Cellist Julian Lloyd Webber writes about his colleague Rebeca Omordia, a pianist of Romanian and Nigerian parentage who, since 2013, has been pursuing a project to find and present music by African composers working in Western classical genres. She's found more than 200 of them, and she presents their work every year in a concert series in London. -...
“It is being slightly masked by Covid, but we are already seeing individuals losing their jobs because they don’t hold an EU passport. People are being told their application for a post is not welcome anymore, or that gigs are being postponed or cancelled because EU promoters are not certain whether British talent will be able to make it...
"If athlete-driven podcasts were once shoestring affairs, they've now been absorbed into the sports-media economy. Last year, The Ringer was acquired by Spotify for around two hundred million dollars." And the athlete-hosts don't talk only about the game; they sometimes have on as guests rock musicians, movie stars, entertainment execs, and politicians. - The New Yorker
The traditional hierarchies of the art market, where values, both monetary and aesthetic, were established and policed by art historians, curators and museums, are being assaulted by a new breed of wealthy new players, with new tastes and “new” money. Their wallets are stuffed with the currently surging cryptocurrencies. The traditional art world may sniff at some of their...
Over the past few years, a series of stylometric analyses, employing both human brains and AI software, has found that the true identity of the famously pseudonymous and reclusive author is almost certainly that of writer Domenico Starnone. (The other prime candidate, identified by an investigative journalist in The New York Review of Books, is Starnone's wife, translator Anita...
The mobile experience will allow people to zoom in on the details. It will include six poems in the voice of Balthasar, the black king pictured to the left of Mary, with his gift of myrrh and wearing a lynx-fur-lined red robe and fabulous boots with leather so fine you can see his toes. - The Guardian
Joshua Barone: "Kurt Weill is often described as if he were two composers. One spun quintessential sounds of Weimar-era Berlin in works like The Threepenny Opera, and the other wrote innovative earworms for Broadway's golden age. His career was bifurcated, so the story goes — split not only by a shift in style, but also by the Atlantic Ocean,...
Clearly, asking questions about consciousness does not prove anything per se. But could an AI zombie formulate such questions by itself, without hearing them from another source or belching them out from random outputs? To me, the answer is clearly no. If I’m right, then we should seriously consider that an AI might be conscious if it asks questions...
"For human art lovers, learning which style or category a piece of art falls in is a relatively straightforward and objective task. Like the neural networks , we can learn how to do that by looking at a lot of art and finding patterns. But there's something humans do that computers don't: we also form opinions about the art...
In most places, the pandemic has put a stop to large-scale corps dancing. Yet, even when the virus is finally under control, there's reason to wonder about the future of large groups of ballet dancers beyond revivals of old classics: few contemporary choreographers make use of more than small groups. Laura Cappelle looks at why that is and why...
The prestigious, competitive art/architecture/engineering school in Manhattan's East Village charged no fees to students from its opening in 1859 until 2012, when an overambitious building program and bad management decisions led to financial disaster and free tuition was abolished, much to the fury of students, alumni, and others. There were worries that the pandemic would hamper the fundraising necessary...
"Despite the reopening of most private museums in Washington, the Smithsonian and the National Gallery of Art have no set date to reopen from pandemic-related closures that began in November. … When they are ready to reopen this spring, they will mimic last summer's multiphased approach, Bunch said, with the National Zoo one of the first to come...
"Many are skeptical, including fans who badly miss being surrounded by echoing laughter and stand-ups who are exhausted by performing for screens and who widely prefer telling jokes in the same room as crowds. While conceding that nothing replaces the traditional comedy format, said the doubts will look as shortsighted as early mockery of Twitter, podcasting and so...
From 1980 to 1994, he led a team of workers who carefully washed away, frequently with plain soap and water, centuries' worth of dust, smoke and other grime from Michelangelo's work — revealing what were, to those who had been accustomed to the dim, grim aspect of the unrestored "Last Judgment" fresco, the astonishingly vivid colors the artist used....
With COVID caseloads on the rise again, President Macron announced a new set of restrictions, less strict than the first set introduced last year, running April 3 to at least May 2. He also said his office is preparing a timetable for "certain" cultural venues to accept visitors again, a process he hopes will start in mid-May, pandemic conditions...
