"New York City is heading into one of its most consequential elections in decades. … For the purposes of this inquiry, we asked eight leading Democratic candidates to spell out their specific proposals for arts and culture in New York City." - Artnet
In January of 2017, a group of skilled, acrobatic robbers began a series of daring break-ins — climbing walls, breaking through skylights and barriers, lowering themselves dozens of feet with ropes, never setting off alarms — to steal shipments of rare books worth millions from storage facilities around London. Here's the story of how Scotland Yard, working with detectives...
"It sounds like an April Fools joke, and it both is and isn't. Author and art historian Ben Lewis has created a real non-fungible token (NFT) of Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi — and, like the original, he's hoping to auction it for $450 million. Okay, he's not really expecting to sell it for that much." Because it makes...
"For years, campaigns to oust cruise ships from the lagoon have been gaining traction, with locals claiming that the ships' massive structures erode the seabed, effectively turning the lagoon into an offshoot of the Adriatic Sea. And now, finally, the Italian government has agreed with them, passing a decree to ban cruise ships and other large vessels from the...
Shakespeare’s Globe has announced a mid-May reopening, albeit with a capacity of up to only 500 in a popular auditorium that can hold as many as 1,700. The coveted standing places that allow the so-called Globe groundlings to jostle one another, and on occasion the actors, will be replaced by seats; a lack of intermissions will further limit unwanted...
“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
