ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

IDEAS

What Does It Mean To Make Art?

Implicit in the phrase “the artist’s life” is the idea that this is a life apart. We are not so quick to rhapsodize about the insurance agent’s life or the plumber’s. - The New York Times

Struggling To Understand (It’s More Difficult Than Ever)

Not understanding makes bad things happen. When we don’t understand why lightning strikes or ships sink or babies die, sacrificing virgins might seem a viable approach. - Wired

The Next Coachella: Arkansas?

Can a group of contemporary art curators and tastemakers turn the Arkansas town of Bentonville into an art-world hotspot? - Artnet

More Of Us Are Abandoning Cash. Is This Wise?

The economic and enforcement arguments against cash may stack up nicely, but a payment isn’t just an economic or administrative act; it is a social one that depends on the two parties’ common acceptance of a currency and the mode of delivering it. - The Guardian

Sorry, But Paris Is Dead

Paris is dead, and many people like it that way. Living in the ruins of an old Cathedral, Parisians are the ivy that overtake it, the vandals who paint their names on the side of it, and the squatters inside who reinforce its cracking walls. - 3 Quarks Daily

AI Is Getting Awfully Good At Writing. This Has Big Implications

It turns out that with enough training data and sufficiently deep neural nets, large language models can display remarkable skill if you ask them not just to fill in the missing word, but also to continue on writing whole paragraphs in the style of the initial prompt. - The New York Times

We Praise Creativity. But We Shy Away From It

Research has found that we actually harbor an aversion to creators and creativity; subconsciously, we see creativity as noxious and disruptive, and as a recent study demonstrated, this bias can potentially discourage us from undertaking an innovative project or hiring a creative employee. - The New York Times

Comedians Like Bill Maher And Dave Chappelle Are Obsessed With Their Haters

And, quite frankly, it's ruining their comedy. "That isn’t just bad for public discourse—it’s bad for a mainstream comedy landscape that too rarely spotlights the many voices doing subtler, gentler, weirder, or more experimental work." - Time

So Globalism Is Dead You Say? Think Again

International data flows surged as the pandemic sent in-person interactions online. The annual growth rate of international internet traffic roughly doubled in 2020. But that was just a one-time spike. - Harvard Business Review

Somehow, We Decided There’s No Truth. But We Need To Return To The Idea

If truth is a problem now for everyone, if the idea seems empty or useless in ‘the era of social media’, ‘science denialism’, ‘conspiracy theories’ and suchlike, maybe that just means that ‘everyone’ has caught up to where philosophy was in 1922. - Aeon

Minutes? Hours? Who Needs Them? We Need A New Time Measure

Weeks, days, hours, minutes—especially minutes—are just more mechanisms for keeping humans in thrall ultimately based on astronomy, astrology’s lesser sibling. In the globalized information environment we currently enjoy, we should and must construct better timescales. - Wired

Department Of Untruths: Careful Who You Call A Liar

We should hesitate to call someone a liar because we are not privy to other people’s motives or states of mind. That a statement is untrue can usually be established beyond reasonable doubt; that the person who said it knew it was untrue is harder to establish. - Prospect

Margaret Atwood: Feelings As Explanation, Not Excuse

Feelings are real—people do have them, I have observed—and they can certainly be plausible explanations for all kinds of behavior. But they are not excuses or justifications. - The Atlantic

Cities Not Working? Why Not Build New Ones?

At first blush, it might seem obvious. But history is full of failed, unfinished or underperforming scratch-built city projects, in California and elsewhere, and more are in the pipeline. - Bloomberg

The Age Of Cultural Dopes

A cultural dope is someone like me or you, a consumer of culture or a “creative content provider” who produces, or consumes, the preexisting cultural artifacts of the dominant political economy while functioning under the illusion that what they are creating or consuming is “new.” - Los Angeles Review of Books

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