Although momentum behind AI-generated art has been building for a while, the release of Stable Diffusion might be the moment the technology really takes off. It’s free to use, easy to build on, and puts fewer barriers in the way of what users can generate. That makes what happens next difficult to predict. - The Verge
The story enacted by Viola Davis and her colleagues is fictional, but the Agojie did actually exist: a troop of women warriors, founded in the early 1700s in the Kingdom of Dahomey (in present-day Benin), which grew to 6,000 strong by their peak a century later. - Smithsonian Magazine
Back in March, early in the invasion, Sergiy Ivanchuk was driving escaping civilians from the besieged city of Kharkiv when his car came under Russian gunfire. Six months later, thanks to remarkable luck and hard work, he is safe in German and studying voice once more. - The New York Times
"I absolutely knew there was no way I would get out alive. I was going to ruin everyone's childhood. ... Everything that was presented as a virtue when (the novel) was taught to us in school gets questioned." - San Francisco Chronicle
"She has only 20 predecessors, most of whom held their positions for life. ... Over the centuries, the function of the master as primarily a musician composing and performing for the pleasure of the sovereign has evolved into something more akin to a poet laureate." - MSN (The Washington Post)
The 15 million yen (currently $104,000) prizes have been awarded to artist and dissident Ai Weiwei (sculpture), filmmaker Wim Wenders (theatre/cinema), pianist Krystian Zimerman (music), artist Giulio Paolini (painting), and Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of the firm SANAA (architecture). - Artforum
Management says that the museum will remain open to the public despite the walkout and picket line, which the union is staging to press for some progress in bogged-down contract negotiations that have dragged on for two years. - The Philadelphia Inquirer
Robert Garland, a former DTH dancer mentored by founder Arthur Mitchell, was the company's first resident choreographer. He succeeds Virginia Johnson, a founding member of DTH who brought the company back to the stage after an eight-year hiatus caused by a debt crisis. - The New York Times
Modern dance in the United States did not emerge from a legible high-art context—a handful of individuals, mostly women, had to make their own, insisting on dance not as entertainment but as art, at a time when they had neither support nor recognition. - BookForum
The English vocabulary is especially limited, with only 170,000 or so words in an English dictionary. What does this mean to the art writer trying to capture a brushstroke? You fall back on tried and true descriptors like lush, bold, tentative, delicate. - LitHub
“Funding and the politics of funding within the Australia Council is dominated by performing arts, the lion’s share of funds goes to performing arts bodies, and it is essentially a performing-arts grants body. It’s time it was recognised as such, and literature split from it.” - The Guardian
It seems logical that an orchestra’s basic tools of sound production – tone colour, dynamics, rhythmic precision and articulation – are strongly influenced by their home concert hall, so much so that they continue to manifest those integrated sonic fingerprints in unfamiliar acoustical environments. - The Strad
Each museum that pledges to surrender some or all of its African collection intensifies the pressure on the holdout institutions to follow. But each of these pledges also intensifies the uncertainty about what exactly is being pledged. What does it mean to return an object “to Nigeria”? - The Atlantic
"Rather than a crime drama in the vein of the Scamming Show canon, Better Call Saul is perhaps best understood as an unlikely Künstlerroman — the story of an artist coming into his own ... an artist whose medium just happens to be scamming." - The Point
