"A majority of respondents were only able to identify one of the five AI landscape works as such. Around 75 to 85 percent of respondents guessed wrong on the other four. When they did correctly attribute an artwork to AI, it was the abstract one." - Artnet
"Vast cuts at the Victoria and Albert Museum are feared to be imminent, with curators and conservators in the line of fire. … Details of the museum's 'recovery strategy' were briefed to unions on Thursday. Staff are expecting to hear news of redundancies within days. One insider expressed dismay that the curatorial division may have to make 20% cuts."...
"'I am calling you for a poetic consultation,' said a warm voice on the telephone. 'It all starts with a very simple question: How are you?' Since March, almost 15,000 people around the world have received a call like this. These conversations with actors, who offer a one-on-one chat before reading a poem selected for the recipient, started as...
Cerise Castle said in a podcast interview and on social media on Monday that her time at KCRW was “marked by microaggressions, gaslighting, and blatant racism starting when I was physically prevented from entering the building multiple times within my first month of employment.” - Los Angeles Times
As the pandemic forces relationships to be conducted remotely, more people than ever are resorting to the virtual exchange of intimacies. Last autumn, a poll of 7,000 UK schoolchildren by the youth sexual health charity Brook put the figure at nearly one in five who said they would send a naked selfie to a partner during a lockdown. -...
Tasmania’s MONA FOMA festival last month saw a 'hyperlocal' approach to programming. Unable to draw headliners from around the world, local artists were front and centre – of the 352 artists involved, 90% were Tasmanian. By most accounts, it was a success with reviewers and audiences. - ArtsHub (Australia)
"It’s almost as though the existence of animals, and their various similarities to humans, constituted insults. Like a squirrel, I have eyes and ears, scurry about on the ground and occasionally climb a tree. (One of us does this better than the other does.) Our shared qualities — the fact that we are both hairy or that we have...
Roland Valliere described the Concert Companion as similar to audio guides in art museums. “I was trying to do for symphony orchestras what audio guides have done for museums: enhance and enrich the experience in real-time,” he was quoted as saying. But audio guides do not have a time sequencing pressure associated with them like music does and they...
Jobs in arts, entertainment and recreation fell by 66% last year from 2019, the largest decline among the city’s economic sectors, erasing a decade of gains in what was one of New York’s most vibrant industries, the report said. - Crain's New York
Kazuo Ishiguro: "In some ways, I suppose, I'm just not that dedicated to my vocation. I expect it's because writing wasn’t my first choice of profession. It’s almost something I fell back on because I couldn't make it as a singer-songwriter. It's not something I've wanted to do every minute of my life. It's what I was permitted to...
Created by Canadian-based Massive Technologies, the AI pianist is trained to listen to musical compositions and recreate them with virtual hands—and the results are pretty good. - Vice
"When the faithful listeners to Klubrádió, a talk radio station that has been a beacon of free speech in Hungary, tuned in last Monday, February 15, they found only silence. … As an open forum for public discourse, Klubrádió has challenged a range of government policies, including those bearing on public memory and press freedom." - The Nation
In the group’s “Whose Heritage?” report, the Southern Poverty Law Center said that last year had been transformative, but that more than 2,100 symbols of the Confederacy remained, including 704 monuments. - The New York Times
"Over the past year, German has coined some 1,000-plus new terms endemic to the Now Times. … And that's thanks to the language's rules of compound noun formation, which dictate that you can make a new, longer legitimate word out of almost any existing ones." Germanist and recovering academic Rebecca Schuman is our guide. - Slate
First there was the fire. "Since then, tragedy has turned to travesty and toxicity as a wall of silence coupled with multiple sackings has left Glasgow reeling. The city that was once renowned for both its hundred-plus years of artistic heritage and current can-do dozen Turner prize winners now has a vast burnt-out shell – literally – at its...
