“[Princeton undergraduate Alice] Xue trained an algorithm using 2,192 traditional Chinese landscape paintings collected from art museums. The resulting AI-generated paintings were mistaken for being made by humans 55 per cent of the time.” – South China Morning Post (Hong Kong)
How I Learned To Love Modern Poetry
“Book critics who know nothing about contemporary poetry learn to live with the terror of exposure. We’re like Cold War spies embedded in enemy territory, waiting for a joke we don’t get or some stray cultural reference that exposes us as frauds.” – Washington Post
New AI Can Predict Your Moral Principles
The development team “choose to focus on a theory commonly used by social scientists called Moral foundations theory. It postulates several key categories of morality including care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity. The aim of the new models is to infer values of those five moral foundations just by looking at their writing, regardless of what they are talking about.” – IEEE Spectrum
Why Producers Are Killing Movie Theatres
“We’re witnessing a transformation of what it means to watch a movie. For over a century, film was at its core a theatrical art form: While it’s true that movies could be watched on TV, the primary cinematic experience was immersive viewing in a theater surrounded by strangers. Now there is a push to make the movie theater merely one platform among others, offering an experience deemed no more meaningful than watching the same feature-length visual narratives on a home entertainment system, a laptop, or even a cell phone.” – The Nation
How ‘Citizen Kane’ Got To Be, And Stopped Being, The ‘Greatest Film Ever Made’
“Maybe it’s hard to imagine now, but for many years, Kane‘s dominance wasn’t a matter of personal preference. It was practically a piece of data — like the name of the president, or the location of Florida. Miles and miles of words have been written about why Orson Welles’s masterpiece was so widely acclaimed … [and], of course, about whether it deserves that acclaim — not to mention who, exactly, is responsible for its greatness. But how did Citizen Kane become so firmly established at the top of the canon in the first place? Who put it there?” Bilge Ebiri gives a run-down of the history. – Vulture
The Complicated Legacy Of James Beard (And What It Says About American Food Culture)
“In the decades that followed World War II, no public figure prosecuted the cause of introducing America to seasonality, freshness, and culinary pleasure with greater vigor than James Beard. Gay, bow-tied, effusive, charismatic, and possessed of a lavish appetite, Beard had the misfortune to live in an era at once bigoted, repressed, paranoid, abstemious, and uninterestingly dressed. Today he is best known for the awards dispensed by his eponymous foundation, which remain, 35 years after his death at the age of 81, the most prestigious in the American restaurant industry. But of the man himself, contemporary memory is fairly shallow: He exists mostly in outline, as the bald, long-dead bon vivant beaming out at America’s eaters from illustrations, portraits, and the obverse of the culinary medals that bear his name.” – The New Republic
Great Dead Pop Singers Are Posting TikTok Videos
“Frank Sinatra has a TikTok account …, as do Whitney Houston, John Lennon, and Prince. Some of the profiles were clearly set up by the late-singers’ estates. Others seem to be the work of record labels, in a bid to introduce their catalogues to a younger generation. And while the phenomenon is a little weird, it’ll also probably work.” – Mic
Well, Someone’s Taken Credit For The Monoliths (Just Guess What They’re Doing Now)
“An anonymous collective called The Most Famous Artist says it was behind … the original steel stele in Utah as well as the replica that popped up in Atascadero, California, before being swiftly dismantled by a band of Christian zealots. And now — as if there were any doubt as to where this was headed — the collective is selling facsimiles for the low, low price of $45,000.” – Artnet
He Ran La Scala, Then The Paris Opera. Now He’s Moved To Italy’s Oldest Opera House
“The future will be very different, and I am convinced that it will no longer be possible for a theater to be passive, waiting for the public, even with a great program. So in the future I see two aspects that are not contradictory but actually complementary.” – The New York Times
The Organist Who Bought A Nova Scotia Church So He Could Practice
“In my childhood, it was quite difficult to go practice in some churches in Europe because we always have to [get] dressed up to go to the church, ask for the key from the priest or the minister, or we have to argue with some old Catholic nuns who were responsible for the church. They always said, ‘Oh you play the organ so loud, we can’t live here’. So now I’m alone and I can play as loud as I like…. Sometimes I play in pyjamas, of course.” – CBC
The Not-So-Hidden Literary Heritage Of Harriet The Spy
An ode to Dorothy Sayers’ Harriet Vane? You bet. But also, “Harriet is a writer devoted to routine. She loves her tomato sandwiches, her egg creams, and her spy route and notebook both because they give her a lot of pleasure and because they ground her. Like a working artist, she doesn’t want to think about the mundane details. That’s what a parent—and later, a partner—is for: somebody who can deal with practical things so an artist doesn’t have to. When Harriet’s routines are disrupted, all hell breaks loose. A thousand more writers would call that realistic.” – LitHub
In The Upper Levels Of Irish Government, Talks Continue About Reopening Theatres
Cinemas have reopened, but not theatres. Why? “Sources close to Minister for Arts and Culture Catherine Martin pointed to a ‘complex environment for indoor live performances.'” – Irish Times
A Group Of Young Men Chanting ‘Christ Is King’ Remove California Monolith And Install A Cross
Elaborate prank? Culture war? Should we be paying attention to this at all? Seriously: “The men, wearing night vision goggles and camo gear, chanted in the grainy video as they toppled the shiny structure, in a video that was posted to the streaming site DLive.tv by someone using the name CultureWarCriminal, but later removed, according to The San Luis Obispo Tribune. The Tribune described the video as ‘at times racist and homophobic’ and said that the men sang along to country songs.” – The New York Times
It’s Hard To Write About America
Not that you would know it from the number of books out there – but capturing the country isn’t easy. “Gross simplification comes along with trying to describe America. I’m convinced that trying to do this is like pouring Lake Michigan into a shot glass. It just can’t be done.” And yet. – LitHub
Video Games Are Now Playgrounds For Designers – And Brands
This is what happens with a pandemic shutdown of everything outside the house: Video games, which is a small market compared to apparel, shoots up in numbers. People start recreating brand ads in Animal Crossing. And the brands follow. “Many so-called hypebeasts who obsess over fashion are also gamers. … ‘The prototypical nerds have evolved to a point where they are very style-conscious. It’s cool to play games now.'” – Los Angeles Times
Panic About Warner Bros. Announcement Sets In For Actors, Agents, And More In The Film Business
As various contract and payouts get renegotiated, everyone is in shock. The worry: This decision “could irrevocably rewire moviegoers’ ticket-buying patterns, forever changing the way people turn out for films.” – Vulture
Will Publishing’s Latest Merger Kill Off Small Presses?
Literary diversity is in jeopardy with the proposed Penguin Random House/ Simon & Schuster merger, or so small publishers claim (with numbers to back them up). “This lack of competition doesn’t inflate consumer prices; it decreases labor costs. In other words, it disadvantages writers. Nowadays, the Big Four might not even make an offer for those big literary debuts. These are not guaranteed hits, after all.” – Los Angeles Times
Cliff Joseph, Artist And Advocate For Black Artists And Multicultural Art Therapy, 98
Joseph led protests in the 1960s and 1970s, telling museums they needed to include Black artists in their collections. Later, he entered the field of mental health, and taught art therapy at The Pratt Institute. He is credited for “helping to introduce concepts like racial sensitivity and cultural competency to the profession.” – The New York Times
Naomi Long Madgett, Longtime Poet Laureate Of Detroit And Champion Of Black Poets, 97
Madgett was 17 when her first book was published. “Her elegant, exacting and lyrical poems — which invited comparisons to Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson — addressed a breadth of themes: social justice, romantic love, women’s histories, religious devotion and the craft of poetry itself. Yet she was almost as well known as a publisher and editor of poetry.” – The New York Times
The Bolshoi Attempts To Return To Holiday Season
More than 100 staff and dancers are out sick, but the financial losses were adding up. One dancer: “‘There’s this term, ‘stage therapy’ and that’s what’s happening now,’ she said of the intensive group effort that’s been required to rehearse and perform despite the restrictions. ‘We take energy from [the audience] and we give energy.'” – CBC
The Museum Of Latin American Art Is Selling Off Much Of Its Permanent Collection
The massive online sale is the second since the museum shuttered in the March wave of the pandemic. “The unprecedented bulk-removal of works from the museum’s collection, known as deaccessioning, raises the specter of serious financial stress at the Long Beach institution.” – Los Angeles Times
Warner CEO Explains Why The Studio Blew Up The Movie Streaming Window
Hollywood thrives on hyperbole. But it would have been right to describe this move as unimaginable less than a year ago. While some moviegoers and studios have wanted for a long time to make it easier to see movies at home, the movie theater industry has hated that idea and has been able to prevent it from happening. – Vox
How Do They Reconstruct The Smell Of A Particular Time And Place?
That’s not an idle question, what with the Rijksmuseum running a project called “In Search of Lost Scents” that offers the odors of places from Amsterdam’s 17th-century stock exchange to the Battle of Waterloo to the Dutch locker room after a 1988 soccer championship, plus an endeavor called Odeuropa that aims to archive aromas from throughout European history. Here’s a look at just what some of those odors would be and how specialists reconstitute them. – The New York Times
Why The NY Times Didn’t Include Meryl Streep On Its ’25 Greatest Actors Of The 21st Century’ List
“Late last month, after the list published online, [Manohla] Dargis and [A.O.] Scott discussed notable disagreements, that Meryl Streep exclusion” (had it been a list of 20th-century actors, she’d have been there) “and the importance of representing performances from around the globe.” – The New York Times