After years of either cuts or stagnant funding, the New York City Council has allocated $4 million for arts instruction and programming in 239 schools (which is not all of them) across the city — all of $16,257 per school. - PIX11 (New York City)
To judge by the number of papers I read last semester that were clearly AI generated, a lot of students are enthusiastic about this latest innovation. It turns out, too, this enthusiasm is hardly dampened by, say, a clear statement in one’s syllabus prohibiting the use of AI. - The Walrus
Even beyond their economic potential, the cultural value of practices more traditionally associated with commercial activity has become more central to the national conversation. - The Conversation
Visibility is only part of the equation. Who controls it? How are cultural narratives shaped? What systems determine access? If we don’t ask these questions, we risk treating discoverability as just another distribution challenge, rather than a fundamental issue of power, representation, and digital agency. - Linked.In
Harvard is the flagship of American higher education ...and what started as a crisis of speech and authority on campus has grown into a fear that internal conflict, amplified by outside pressures, can run it and the whole fleet of American universities aground. - The New Yorker
“The French Government has announced a 50 percent cut in their lauded Culture Pass, four years after its nationwide launch for young people aged fifteen to eighteen to take up cultural activities.” - ArtReview
Three AI programs are set to replace lecture slides in the University of Auckland’s Digital Marketing 304 class when the first semester of the year begins on Monday. “Complete bull****,” one student enrolled in the course said. - New Zealand Herald
"We’ve now seen years and years of austerity, and it’s not just the arts that have taken a hit – it’s anything that sits on the periphery of the mainstream route to work. There do need to be questions asked about how we’re valuing the arts in this country.” - The Guardian
It can be fractured, confined, and eroded—perhaps not all at once, but over time if the conditions are not right for genius to flourish. Politicians can exercise their influence for short-term gain but if we look at the experience of the Soviets and the Nazis, such influence leads to long-term loss. - Nightingale Sonata
“With no standards in place for transparency, we fear this commingling of real and unreal could compromise the nonfiction genre and the indispensable role it plays in our shared history.” Indeed, the generative AI companies even present this footage as fact. - Los Angeles Times
Ahead of the Oscars, the West Bank-set documentary No Other Land was tipped to win - but it still has no U.S. distributor. It's "a bleak comment on the state of a documentary market that has seen buyer interest and dollars shrink.” - The Guardian (UK)
“The corporation apologized and removed Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, about the lives of three children caught in the Israel-Gaza war, from its streaming service BBC iPlayer” after news broke that one of the 13-year-old subjects is the son of a Hamas official. - The Hollywood Reporter
If Emilia Pérez doesn’t win much tonight, at least it looks good: "Saint Laurent clothes played pivotal roles in the wardrobes of various characters, including a faux fur coat worn by Selena Gomez and a red suit worn by Zoe Saldaña.” - The New York Times
“French president Emmanuel Macron has said he is concerned about the 'arbitrary detention’ and health of Boualem Sansal, days after the French-Algerian author began a hunger strike over his imprisonment in Algeria.” - The Guardian (UK)
