By the time the concert hall opened in 2017, it was six years late and had cost €866 million, ten times the initial budget. Five years on, concert audiences have tripled, subscriptions have quadrupled, and the "Elphi" is a beloved symbol of the entire city. - The Guardian
Besides the fact that "the NFT market is essentially a game of hot potato: Ditch it before the music stops, or you're stuck with some lines of code and a hefty financial loss. … The question is whether NFTs are the right medium to encourage connections" between artists and audiences. - Van
Ruth Slenczynska, the last surviving student of Sergei Rachmaninoff, will see her new recording of his music and that of Chopin issued on the Decca label, which first recorded her 66 years ago. - BBC
Consider those charitable foundations that have decided to stop funding the arts, or to only fund arts activities that explicitly promote diversity, equality, and justice. This is the reductionist notion that has steered philanthropic giving away from traditional “high culture.” - American Purpose
The petroglyphs, at least 4,500 years old, in Big Bend National Park were ruined by "Isaac, Ariel, Norma, (and) Adrian," who carved their names on the rock on the day after Christmas. - Texas Monthly
The complexity that this wealth of data has revealed to us cannot be captured by theory as traditionally understood. “We have leapfrogged over our ability to even write the theories that are going to be useful for description,” says computational neuroscientist Peter Dayan. - The Guardian
“It became clear, just in a matter of days, that the only way to salvage the school was to actually do a mass evacuation and airlift of the entire school community.” - Berkshire Eagle
Seattle Symphony music director Thomas Dausgaard has abruptly stepped down from his post, midway through his third season at the top of Seattle’s flagship orchestra. - Seattle Times
From a very early age, dancers are taught that pain comes with the territory. “Dance is not natural. We’re stretching our bodies to extremes.” Think of a young, impressionable dancer developing their splits or breaking in pointe shoes for the first time—basically everything hurts. - Dance Magazine
Some 90% of the world’s data has been created in the last 2 years alone. In total, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day, with the number continuing to grow. Yet while the amount of data that we produce has grown exponentially, our understanding of how to manage it has not. - VentureBeat
"(He) overcame an impoverished background in the Bahamas … to rise to the top of his profession at a time when prominent roles for Black actors were rare. … At the same time, as the lone Black leading man in 1960s Hollywood, he came under tremendous scrutiny." - CNN
For five years, someone has been impersonating various publishing industry figures (dozens of them) in order to obtain not-yet-published manuscripts — which were never posted online or held for ransom, baffling people in the field. The suspect is Filippo Bernardini, a young employee of Simon & Schuster. - Vulture
Researchers at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland trained the software on topographical scans of paintings (rather than the high-resolution digital images more commonly used) and found that it could match painting to artist with 96% accuracy. - The Art Newspaper
Now that we have more storytelling than ever, has empathy increased apace? If stories have such sunny effects, why has the big bang of storytelling coincided with an explosive growth of hostility and polarization rather than harmony and connection? - Boston Globe
Why are composers like Mozart, Beethoven and Bach widely regarded as the greatest of all time? Why is it that in a 1985 survey of art experts by the Illustrated London News, only 2 of the 20 greatest paintings of all time were from the 20th century, one from the 18th century, and none at all from the 19th century? - EconLib
“The attention paid by the game developers and their historical consultants to details of both the actual and social geography of these urban settings produced one of the most authentic depictions of eighteenth-century life in popular culture”—far more historically accurate than Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. - Lapham's Quarterly
For years, aesthetes and directors of development have been frustrated by the lack of interest that software industry execs have shown in directing their charitable donations to the arts. In the Bay Area, that has started to change. - San Francisco Chronicle
For Hollywood studios, 2021 was a year of great experimentation and the rare chance to relentlessly test movie distribution patterns in ways they had salivated over prior to the pandemic. - Variety
