The demand to “stay informed” creates and nurtures that feeling of helplessness. By now, it’s common knowledge that social media is exquisitely crafted to make people feel terrible, but it’s also being increasingly recognized that mainstream news media is just as bad. - 3 Quarks Daily
"(It's) a powerful exploration of the harshness of the rural landscape, with an ecological message that still resonates. ... In many ways, it defined a particular branch of US cinema – one that became particularly popular in the 1970s, and expressed an abject fear of those who lived outside of cities." - BBC
Oldenburg had his avant-garde moment. One of the three saints of the first rise of Popism in the United States, alongside Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, he was, in a way, the odd man out among them. - The New Yorker
Authorship as we know it — that is, singular, capital-A Authority — will become narratively obsolete. It won’t die, or disappear, but merely get integrated into a massive hive mind, a great narrative-making machine (“The newspaper is the sea; literature flows into it at will”). - LA Review of Books
Stefan Soltesz, an Austrian conductor, was near the end of the first act of Richard Strauss' The Silent Woman at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich when he fell from the podium. One opera director collaborator said, "In a world of dilettantes, he was the real thing." - The New York Times
Plantation workers there earn twenty or thirty dollars a month; as artists, they make much more. The collective has brought in more than a hundred thousand dollars since its creation, and it has had shows in cities including Berlin, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Tokyo, New York, Copenhagen, and Jeddah. - The New Yorker
Jonathon Heyward, now 29 and chief conductor of the Northwest German Philharmonic, will be (after the late James DePreist of the Oregon Symphony) the second African-American music director of a major US orchestra in history. He begins his initial five-year term in the fall of 2023. - Yahoo! (The Baltimore Sun)
I went to a therapist. She told me (ready?) to stop consuming the news. That felt wrong. Wasn’t it important to be informed? Quitting the news felt like quitting the world. Then one day a journalist friend confided that she was avoiding the news, too. - Washington Post
Mahler and Beethoven left several tantalizing blueprints of their 10th Symphonies behind. Now, computer scientists are developing algorithms for artificial intelligence (AI) to lift the “curse of the ninth” and complete the unfinished works of these classical masters. - Mental Floss
In number of subscribers, Vox is fourth, behind the BBC, ABC News, and CNN. But in average number of views per video, Vox racks up more than 2 million, four times the tally of the runner-up, The Economist (and more than 14 times that of Fox News). - Press Gazette (UK)
The notion of participatory creativity has major implications for any person or organization concerned with the creation of innovative ideas or artistic expression. It means recognizing and putting in place the means to foster creativity as a collaborative process. - The Conversation
Mr. Oldenburg entered the New York art scene in earnest in the late 1950s, embracing the audience-participation “Happenings” then in vogue and expanding the boundaries of art with shows that incorporated things like street signs, wire-and-plaster clothing and even pieces of pie. - The New York Times
"The assumption that 'a gay book' is necessarily a sexualized book, and therefore inappropriate for children, is baked into the language of 'Don’t Say Gay,'" the censorious, proudly homophobic Florida law that Republicans would like to pass and enforce everywhere. - The New Yorker
Jeffrey Arlo Brown writes about the tricky, nerve-wracking process that two young trumpeters went through. One passed his trial, the other failed hers — which turned out to be a very lucky thing. - Van
Many institutions have moved, or are on the verge of moving, significant portions of their collections off-site. Some are embarking on large-scale book de-accessioning projects, a process by which books are removed permanently from a collection. - The Walrus
He took the helm of the Guggenheim in 2008, following the resignation of firebrand director Tom Krens. Only the fifth leader in the institution’s history, Armstrong inherited Krens’s ambitious expansion plans, which had seen the Bilbao outpost open in 1997 and the inking of a deal with Abu Dhabi. - Artnet
There’s a preponderance of copaganda and superheroes saving the day and a category of narrative best described as wealth-aganda — stories focused on the interior lives of the rich, from the aspirational to the ridiculous to the unscrupulous. - Chicago Tribune
It’s an irony that arguably the most radical movement in European thought should have been appropriated by the conservative forces of the market, but it’s also predictable. - Aeon
It only operated from 1933-1957 in North Carolina's Swannanoa Valley, and its great impact was through its summer program. But to see how important Black Mountain College was, you need only look at the astounding list of those who taught and studied there. - T — The New York Times Style Magazine
Oxford's Institute for Digital Archaeology has lidar-scanned some of the sculptures at the British Museum; its robot is now chiseling copies of them from Carrara marble; those copies would go to London as the originals returned to Athens. Not everyone is on board with this plan. - The New York Times
