ArtsJournal Classic

AJ Four Ways: Text Only (by date) | headlines only

DANCE

    IDEAS

    • AI Gets a Museum; Its Story Cracks

      Good Morning,

      The AI conversation is colliding with itself today. Refik Anadol’s Dataland — billed as the world’s first AI art museum — got a June opening date inside Frank Gehry’s Grand L.A. complex (Artnet). Meanwhile, a new Google DeepMind paper argues large language models will never be conscious, demonstrating the gap between AI marketing and rigorous science (404 Media). And a dissection of Sora’s stalled adoption asks why creative AI keeps drawing initial crowds and then bleeding them (The Conversation). The shift is from what AI can do to what it can sustain — and who pays for the institutional bets placed before the answer is in.

      Elsewhere: Venice’s La Fenice abruptly fired Beatrice Venezi as incoming music director after she trash-talked the opera house and its audience to an Argentine paper (The Guardian). And Chicago arts leaders say openly they no longer count on federal funding as a reliable line item (Crain’s Chicago Business).

      A 6th-century New Testament text long thought irretrievable from re-used parchment has been recovered through “ghost imaging” (Artnet). Medieval monks broke the book up. The technology of 2026 put it back together.

      All of our stories below.

    • “Ghost Imaging” Recovers Text Of 1,500-Year-Old Biblical Manuscript

      The 6th-century Codex H included a Greek-language copy of the New Testament’s letters of St. Paul. Sometime in the Middle Ages, though, the monks of Mt. Athos broke the book up and re-used the parchment. Fragments have since been identified, but the original text on them was considered irretrievable — until now. – Artnet

    • Rise Of The Viral Micro-Drama

      While the rest of the world was getting hooked on cat videos and bedroom-dance routines, Chinese creators were tinkering with something more ambitious: serialized shows shot vertically, for phones, and packed with racy plots, absurd twists, and great swells of emotion. – The New Yorker

    • Nilo Cruz: The Art Of Opera Libretto

      A play lives in language. An opera lives in duration. One moment in an opera can expand for five minutes. Maybe you give the composer a full sentence. They might take one word and heighten it, expand it even more. Maybe the whole sentence disappears into music.  – The Paris Review

    • AI: A Philosophy About Language

      The underlying intelligence of a large language model isn’t a function of its architecture, its parameter count, or the volume of compute thrown at its training. It is not even about the training data. It is a function of the social complexity of the civilization whose language it digested. – The Ideas Newsletter

    ISSUES

    MEDIA

    MUSIC

    PEOPLE

    • AI Gets a Museum; Its Story Cracks

      Good Morning,

      The AI conversation is colliding with itself today. Refik Anadol’s Dataland — billed as the world’s first AI art museum — got a June opening date inside Frank Gehry’s Grand L.A. complex (Artnet). Meanwhile, a new Google DeepMind paper argues large language models will never be conscious, demonstrating the gap between AI marketing and rigorous science (404 Media). And a dissection of Sora’s stalled adoption asks why creative AI keeps drawing initial crowds and then bleeding them (The Conversation). The shift is from what AI can do to what it can sustain — and who pays for the institutional bets placed before the answer is in.

      Elsewhere: Venice’s La Fenice abruptly fired Beatrice Venezi as incoming music director after she trash-talked the opera house and its audience to an Argentine paper (The Guardian). And Chicago arts leaders say openly they no longer count on federal funding as a reliable line item (Crain’s Chicago Business).

      A 6th-century New Testament text long thought irretrievable from re-used parchment has been recovered through “ghost imaging” (Artnet). Medieval monks broke the book up. The technology of 2026 put it back together.

      All of our stories below.

    • “Ghost Imaging” Recovers Text Of 1,500-Year-Old Biblical Manuscript

      The 6th-century Codex H included a Greek-language copy of the New Testament’s letters of St. Paul. Sometime in the Middle Ages, though, the monks of Mt. Athos broke the book up and re-used the parchment. Fragments have since been identified, but the original text on them was considered irretrievable — until now. – Artnet

    • Rise Of The Viral Micro-Drama

      While the rest of the world was getting hooked on cat videos and bedroom-dance routines, Chinese creators were tinkering with something more ambitious: serialized shows shot vertically, for phones, and packed with racy plots, absurd twists, and great swells of emotion. – The New Yorker

    • Nilo Cruz: The Art Of Opera Libretto

      A play lives in language. An opera lives in duration. One moment in an opera can expand for five minutes. Maybe you give the composer a full sentence. They might take one word and heighten it, expand it even more. Maybe the whole sentence disappears into music.  – The Paris Review

    • AI: A Philosophy About Language

      The underlying intelligence of a large language model isn’t a function of its architecture, its parameter count, or the volume of compute thrown at its training. It is not even about the training data. It is a function of the social complexity of the civilization whose language it digested. – The Ideas Newsletter

    PEOPLE

    • AI Gets a Museum; Its Story Cracks

      Good Morning,

      The AI conversation is colliding with itself today. Refik Anadol’s Dataland — billed as the world’s first AI art museum — got a June opening date inside Frank Gehry’s Grand L.A. complex (Artnet). Meanwhile, a new Google DeepMind paper argues large language models will never be conscious, demonstrating the gap between AI marketing and rigorous science (404 Media). And a dissection of Sora’s stalled adoption asks why creative AI keeps drawing initial crowds and then bleeding them (The Conversation). The shift is from what AI can do to what it can sustain — and who pays for the institutional bets placed before the answer is in.

      Elsewhere: Venice’s La Fenice abruptly fired Beatrice Venezi as incoming music director after she trash-talked the opera house and its audience to an Argentine paper (The Guardian). And Chicago arts leaders say openly they no longer count on federal funding as a reliable line item (Crain’s Chicago Business).

      A 6th-century New Testament text long thought irretrievable from re-used parchment has been recovered through “ghost imaging” (Artnet). Medieval monks broke the book up. The technology of 2026 put it back together.

      All of our stories below.

    • “Ghost Imaging” Recovers Text Of 1,500-Year-Old Biblical Manuscript

      The 6th-century Codex H included a Greek-language copy of the New Testament’s letters of St. Paul. Sometime in the Middle Ages, though, the monks of Mt. Athos broke the book up and re-used the parchment. Fragments have since been identified, but the original text on them was considered irretrievable — until now. – Artnet

    • Rise Of The Viral Micro-Drama

      While the rest of the world was getting hooked on cat videos and bedroom-dance routines, Chinese creators were tinkering with something more ambitious: serialized shows shot vertically, for phones, and packed with racy plots, absurd twists, and great swells of emotion. – The New Yorker

    • Nilo Cruz: The Art Of Opera Libretto

      A play lives in language. An opera lives in duration. One moment in an opera can expand for five minutes. Maybe you give the composer a full sentence. They might take one word and heighten it, expand it even more. Maybe the whole sentence disappears into music.  – The Paris Review

    • AI: A Philosophy About Language

      The underlying intelligence of a large language model isn’t a function of its architecture, its parameter count, or the volume of compute thrown at its training. It is not even about the training data. It is a function of the social complexity of the civilization whose language it digested. – The Ideas Newsletter

    THEATRE

      VISUAL

      • AI: A Philosophy About Language

        The underlying intelligence of a large language model isn’t a function of its architecture, its parameter count, or the volume of compute thrown at its training. It is not even about the training data. It is a function of the social complexity of the civilization whose language it digested. – The Ideas Newsletter

      • New Google Paper Argues AI Will Never Be Conscious

        The paper shows the divergence between the self-serving narratives AI companies promote in the media and how they collapse under rigorous examination. – 404 Media

      • Why AI Is Struggling With Creativity

        Many generative AI programs geared toward creative fields have encountered a common problem: rapid initial adoption, followed by declining sustained engagement. – The Conversation

      • Why It’s So Difficult To Agree On Truth

        These different notions of truth shape everyday discourse as well as philosophical debate. They might help explain why some arguments feel pointless, why political debates circle endlessly, and why certain disagreements never quite meet on common ground. – Psyche

      • How Short-Form Video Clips Took Over The Internet

        Once you start looking, you realize that short video clips—not tweets, or posts, or static photos—have become the atomic unit of online content. Short-form video, of course, isn’t new, but the prevalence of the clips is. – The Atlantic

      WORDS