"At the top levels, where base salary is over $100,000, it takes years of training and experience and an intense audition process to get a job. Here, the difference in the two positions is more about function than skill." - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"Stone heads of Eros, Dionysus, Herakles, and others were uncovered, as well as a full statue of an unidentified hero of Azanoi, of which there are many. The statue measures at over two meters, or just over six-and-a-half feet, and is missing a few chunks from its pedestal and foot." - ARTnews
"His prolific career spanned more than six decades, with over 100 completed buildings erected. ... The bold, helical Art Tower Mito in Japan, the Sidra tree-inspired Qatar National Convention Center in Doha and the Palau Saint Jordi, created for the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, are among his best-known works." - CNN
GPT may be not so much a revolutionary leap forward as another step down a long, well-trodden path. Insofar as it is used for cultural production and commentary, it will streamline already well-established tendencies toward imitation, repetition, and pastiche. - Commonweal
The equation of anonymity on the internet with deviance, mischief and hate has become a central plank in the global war on “misinformation”. But for many of us, anonymity has allowed us to pursue our passion for scholarly research in a way that is simply impossible within the censorious confines of modern academia. - Unherd
If a computer system has no intelligence, creativity, or understanding but can mimic these qualities, when does it become a distinction without a difference? ChatGPT still falls short, but ChatGPT 2031 may be a different story. What is our place in such a world? - 3 Quarks Daily
The word “information” predates Gutenberg. But once printing took off and books proliferated, new kinds of books had to be invented to track, organize and summarize the relentless flood of data they generated: encyclopedias, bibliographies, dictionaries, multilingual bibles, summaries, herbals. - The Wall Street Journal
For the 2022 edition, we examined representation in U.S. museums and the art market for work by Black American artists, female-identifying artists, and Black American female-identifying artists, by tracing museum acquisitions (a total of almost 350,000 objects) and exhibitions (nearly 6,000). - Artnet
The Avatar sequel comes at a time of great debate in the VFX world about the working environment and treatment of VFX artists in the blockbuster movie space. - BBC
Despite a highly misleading headline, Ivan Hewitt uses a West End show called "Handel's Messiah: The Live Experience" to consider the various things that get added (frequently high-tech and sometimes thoughtful) and taken away (religious content) to attract younger adults to classical music. - MSN (The Telegraph, UK)
Accidents in "The Nutcracker" are so common there are injuries named after the ballet. A nutcracker fracture is a foot fracture of the cuboid bone. - Salon
In Yippee Ki Yay, running through this week in London and then touring Britain, poet/playwright Richard Marsh uses just a few props and 75 minutes' worth of verse to recreate Hollywood's greatest big-budget fighting-terrorists-at-Christmastime movie. - The New York Times
On the high end, it’s a 22% jump from what Comscore is expecting 2022 to final at, that being $7.4B. This year’s domestic box office also reps a 72% surge over 2021’s $4.3 billion. - Deadline
"The triggering effect of the pandemic, and its impact on artists' livelihoods and careers, resulted in what had been previously been unimaginable: an almost doubling of the Arts Council budget from €75 million before COVID to €130 million for 2021, a level retained for the coming year." - The Irish Times
