times
A Christmas Without Enough Paper Books As Printers Run Into A Bottleneck
Turns out a banner year for publishing (which is what 2018, improbably, turned into) means that printers are running as fast as they can, and it’s not fast enough. That’s “creating a backlog that has led to stock shortages of popular titles.” (They do have these things called ebooks and audiobooks? But … anyway.) – The New York Times
