“We were demonstrating that we were still there, that we were still dancing, that we still wanted to dance, that we were still those people that engage in practices that are not Zoom-able, and that the things that we offer the world are not essential. We’re demonstrating that our bodies are these things that are meaty and fleshy and...
Certainly with international travel likely to be restricted in some form for a while, the chances are that international and local demand for festivals will still not be the same as they were pre-COVID. - The Conversation
Every day I’m thankful for the work I get to do. I am paid to watch, to think, to write. But this week, like so many others recently, it has felt pointless, even silly, to analyze fictional stories when real people are dying." - The New York Times
Miller argues that AI-fueled art gains independence from its algorithmic parents and takes flight in works that bear the hallmarks of creativity and genius and will one day exceed human artists’ wildest imaginative dreams. Miller says he sympathizes with what I’m saying about the power of art coming from the connection with a human artist, plumbing their emotions and...
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...
