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Gleeful Trashiness Is What Makes American Culture Fun. But The Culture Wars Have Chased Trashiness Away. So Where Has It Gone?

Wesley Morris: "The gutter is where our popular culture began, and the gaminess lurking there is our truest guise.  ... Trash is a persistent, consumptive force that'll set up shop in any eager host. And its shamelessness went and found a new home, in American politics." - The New York Times Magazine

Something New: Viral Jazz?

Much truer to the spirit of viral jazz is the musician who fully inhabits a given platform, allowing it to inform their creative process — for a point of comparison, someone like the jazz-conversant polymath Jacob Collier, a harmony and rhythm savant par excellence. - NPR

Subtly As Well As Brazenly, Russian Action Movies Are Propagandizing For Putin’s Ukrainian War

"For an American, it can be easy to forget how much ideology is packed into the genre — until you watch a film from elsewhere, and are confronted with the cartoonish heroes and villains of other cultures." - The New York Times Magazine

Why Didn’t Gaming Criticism Catch On?

Experiencing a game is weirdly different from experiencing a TV show, a movie, a play or a book. They are, to use a drab but accurate phrase, “lean back” culture. You’re the audience, experiencing the art — the artists and creators talking to you. Games, on the other hand, require you to do things. - Medium

Spotify Has Insisted On Exclusive Rights To The Podcasts It Carries. Maybe That Wasn’t A Good Idea

The podcast industry built itself on an open ecosystem: any podcast player could make any particular podcast available.  Then Spotify, after it bought Gimlet Media, started insisting on allowing its podcasts only on its own player.  It's a standard big-business move — and it's backfiring. - Simon Owens's Media Newsletter

The Modern Orchestra Is An Exquisite Piece Of Technology. Its Operating System Could Use An Update

The institution of an orchestra was built for another time. In an age of attacks against institutions, perhaps it's necessary to tweak how the institution works. - The American Scholar

What’s A Poor Stage Director To Do When The Script Calls For Eyeballs Coming From The Floorboards Or The Entire Set On A Steep...

Michael Longhurst, Ned Bennett, Milli Bhatia, and Nadia Latif talk about meeting the challenge of staging the (presumably) unstageable. - The Guardian

Black Writers And Characters Are Appearing In American Fiction More Than Ever Before. Here’s The Difficulty With That.

"Our current problem isn't an insufficient amount of Black representation in literature but a surfeit of it. And in many cases that means simply another marketing opportunity, a way to sell familiar images of Blackness to as broad an audience as possible." - The New York Times Magazine

Intimidation And Self-Censorship Are Rampant In Poland’s Cultural Sphere, Says Report

"The 100-page report ... claims that instead of establishing an explicit, centralized censorship regime, the leading the Law and Justice party has taken a more 'devious' approach, exerting its influence by infiltrating art institutions." - Artnet

This Fernand Léger Painting Was Missing For 100 Years. Turned Out It Was On The Flip Side Of Another Painting.

"A lost Fernand Léger painting has reappeared after more than a century of being hidden behind another canvas. The work, an unnamed piece from the Smoke over the Rooftops series (1911–12), was discovered on the flip side of Léger's Bastille Day, painted later that year." - ARTnews

Which San Antonio Orchestra Will Get County Funding? There’s Been A Bit Of A Battle

The problem: during the period between the board closing the San Antonio Symphony and the musicians forming the new San Antonio Philharmonic, a stopgap organization was created to provide pit musicians for the opera and ballet. It's that last organization that's been funded in the next county budget. - San Antonio Report

He’s Actually Going Through With It: Damien Hirst Is Burning His Own Paintings After Selling NFTs Of Them

"A lot of people think I'm burning millions of dollars of art but I'm not. I'm completing the transformation of these physical artworks into NFTs by burning the physical versions." - BBC

Here Are The 2022 Winners Of The MacArthur Fellowships (Okay, The “Genius Awards”)

The arts figures included in this year's class of winners are visual artists Paul Chan and Tavares Strachan; musician/scholar Martha Gonzalez; film/video artist Sly Hopinka; novelist/journalist Kiese Laymon; percussionist and electronic music composer Ikue Mori; jazz cellist Tomeka Reed; and architect Amanda Williams. - NPR

An Idea Isn’t Copyrightable. But Art Is

Fundamentally, artists must realise that in copyright terms, their creative ideas are worthless until those ideas form part of a tangible piece of work – whether that be as a drawing, a painting, a script, a musical score or a work of literature (for example). - ArtsHub

Philadelphia Museum Of Art Strike Enters Third Week. Here’s What’s Driving It

“It’s kind of a generational movement that I see here. I see it as something coming out of a young workforce that is mostly college-educated and is aware of the role that they play in the economy. And you know, they understand that they need better benefits and better wages.” - Philadelphia Inquirer

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