“Virtual entertainment is the new cultural center of gravity,” Authentic Artists founder and CEO Chris McGarry told Protocol. Authentic Artists has developed a dozen such virtual DJs thus far, and is powering their performances with a custom-built AI music engine that uses a catalog of 130,000 MIDI files to generate performances in real time. The resulting music is being fed into the company’s animation pipeline, and there’s a feedback mechanism for Twitch audiences to change the course of a set. – Protocol
Stuck In The Post-Truth World — How Do We Get Out?
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 opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” – The Walrus
The Art Of Doing Nothing Architecturally. It’s A Revolution
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 and Vassal have not only renewed the legacy of modernism: they are redefining architecture itself. – The Conversation
Dana Gioia On Being An “Information Billionaire”
“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 that potential, it enlarges it, it refines it, and each art does it in different ways.” – Conversations with Tyler
This Gainsborough Portrait Of An Obscure Composer Sold For £2,500 (Could Be Worth £1 Million)
“Gainsborough had a great deal of interest in musicians and likened a picture to a piece of music, once writing: ‘One part of a Picture ought to be like the first part of a Tune; that you can guess what follows, and that makes the second part of the Tune, and so I’ve done.’” – The Guardian
Preserving Websites With User-Generated Content When Corporate Owners Want To Pull The Plug
“After seeing yet another situation where a longstanding Yahoo-owned website [Yahoo Answers] is shutting down, I’m left to wonder if the problem is that the motivations for maintaining sites built around user-generated content simply do not favor preservation, and never will without outside influence. How can we change that motivation? Today’s Tedium, in a follow-up to the post we wrote as Yahoo Groups was getting shut down, ponders the issue from the corporate perspective.” – Tedium
Back In The Theatre: “Necessity Is The Mother Of Devotion”
I can report that once the rest of us were inside — 25 or so socially distanced in a black box theater that normally seats up to 99 — the evening unfolded exuberantly. It was the first of three live theatrical events I attended over the weekend, the first time in a year my schedule resembled something like the days before covid-19. I wore my mask throughout the shows, a feat that a year ago I had convinced myself would be too uncomfortable to tolerate. – Washington Post
Granta’s New List Of The Best Young Writers Working In Spanish
“Eleven years after publishing its first collection of the finest up-and-coming authors in Spanish, Granta magazine is releasing a second volume that brings together 25 writers aged under 35 and now at work on four continents. The list includes 11 female writers and 14 male writers from Spain, Nicaragua, Cuba, Colombia, Uruguay, Peru, Mexico, Argentina, Equatorial Guinea, Chile, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica and Ecuador.” – The Guardian
There’s Still A Tyranny Of Thinness In Ballet. It Just Gets Worded Differently.
“Today’s ballet teachers and company directors know that they can no longer simply instruct their dancers to lose weight. But that doesn’t mean they’ve relinquished their rigid, narrow vision of what a ‘good’ ballet body looks like: They simply swathe that ideal in the gauzy, feel-good messaging of today’s fitness culture.” Or they use the aesthetic ideal of “length” as camouflage or euphemism. – The Washington Post
Diversity Lessons From The 1990s Culture Wars
“What David Lang wrote in 1989 was not wrong: no senators took to the floor to tear up scores by Philip Glass or John Cage. New music was ultimately collateral damage in the Culture Wars, not directly targeted by congressional Republicans but still subject to the same devastating public funding cuts that the controversies over Serrano and Mapplethorpe inaugurated. But the controversies over NYSCA’s funding of new-music organizations—relatively tame in comparison to what unfolded on the floor of the senate—tapped into the same partisan rhetoric as the more famous ones that played out on the national stage, and did in fact conscript American composers into the battles of the Culture Wars.” – NewMusicBox
Rock Musicians Are Getting Into NFTs. It’s Going To Be Messy.
“At the end of February, Grimes sold 10 pieces of digital artwork as NFTs for $6m, while Deadmau5 has offered bundles including music and collaborative artwork. The Weeknd generated $2.2m by selling digital artworks with clips of a new track. … Despite the clear traceability, there remains enormous uncertainty about just how the rights and ownership of the original creators – from songwriters and producers to session musicians – apply in an NFT sale that includes music.” – The Guardian
Why Wouldn’t Saudi Arabia Lend ‘Salvator Mundi’ To The Louvre? Spite, Basically
History’s most expensive artwork, purchased by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2017 for $450 million, was supposed to be part of the Louvre’s blockbuster Leonardo da Vinci exhibition in 2019 and then go on long-term loan to the new Louvre Abu Dhabi. But Salvator Mundi hasn’t been seen in public since its auction (and is rumored to be on a royal yacht). Why? It seems there was a battle of wills between His Royal Highness and the Louvre’s specialist curators over certifying the painting as Leonardo’s work. – Artnet
Wisconsin School Works To Save Ojibwe Languages Before Native-Speaker Elders Disappear
On the Lac Courte Oreilles reservation, near Lake Superior in the northwestern corner of the state, is a K-8 school called Waadookodaading (“a place where people help each other”), where Ojibwe children are taught, in their ancestral language, a curriculum that combines federal and state educational requirements with traditional culture. For instance, the kids study biology using fish they’ve speared, and the wild rice harvest becomes a way to learn how to measure volumes. But the COVID epidemic, which has hit Native Americans harder than any other group in the U.S., has posed special problems for the school. – The Guardian
Hong Kong’s New M+ Wants To Be One Of The World’s Great Contemporary Art Museums. Politics May Make That Impossible.
“The [West Kowloon Cultural District Authority] has set M+ the target of being the first museum of its kind in Asia and to be ranked among the top five museums in the world for visual culture. … To achieve such lofty ambitions, M+ needs international credibility. But given growing ideological tensions between China and the West, it is going to be hard for the museum to meet the expectations of its political master as well as an international art world based on the values of liberal democracies.” – South China Morning Post (Hong Kong)
Lois Kirschenbaum, New York’s Most Beloved Opera Superfan, Dead At 88
Night after night, through multiple performances of a production’s run at the Met or New York City Opera, Lois (the city’s entire opera community referred to her as Lois) was in the audience, and more often than not went backstage afterwards to solicit autographs and talk to singers. “She could tell you anything going on in your performances on any given night — this or that particular phrase and what it meant,” says soprano Aprile Millo. “For a singer, it gave you the feeling that you were being heard.” – The New York Times
What Killed L.A. Stage Alliance? It Wasn’t That One Dumb Mistake
Los Angeles sound designer and playwright Howard Ho — the boyfriend of actress Jully Lee, who was the subject of the dumb mistake at LASA’s Ovation Awards — writes that the last thing he and Lee expected was for the organization to shut itself down (they initially laughed off the mistake, which wasn’t even the only error that night, and were surprised that it got so much attention) and goes on to look at how the controversy unfolded inside Southern California’s Asian-American theater community. – American Theatre
Enormous Golden Modernist Mobile Removed From Lincoln Center Will Be Installed At LaGuardia Airport
There was a minor uproar in December when Lincoln Center announced that Richard Lippold’s Orpheus and Apollo, which had dangled in the multi-story upper atrium of Philharmonic Avery Fisher David Geffen Hall since the 1960s, had been removed as part of the venue’s renovation and would not be returning. Following a suggestion by former New York Times and New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger, the work will have a new home in the newly renovated Terminal B at LGA. – Gothamist
Live Theatre Returns To Live Theatre In NY — And It’s… Different
The line of people he came to greet waiting to see the first performance of Blindness at the Daryl Roth Theatre off Union Square was collectively, properly masked, but still a line, still packed closely together, reminding this critic that whatever measures being taken inside theaters, the line outside a theater right now remains just as it always was—an expectant, kettled huddle. – The Daily Beast
Art At Scale: Putting All Of The UK’s National Collections Online
Art UK brings together over 3,000 public collections on one shared, economically efficient platform, allowing them all to reap the benefits of scale and technology in one of the largest arts partnerships put together in the UK. Art UK’s Partner Collections have access to the Art UK Shop, enabling them to generate income without making any capital investment or taking any risk. – ArtUK
Join the Conversation
I have said before here that the time for talk is long past and that figuring out a way to prod real action on DEI issues is essential. This Conversation, hosted by the Community Engagement Network, is an attempt to lay groundwork for actual movement. – Doug Borwick
Producer Scott Rudin, “Monster” Boss
Even as others have been canceled or have dialed back their aggression, Rudin’s behavior has continued unabated, leaving a trail of splintered objects and traumatized employees in his path. – The Hollywood Reporter
India Eliminates Appeals Of Film Censorship Board’s Decisions
“The Indian federal government has passed an order that scraps the Information and Broadcasting ministry’s Film Certification Appellate Tribunal, the first avenue of appeal if a filmmaker disagrees with a certification decision. Instead, filmmakers will have to go to court.” – Variety