The rush of documentaries - they are cheaper to make, and especially if they're true crime, there's a willing and eager audience - has some aesthetic issues. "Cornball fuzzy re-creations lack credibility. ... It doesn’t have to be like this. Plenty of recent shows and movies have made compelling artistic choices that enliven the storytelling." - The New York...
The business side of music can be vicious for its musicians, and when a label owned by a man you loathe gets to profit off your music? Well. "The debut this week of the now 31-year-old Swift’s full rerecording of that album she made at 18, under the title Fearless (Taylor’s Version), is a reminder of how inextricably blurred the creative...
The Small Business Association opened a grant portal for arts venues closed down by the pandemic - and, after a few hours of deep misery for every arts venue trying to apply, took it all offline, indefinitely. "Anyone who tried to log on to apply for grants when the portal first opened was met with different error messages at...
In 2016, 25 queer women characters on TV died on scripted TV and streaming shows. But Wynonna Earp promised to be different. With the choices the writers' room and showrunner made, viewers saw "an acknowledgement of — and a direct rebuke to — a hurtful trope." They rewarded the producer with trust and increased interest. - Los Angeles Times
It's every art dealer's nightmare, but if a fake is a beautiful painting, what's our problem with it? We care about authorship is why - but humans didn't always care. "What mattered before the Renaissance was the meaning of an image, not the ineffable singularity of the image-maker’s touch." - Hyperallergic
Ahmed, whose performance in The Sound of Metal has been nominated for countless awards this season, doesn't prefer the easy life. When he was a kid, he says, "I wanted to perform in some way, but I didn’t think it was viable. Teachers told me I should be a barrister, because I was always arguing with them." - The...
Gabriel began working at RCA when she was a student at Temple University, testing records for manufacturing imperfections. And she didn't leave. "Gabriel often said that she had produced some 2,500 records. Tucker said officials at Sony, which now holds RCA’s archives, had told her that the number may actually be higher, since contributions were not always credited."...
Ma Rainey, Mank, and others win on the first night of the British Academy Film and Television Arts awards, when mostly the crafts are recognized. - Variety
We now consider disinformation a defining part of the contemporary experience. In 2016, Oxford Languages chose post-truth as its word of the year. The essential characteristic of our age, the accompanying press release stated, was the loss of a distinction between truth and feeling; we were entering an era in which “objective facts are less influential in shaping public...
Blockchains may radically transform many facets of business life, but they’re a tool particularly well suited for collaborations. Put simply, blockchains are digital ledgers where several people have joint control over the shared information — a feature that makes them ideal for situations where trust and information sharing are important. The technical design of blockchains makes it virtually impossible...
"This last year, with the pandemic and its disruptions in terms of routine, discipline, just ordinary day-to-day activities, the body doesn't know itself at the moment. So I can't tell you what I can ask it to do until I refamiliarize myself. And I'm in the process of doing that. … Whenever I've finished one of these big projects,...
In a world in which flamboyance and style have long determined how an architect becomes a star, this approach – doing nothing – is an act of resistance. The fact that, 30 years into their career, Lacaton and Vassal have now been awarded the built environment’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize is a revolution. As the jury put it, Lacaton...
"Everything that was once considered lowbrow is now triumphant. It is still common for people to talk of “guilty” cultural pleasures—TV, dance music—about which no one has felt guilty in decades, and to apologize for them with an enthusiasm that looks a lot like pride. But the pretense of guilt is merely there to increase our pleasure; it adds...
"I think poetry has a social function but it’s a relatively complicated and subtle one, which is to say, the reason that we have art is, in a sense, to increase human happiness. It does that, essentially, on an individual level. A work of art awakens you. It awakens you to the possibilities of your own potential. It takes...
Experts have felled 59 of the trees at the Villefermoy forest in the Seine-et-Marne region, and a further 26 oaks will be donated by four state-owned forests managed by the National Forestry Office. The massive restoration effort will need 1,000 French oak trees in total. - Artnet
