[contextly_auto_sidebar id="V6NmBVYqb2qdo87yWjeHN0SrNINzHk4V"] NO, this hasn't become an abstinence-themed blog while you were napping. But I'm struck today by a piece about the joys of waiting for culture, whether it's a weekly music newspaper or the new singles or LPs that those publications served to announce or assess. No matter what kind of culture you care about, you'll find something you … [Read more...]
Switching Sides in the Digital War
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="eJnmz4EFyiZtMYvvDKNPqiDekKwUDUR1"] DIDN'T we hear about how great it was going to be? Those early days, when we were told how funky and non-commercial and liberating the Web was going to be, now seem like ancient history. One writer who believed in the promise of the Internet in the early days has come to see what a much more complex issue the digital revolution … [Read more...]
The Death of Art’s Third Place
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="m8KE0CbwCulzkRvRmJL6ZGSvuY8h2kLD"] DAVE Hickey has long been one of the orneriest and most original voices in the art world -- his book Air Guitar is a revelation -- and he recently posted something that hits me almost literally where I live. He's talking about the disappearance of a discourse around visual art that is neither grounded in academia or the marketplace. … [Read more...]
Will the Internet Ever Get Less Nasty?
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="sX5mpeff0G48ZdDK8B8DiylO4zB4YCnG"] BY now, anyone who writes for a living knows the kind of nasty comments and chatter that accompanies almost any public utterance. (This seems like a cross between the hostility that's bred on places like Fox News and the larger "snark" culture, with an extra layer of nastiness unique to the Internet.) How did it happen, what are the … [Read more...]
Journalism’s Phony Golden Age
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="v0eG90rPghAVd66MQLAYaRsKRNlqKbJ4"] IT was only, I guess, a matter of time before the digital utopians started telling us -- including laid off scribes -- how great journalism has gotten. The latest is a Wired piece, "How the Smartphone Ushered in a Golden Age of Journalism. (It's venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, and not the Wired writer, who calls it a "golden … [Read more...]
The “Antifree” Movement Takes on “Free”
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="hMpJwAX7ROFisoxfaiwhWpOQbmzRcRS5"] BY now, we're all pretty familiar with the information-wants-to-be-free argument, and if you write for a living, or have had to endure numerous unpaid internships to break into a creative field, you know it all too well. A wide-ranging, perceptive, and slightly arch essay in the hip Brooklyn journal n+1 sketches out the … [Read more...]
Celebrating the Power of SLAKE
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="sx5hfk7MoWchhQaW7wXbDMvKVh3UKnXl"] HERE at CultureCrash, we're longtime fans of the Los Angeles literary magazine Slake, which put out four smart, handsome, forceful issues full of art, fiction, memoir and poetry. Editors Joe Donnelly and Lauria Ochoa -- both formerly of the LA Weekly -- did something not easy to pull off in sprawling LA: They galvanized a community … [Read more...]
How Do Writers Make Their Living?
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="7bGpqAdbG8eEXFCQfCXKxBmqMplgXX5l"] AFTER a long period in which authors and other scribes shied away from going public with their finances -- perhaps not wanting to seem like they were "in it for the money" -- the economics of the literary life have become more transparent lately. This is partly, I suspect, because of the greater concern for economics that arrived … [Read more...]
What Are Humans Good For?
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="NUIeoMZoQbFSCCvhJftok1FkbupHfdXm"] WELL, folks, it's gotten to the point where we've gotta ask this question. With various kinds of automation and AI replacing human labels even at the most cerebral and professional level -- it's not just bank tellers any more -- we've got to ask, What can humans do that a computer or algorithm can't? A new Slate story notes that … [Read more...]
“The Disruption Machine” and the Arts
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="R3zLDzzRclVKKTROWNxF41CXdu70ZMpQ"] Jill Lepore's New Yorker article, "The Disruption Machine," which looks at one of the key fallacies of the digital crowd, has become much discussed. Her challenge to a theory that describes how newer, smaller companies destroy old ones may not seem to relate to the world of arts and culture. But these things are intimately … [Read more...]