ArtsJournal Classic

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

DANCE

    IDEAS

    • What Cinema Is Becoming

      In this new media landscape, the rigid divides between pure cinema and genre cinema collapsed. Show business no longer creates value solely by selling a single commodity. Instead, it thrives on building interconnected “media ecologies,” creatively connecting film production with TV, toys, games, tourism, platforms, brands, live events, local practices and new technologies. – The Conversation

    • Tulsa Ballet’s Artistic Directors Are Retiring After 30 Years

      Artistic director Marcello Angelini and assistant artistic director Daniela Buson (who are married) announced they will retire from their positions at the end of the 2026-27 season, the company’s 70th. Among the couple’s crowning achievements is this spring’s tour to London, for which the company received glowing reviews. – Tulsa Flyer

    • The Depressing Notion Of AI Art

      The point is that art is linked to dialectical movement. In most societies at most points in time, art is decoration or religious offering — the lyric is also possible. But to actually have artistic evolution, you really need a movement of historical forces that art, essentially, is keeping pace with. – Castalia

    • The Bullshit Jobs We Do To Make Possible Our Real Work

      “Utilizing a bullshit job to pursue other projects isn’t easy. It requires judgment and determination to take time that’s been first flattened and homogenized … then broken randomly into unpredictably large fragments.” – Arrowsmith Press

    • New York State Museum Accused Of Fraud

      Federal investigators said high-ranking administrators at the New York State Museum in Albany directed a subordinate to falsify time sheets, allowing the state to improperly draw down $597,624 in federal grants from 2020 to 2022. – The New York Times

    ISSUES

    MEDIA

    MUSIC

    • Why Writing Feels So Difficult

      Every time you sit down to write, you’re doing something your brain registers as socially risky. Translating private thoughts into language means exposing yourself to judgment and for most of human history, judgment wasn’t just uncomfortable, it was dangerous. – LitHub

    • Authors Have Mixed Feeling About Anthropic “Win”

      One possible way for authors to get a fairer shake in the age of AI could be through the licensing of their work to AI companies. – NPR

    • The Return Of “Tamizdat”: Why So Many New Russian Books Are Being Published Abroad

      “Freedom Letters … (is) one of a growing number of cultural organizations that have joined forces with bookstores, wholesalers and book-fair organizers to build a literary resistance among the Russian diaspora. Together, they publish, sell and distribute books that can’t get through Russia’s restrictive new censorship laws.” – Bloomberg

    • Literary Crisis? I Think Not

      I don’t want to totally wave away the issues these pieces are gesturing towards, but I’d argue the fear that we’re sliding into a post-literate society rests on a category error that feels endemic at this point. – Becoming Literary

    • Students Are No Longer Reading Full Books

      Before we ask our students to read difficult material, those of us who teach in college owe it to all of them to explain that reading books in their entirety matters. If we won’t, or can’t, then higher education will have a bleak future. – The Conversation

    PEOPLE

    • What Cinema Is Becoming

      In this new media landscape, the rigid divides between pure cinema and genre cinema collapsed. Show business no longer creates value solely by selling a single commodity. Instead, it thrives on building interconnected “media ecologies,” creatively connecting film production with TV, toys, games, tourism, platforms, brands, live events, local practices and new technologies. – The Conversation

    • Tulsa Ballet’s Artistic Directors Are Retiring After 30 Years

      Artistic director Marcello Angelini and assistant artistic director Daniela Buson (who are married) announced they will retire from their positions at the end of the 2026-27 season, the company’s 70th. Among the couple’s crowning achievements is this spring’s tour to London, for which the company received glowing reviews. – Tulsa Flyer

    • The Depressing Notion Of AI Art

      The point is that art is linked to dialectical movement. In most societies at most points in time, art is decoration or religious offering — the lyric is also possible. But to actually have artistic evolution, you really need a movement of historical forces that art, essentially, is keeping pace with. – Castalia

    • The Bullshit Jobs We Do To Make Possible Our Real Work

      “Utilizing a bullshit job to pursue other projects isn’t easy. It requires judgment and determination to take time that’s been first flattened and homogenized … then broken randomly into unpredictably large fragments.” – Arrowsmith Press

    • New York State Museum Accused Of Fraud

      Federal investigators said high-ranking administrators at the New York State Museum in Albany directed a subordinate to falsify time sheets, allowing the state to improperly draw down $597,624 in federal grants from 2020 to 2022. – The New York Times

    PEOPLE

    • What Cinema Is Becoming

      In this new media landscape, the rigid divides between pure cinema and genre cinema collapsed. Show business no longer creates value solely by selling a single commodity. Instead, it thrives on building interconnected “media ecologies,” creatively connecting film production with TV, toys, games, tourism, platforms, brands, live events, local practices and new technologies. – The Conversation

    • Tulsa Ballet’s Artistic Directors Are Retiring After 30 Years

      Artistic director Marcello Angelini and assistant artistic director Daniela Buson (who are married) announced they will retire from their positions at the end of the 2026-27 season, the company’s 70th. Among the couple’s crowning achievements is this spring’s tour to London, for which the company received glowing reviews. – Tulsa Flyer

    • The Depressing Notion Of AI Art

      The point is that art is linked to dialectical movement. In most societies at most points in time, art is decoration or religious offering — the lyric is also possible. But to actually have artistic evolution, you really need a movement of historical forces that art, essentially, is keeping pace with. – Castalia

    • The Bullshit Jobs We Do To Make Possible Our Real Work

      “Utilizing a bullshit job to pursue other projects isn’t easy. It requires judgment and determination to take time that’s been first flattened and homogenized … then broken randomly into unpredictably large fragments.” – Arrowsmith Press

    • New York State Museum Accused Of Fraud

      Federal investigators said high-ranking administrators at the New York State Museum in Albany directed a subordinate to falsify time sheets, allowing the state to improperly draw down $597,624 in federal grants from 2020 to 2022. – The New York Times

    THEATRE

      VISUAL

      • The Depressing Notion Of AI Art

        The point is that art is linked to dialectical movement. In most societies at most points in time, art is decoration or religious offering — the lyric is also possible. But to actually have artistic evolution, you really need a movement of historical forces that art, essentially, is keeping pace with. – Castalia

      • The Bullshit Jobs We Do To Make Possible Our Real Work

        “Utilizing a bullshit job to pursue other projects isn’t easy. It requires judgment and determination to take time that’s been first flattened and homogenized … then broken randomly into unpredictably large fragments.” – Arrowsmith Press

      • The Ancient World Beyond Greece, Rome and Egypt

        The de facto equation of ‘ancient history’ with ancient Mediterranean history, at least in most of the Anglosphere, has endured for many generations. But we are on the cusp of a dramatic shift in perspective that is producing a much bigger, broader and more exciting view of ‘the ancient world’. – Aeon

      • What If More Intelligence Doesn’t Make Us Better?

        If we think of intelligence as the ability to extract information from data, then even an infinitely advanced model endowed with infinite compute will be limited by the fact that there’s a limited amount of information that can be extracted from the data. – Noahpinion

      • With So Much Abundance, Why Are We Bored?

        For anyone with an Internet connection and a little discretionary income, the contemporary moment offers a superabundance of seductive distractions. Why then the pervasive mood of emptiness? Why are so many at once overstimulated and bored? – The Guardian

      WORDS