Recent video from Ukraine shows a bulldozer tearing down the back of the ruined theater, which Russian fighter planes bombed last March while hundreds of families were sheltering in its basement; over 300 people died. The city's mayor, currently in exile, says the occupiers plan to leave the façade intact. - BBC
"The vandals entered Koonalda Cave on the Nullarbor Plain (in South Australia) and scrawled graffiti across the heritage-listed site, writing 'don't look now, but this is a death cave'. Authorities say the vandals dug under a steel gate to gain access to the site." - The Guardian
These systems are master imitators of human creativity. They have been trained on millions upon millions of human artifacts such as documents, articles, drawings, paintings, movies, or whatever else can be stored in databases at scale. - Big Think
It wasn’t Frank Capra or Jimmy Stewart or the enduring power of cinema that made it a lasting success. It was neglect. “The damnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” Capra himself once said. - The Wall Street Journal
This month saw the inauguration of Jashn-e-Rekhta, an annual three-day festival devoted to Urdu verse, old and new. Attendance was over 300,000 —notwithstanding the fact that Urdu, while very, very closely related to Hindi, is commonly associated with Islam in a country awash in Hindu nationalism. - The New York Times
"The Guardian took every Christmas song that had charted in the UK Top 100 since 1952, and selected the 100 most popular of those on Spotify. Two-thirds were released at least 30 years ago." Which is to say: "all we want for Christmas is mid-20th-century nostalgia." - The Guardian
Beauty is what we find, create, and propagate, either through imitation – creating a copy, another iteration – or through distribution of the thing itself. - Psyche
We don’t need more itinerant maestros who draw big salaries in multiple cities. We need more directorships along the lines of ones in which a conductor focusses on a single city and puts down roots. This is how American orchestral culture unfolded before jet travel. _ The New Yorker
Taraneh Alidoosti, 38, posted messages on social media supporting the protests after Iranian authorities executed a 23-year-old prisoner. "'Your silence means supporting oppression and oppressors,' she wrote." - The New York Times
The list is broken out into the top 20 large communities and the top 10 each of medium-sized and small communities. Because of the unpredictable and uneven nature of recovery from COVID-related shutdowns, this year the list is not ranked. - SMU Data Arts
"The website was restored at around 1:30 p.m. on Thursday, and ticket sales have resumed after more than a week of chaos. Met Opera on Demand, the company's popular subscription streaming platform, has also been restored. ... The Met Opera normally processes more than $200,000 worth of tickets each day." - Gothamist/WNYC
A reasonable reaction to generative AI is concern; if not even the imagination is safe from machines, the human mind seems at risk of becoming obsolete. - The Atlantic
Following the stern directive from Arts Council England, the government funder, to leave the capital, "(Stuart) Murphy said he had been contacted by MPs or mayors in about 10 locations to express an interest in hosting the ENO's new headquarters, but declined to reveal where they are." - BBC
Let’s say there’s a writer named Derek. One of the things that Derek does for The Atlantic is explain stuff. Well, if there’s a technology that effortlessly explains stuff much faster than Derek, what exactly is Derek’s value to The Atlantic? - The Atlantic
"The war recalibrates everything. The humanism and decency of Chekhov now seem less relevant than the survey of Russian violence in the works of Maxim Gorky. ... Everything is situated around burning questions: How could a country come to this? How could a people commit these crimes?" - MSN (The Washington Post)
"I wouldn't be surprised to see (the) protest included in upcoming lists of top-ten artworks of 2022. Theirs is a form of performance art, but its message is muddled and unconvincing. ... They want to have it both ways, to act out their emotions and give up nothing." - New York Magazine
As Live Nation leverages its power across the concert ecosystem to increase its profits, concertgoers see higher prices, and artists experience challenging touring dynamics. Artists’ touring costs have become especially onerous, creating difficult economics for small and midlevel artists. - The New York Times
“The Internet itself is just patterns—so much of what we do online is just knee-jerk, meme reactions to everything, which means that most of the responses to things on the Internet are fairly predictable. So this is just showing that.” - The New Yorker
Hollywood sees this an affront to its identity. Film power players have long clung to the fantasy that the cultural world revolves around them. That delusion is hard to sustain when the masses can’t be bothered to come. Hollywood equates this with cultural irrelevancy. - The New York Times
KPOP marketed its characters over social media, leveraging some of the same tools and tactics that brought K-pop’s biggest names to widespread fame. Unfortunately, KPOP’s fictional groups haven’t yet reached the same success. Creating internet fandom, it turns out, is hard to do. - The Verge
