How to collectively daydream
Plus, more on the future of museum practices.
Hello and happy November. Since we have last spoken, I:
Saw American Ballet Theatre’s Crime and Punishment and wrote my review as soon as I got home. You can read it here.
Watched Death Becomes Her (1992). Camp!
Took a long walk to Trader Joe’s while listening to Mahler’s fifth symphony.
Went to Fort Greene Orchestra’s Halloween performance of Mozart’s Requiem. If you live in NYC, music director
’s newsletter is a great way to find out about classical music concerts.Voted early and got my updated Covid booster and flu shot.
Let’s get into the news.
We’ve spoken about museums increasingly returning looted and misappropriated items; now, the Penn Museum in Philadelphia has launched a three-year study to examine museum collection processes and establish a set of ethical best practices. The “Museums: Missions and Acquisitions Project” will host workshops throughout its study and, by 2027, will publicly publish its findings.
One good example of ethical collection and curation can be found in the Montclair Art Museum’s Interwoven Power: Native Knowledge/Native Art, which “revitalises the museum’s legendary holdings of more than 4,000 pieces of Native American art through a fresh, atemporal lens, collapsing history with cultural memory,” The Art Newspaper reports. How? The museum collaborated with Native community members and acquired modern and contemporary Native artworks that are displayed alongside historic objects.
Civic engagement. Several universities, including the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and others, have transformed their art museums into places where students can not only register to vote, request ballots, and vote early, but also ask questions about voting. This nonpartisan project leans on the power of design—color, form, and space—to energize potential voters. “In addition to dialing down young voters’ anxiety and confusion whenever possible, we aim to create a positive, welcoming experience that increases youth voter turnout and instills a lifelong sense of voter identity,” wrote Creative Campus Voting Project co-leads, Hannah Smotrich and Stephanie Rowden in Forbes.
A few more assorted museum updates: The Grand Egyptian Museum, a $1 billion project that now houses the largest collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts has officially opened in Cairo, after initially being slated to open 12 years ago, in 2012. A few crowd-drawing artifacts, however, haven’t yet made their debut in their new home; Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus and more than 5,000 artifacts associated with the pharaoh are not yet on display. The former is still on-view at the Museum of Cairo.
And in Poland, art and cultural institutions have breathed a sigh of relief after the far-right Law and Order Party was voted out last year. Now, Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art finally has a permanent location after two decades of operating via pop-up. The building itself is a white, light-filled rectangle that critics are divided on, but some see as a “clean slate.” Critically, this space, which will primarily show work by Polish artists when its permanent galleries open in February, will be a place free of censorship, according to mayor city’s mayor, Rafał Trzaskowski. This is a change: as Frieze reported, right-wing rule of the country led arts leaders to “adhere to conservative ideals” lest they lose their funding—a phenomenon we have seen carried out in at least one southern state in the U.S.
In New York, the Whitney Museum could expand its gallery and programming space in the Meatpacking District if currently indicted mayor Eric Adam’s proposal goes through. The renovated Frick Museum will finally reopen in April.
When you view a dance performance, your mind goes to the same place it does when you’re meditating and concentrating internally, shows new research by cognitive neuroscientist Guido Orgs and choreographer Matthias Sperling. Seeing a piece with a live audience is something akin—neurologically speaking—to “collective daydreaming.”
A win for the public transit fans. Families—especially those with young children—traveling through the Gloucestershire countryside in the U.K. can now enhance their trip with an accompanying “audio play” made by the kid-focused theatrical production company Aurora. All they have to do is download an app, and children will find themselves entertained on two specific train routes. Must be nice to live in a country with effective train infrastructure!!
Doing, not just showing. Museums and art galleries—many of which frequently spotlight works of art representative of the ongoing and worsening climate crisis—are beginning to realize that it’s not enough to simply platform a topic; their actions have an impact, too. That’s why an exhibit at the Hammer Museum—which is a part of the climate-themed Los Angeles PST Art event we talked about a few months ago—has shipped art via water or land, rather than air, and prioritized the use of sustainable materials in its exhibition catalog, the New York Times reports. Other museums are prioritizing sustainable upgrades, like solar panels, featuring more works from their permanent collections, and tracking their carbon emissions.
One way to make dance accessible to all. Stopgap Dance Company, a U.K.-based troupe that “uses dance as a movement for change” is reimagining contemporary dance with its piece “Lived Fiction,” which incorporates audio description into the overall performance experience. The company promotes inclusivity with its cast of deaf, disabled, neurodivergent dancers—but its creative team realized that its performances were not able to be enjoyed by all. Throughout “Lived Fiction,” the show’s co-writer Lily Norton stands on stage, narrating the movement of the piece and the emotion that the choreography captures. Dancers, too, have costumes with auditory elements, like zippers and keys.
Instead of relying on literal description, “Norton describes the way their bodies coil together, skin-on-skin, their eyes meeting, how one ‘slips like water’ over the other. I feel the tenderness of the dance, even though I don’t know every move that’s happening,” writes Caroline Butterwick, a visually impaired critic, for The Guardian. “For the first time, I’ve been given my window into dance.”
More than 2,700 writers, including Annie Ernaux, Jhumpa Lahiri, Sally Rooney, and Percival Everett, have signed an open letter published on LitHub, pledging not to work with “Israeli cultural institutions that are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians.” The writers are not boycotting Israeli cultural institutions as a whole, as some have incorrectly interpretted. Rather, they define complicity with two qualifiers: “We will not cooperate with Israeli institutions including publishers, festivals, literary agencies and publications that: A) Are complicit in violating Palestinian rights, including through discriminatory policies and practices or by whitewashing and justifying Israel’s occupation, apartheid, or genocide, or B) Have never publicly recognized the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people as enshrined in international law.” You can read the whole letter here.
If you are feeling anxious about the week ahead, it might help to watch this video of cellist Sophie Kauer serenading ducks in the English countryside with Saint-Saëns’s “The Swan.”▲
Thanks for the recommendation!