ArtsJournal - Newsside

How A Radical Idea To Transform Public Spaces Failed In San Diego

ISSUES Posted:

“The concept behind the Lab — a cadre of designers embedded in the mayor’s office, with the power to revive public spaces around the city and launch a broad campaign of civic engagement — was unique in North America, and almost unimaginable in conservative San Diego. It seemed to answer the long-held desire of architects, especially, for designers to play a role in the decision-making that shapes cities.”

Toronto’s Massey Hall Begins $135M Renovation

MUSIC Posted:

“For all its past glories, the hall has a shopworn feel, with those odd reclining seats and scuffed brass railings. The goal of the expensive facelift, paid for largely by corporate and government cash, is to do some sprucing up without sanding away the antique beauty of the place.”

The Designer Who Became Apple’s Biggest Asset

PEOPLE Posted:

Jonathan Ive “establish[ed] the build and the finish of the iMac, the MacBook, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. He is now one of the two most powerful people in the world’s most valuable company” – on whom 100,000 employees and a not-insignificant chunk of the stock market depend. Says Steve jobs’s widow, “Jony’s an artist with an artist’s temperament, and he’d be the first to tell you artists aren’t supposed to be responsible for this kind of thing.”

Theatre Cancels All-Asian “Showboat” After Concluding It Couldn’t Be Done

THEATRE Posted:

“We spoke with, and listened purposefully to members of racially diverse communities and particularly with our most direct constituents, Asian-Americans, regarding how tackling this work might be perceived when the Asian presence is thrust into the center of a conversation that has historically excluded it. After carefully absorbing arguments of both support and opposition, we have chosen to cancel the production, concluding that the goal that propelled us — to lift up the Asian-American theater artist — could not be sufficiently achieved.”

ISIS Burns 8,000 Rare Books and Manuscripts in Mosul’s Library

WORDS Posted:

“Among its lost collections were manuscripts from the eighteenth century, Syriac books printed in Iraq’s first printing house in the nineteenth century, books from the Ottoman era, Iraqi newspapers from the early twentieth century and some old antiques like an astrolabe and sand glass used by ancient Arabs. The library had hosted the personal libraries of more than 100 notable families from Mosul over the last century.”

How A Museum Can Help Make Science Accessible

ISSUES Posted:

Ellen V. Futter, president of the American Museum of Natural History in New York: “The public has a real thirst to understand the world around them. But what people don’t want to do is be intimidated or made to feel like it’s too much for them to understand. We are … removing any sense that it’s too hard, remote, for experts only. It isn’t. Science really is a great detective story.”

UK Labour Party: We’ll Put Arts “At The Heart Of The Government” (But We Might Cut Funding Anyway)

ISSUES Posted:

Ed Milliband: “I come here with an offer: to put policy for arts and culture and creativity at the heart of the next Labour government’s mission. … The arts and culture define our character as a nation … [But] I can’t make promises about what funding’s going to look like in the future.”

Beyond The Turing Test: Artificial Intelligence Will Never Be Human Intelligence

IDEAS Posted:

“Some insist that ‘hard A.I.’ (with human-level intelligence) can never exist, while others conclude that it is inevitable. But in many cases these debates may be missing the real point of what it means to live and think with forms of synthetic intelligence very different from our own. … A mature A.I. is not necessarily a humanlike intelligence, or one that is at our disposal.”

Why Satire Is Important (Especially When It’s Offensive)

ISSUES Posted:

“If I try, in the aim of cool-headed analysis, to contain that dismay, I find that my American colleagues’ quasi-rationalization of the assassination of caricaturists is rooted in a failure to distinguish between certain basic varieties of the exercise of the freedom of expression. In particular, there seems to be a broad misunderstanding of the social function, and therefore also the necessity, of satire.”

René Magritte Was A Comedian

VISUAL Posted:

“A good comic can take something mundane and familiar and make you see it an unexpected way, whether it’s Dave Chappelle talking about ‘grape drink’, or Louis CK ranting about his four-year-old daughter. Magritte will do the same by sticking a silk mask on an apple. Or having a cloud enter a room by a door.”

Suzan-Lori Parks Wins $100K Playwriting Prize

THEATRE Posted:

“The critically acclaimed epic play Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2, & 3) by Suzan-Lori Parks has won the Edward M. Kennedy Prize for a theatrical work inspired by American history … A check for $100,000 will also go to Ms. Parks, a Pulitzer Prize winner for the drama Topdog/Underdog.”

Relations With The U.S. Or No, Cuba Is Not Returning Exiles’ Art

VISUAL Posted:

“With the recent loosening of US restrictions on trade with Cuba, prisoner exchanges and the promise of warmer relations to come, the two countries are closer than they have been for 50 years. But for those Cuban exiles in the US whose art was seized by the Cuban authorities in the 1960s, restitution of their property is still no closer. Cuba continues to reject the charge that the art in question was stolen, and has no mechanism for its return.”