"Yat-Sen Chang attacked girls and women at the English National Ballet and Young Dancers Academy in London between December 2009 and March 2016. The 49-year-old was convicted of 12 counts of sexual assault and one count of assault by penetration. He was cleared of one offence." - BBC
Perhaps it is that architects speak in a special language, and what looks to me like an arbitrary and ugly assortment of random stark rectangles is, to them, a kind of Morse code saying “Hello! Come inside! Happy to have you here.” But if that is the case, it doesn’t redeem the buildings for architects to have designed them...
Effectively, the studio is making its TV shows as if they were roughly six-hour movies, applying the same production methodology it’s used for the 23 unprecedentedly successful interconnected feature films that comprise the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That means empowering directors to lead a lot of creative decision-making, in collaboration with a small cadre of hands-on Marvel creative executives who...
Hollywood viewed the awards as meaningless at best and corrupt at worst — most notable for their open bar and the industry perks enjoyed by their some 80 voting members. Jack Mathews, who was a film critic for Newsday, once called them “the best-fed freeloaders in the entertainment industry.” - The New York Times
YouTube, the world’s biggest video platform, announced the YouTube Shorts Fund, a $100 million pool of money it’s promising to distribute to creators of the most-engaging clips of its new TikTok-style feature. YouTube expects the program to kick off in the fall of 2021 and continue into 2022. - Variety
In an open letter published yesterday in the Dutch newspaper NRC, 100 notable cultural figures, including Stedelijk director Rein Wolfs, artist Renzo Martens, Rijksmuseum director Taco Dibbits, and Van Gogh Museum director Emilie Gordenker, wrote that the law would enact too many barriers for museum goers. - Artnet
Árni Magnússon, who undertook Iceland's first-ever census and land survey, was a near-obsessive manuscript collector; he gathered many thousands of medieval documents, sagas, and other materials and sent them back to his house in Copenhagen. And in 1728, when the worst fire in the city's history and destroyed more than a quarter of the buildings and nearly every book...
The Thompson Center is Chicago's premier example of Jahn's work, and the project that made him famous. Intended to take government from distant to literally transparent and accessible, it became a vital and diverse, if increasingly shabby, space; its spectacular atrium was the apparent inspiration for Jahn's later, massive Sony Center in Berlin. - Chicago Reader
Last summer, the game AI Dungeon (less than a year old at the time) got an upgraded version of AI text-generation software that lets users type an action or piece of dialogue for their characters and then creates a new piece of narrative. Before long, some users started creating sexual situations involving children. But when the company put in...
If you’re in a major metropolitan area and have ever remotely shown interest in an art event, you may be bombarded by ads on social media for “Immersive Van Gogh.” Or, wait, was it “Beyond Van Gogh?” But you swore the email receipt said “Imagine Van Gogh: The Immersive Exhibition.” - Washington Post
He started his working life onstage with Eva Le Gallienne and Orson Welles; acted in films by Welles, Chaplin, Renoir, and Hitchcock (he was the villain in Saboteur); produced and directed episodes of Hitchcock's TV series (which saved him from the blacklist); had a key role in the primetime medical drama St. Elsewhere; and racked up countless other credits...
Nearly 20 years ago, Anne d’Harnoncourt, the museum's then-director and CEO, proposed to Frank Gehry that he replicate the galvanizing effect of his Guggenheim Bilbao by digging beneath the museum. The idea did not strike the architect as peculiar. “I said, give me the problem,” recalls Gehry, now 92. “I’m ready.” - Architectural Record
"'Something we've thought about for a long time is how the show has historically had a strong emphasis on the individual and the internal world and how there was an absence of perspective about the larger structures that the individual exists inside of,' said Wendle. To describe the intended shift in somewhat reductive terms, then, this new iteration...
Charles McNulty: "I prefer to experience plays the way I experience films at the movie theater — uninterrupted. At night when I awake momentarily from dreaming, I can rarely, if ever, restart the same dream when I fall back to sleep. The spell is broken. … Playwrights do the dreamwork for us, but our absorption is required. And unless...
"The mansion was recently listed for sale — along with an adjoining building — with an asking price of $22.5 million. That has caused a measure of distress among some people who have worked for years to restore what they regard as a crucial monument to Tiffany's genius." - The New York Times
