Features - Page 188

One of the US’ many coronavirus cultural casualties, the Metropolitan Opera, has announced their decision to furlough 41 members of staff indefinitely, and put 11 others on part time contracts.

While the National Portrait Gallery may have closed their doors for the foreseeable, the institution continues to make headlines. Their decision to maintain a relationship with the oil and gas conglomerate BP has met with criticism across the art world.

The death toll in the UK has passed Italy's, previously the worst-affected country in Europe.

Before Covid-19, the greatest drama that came with a trip to the cinema was what size of popcorn to go for. Now, in the coronavirus era, it is unclear exactly how we will return to the plush seats and big screens, at least for the foreseeable.

The first thing you think of when you hear the name Damien Hirst is a shark in a box. Hirst’s infamous piece The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, cemented his name as a figurehead for the YBAs. However, amid the Covid-19 pandemic, his obsession with death remains unsated.

Last night was the biggest event of the cultural calendar. The first Monday in May, a date marked in the diaries of the great and the good across the world, had promised the annual Met Gala, the fodder of cultural comment and memes across the world for weeks and even months to come.

Last year the prospect of a global lockdown as the result of a virus seemed to befit the work of Black Mirror’s creator, Charlie Brooker. Yet six weeks into a countrywide closure, the societal impact of Covid-19 is anything but fictional.

The RfM Group is a multi-faceted accountancy firm headquartered in Lancashire. In conversation with the Leaders Council of Great Britain & Northern Ireland, managing director Paul Newsham discusses how RfM is helping its clients navigate their way through the Covid-19 crisis.

An NHS contact tracing app is set to be released today for council and healthcare workers in a trial exclusive to the Isle of Wight.

In the past six weeks working from home has changed from a choice to a necessity. With the countrywide introduction of social distancing measures and self-isolation, life before Covid-19 is becoming more of a distant memory as the days progress. For some artists, this new reality may inform their work long after the end of the pandemic.

While the outbreak of Covid-19 has resulted in the closure of 95 per cent museums across the world, alternative ways of exploring culture are becoming commonplace. From the Google Arts and Culture app, to the almost daily Instagram live videos from a range of institutions, culture has not disappeared, simply changed its form.

When Bob Iger rode off into the sunset after 15 years as one of the most powerful men in the land, he had well earned his happily ever after. However, the outbreak of Covid-19 had other ideas for his fairy tale ending, and just months after handing over the role of chief executive to Bob Chapek, Iger found himself back in the lurch, trying to save Disney amid a global pandemic.

A novel by Simone de Beauvoir, deemed “too intimate” to be published during her lifetime, will be released next year.

Whoever wrote the old theatrical adage, “The show must go on” clearly did not anticipate a global pandemic. They were by no means alone, with those across the world taken off guard by the outbreak of Covid-19, and its subsequent global impact.