AJ Four Ways: Text Only (by date) | headlines only
DANCE
IDEAS
- Our Playlists Are Filled With ‘Old’ Music
Is nostalgia – and not just A.I. – ruining popular music right now, when more than 100,000 songs are released to streamers every single day? – BBC
- Noise Laws, Drugs, And Cellphones Are Harming Dance Clubs In Britain
Or so lovers of (ridiculously) loud dance music claim. “At Gaffe, a DIY space in northeast London, a sign shows two arrows pointing in different directions. One says ‘Dancing,’ the other ‘Yapping.’” – The Guardian (UK)
- The Queer, Tattooed Colombian Author Who’s A National Book Award Finalist
Júlian Delgado Lopera: “‘Most of the catastrophic violence in our history can be traced back to a man who hasn’t allowed himself to feel tenderness,’ he affirms. … He’s referring to a kind of violence that goes beyond the long-running armed conflict.” – El País English
- The Film Director Whose Impossible Class Struggle Movie Won At Venice
Lee Chang-Dong: “I constantly asked myself: am I worthy of telling this story? And if I am, how do I tell it? Do I stand close to the workers, or keep my distance?” – The Guardian (UK)
- How Netflix Went From Zeitgeist To, Well, Zeitghost
“The main problem with 2020s Netflix: It gets eyeballs watching far more than it gets tongues wagging. If a Super Bowl-size event takes place and nobody talks about it, does it even matter?” – Fast Company
ISSUES
- San Francisco’s SFMoMA Gets A Big Boost From A K-Pop Star
Want to sell tickets? Get a K-pop star’s art collection up. “The show has been a blockbuster success, with over 66,000 tickets sold and advance sales that were six times higher than any previous exhibition at the museum.” – The Guardian (UK)
- Dealers Scramble To Get Work Out Of Art Basel Paris After Surprise Early Closing
Multiple dealers told ARTnews they’d received an email announcing the decision at around 3:30 p.m. on Thursday. By then, many had already suspected Saturday’s opening might be canceled. The loss of Sunday came as more of a surprise. – ARTnews
- Man Arrested For Beheading Iwo Jima Memorial Statue At Quantico Marine Base
“Officers responding to a report of destruction of property at the Marine Corps Base Quantico around 10:31 p.m. saw a man ‘actively damaging the statue with a sledgehammer’ and detained him without incident, Prince William County police said.” – CNN
- Art Basel Paris Is Closing Early Because Of France’s Violent Demonstrations
The art fair had been schedule to run through the weekend, but organizers have decided to shut it down on Friday evening “in light of potential demonstrations across Paris this weekend, and in the interest of safeguarding our visitors.” – Artnet
- Kennicott: The New LACMA Is A Train Wreck
He has achieved what many curators, scholars and museum professionals dream of: A museum that decontextualizes art, mixes it all up in a giant cauldron of visual distraction and isolates it from history and culture. But why? How could this happen to one of the country’s great art collections? – Washington Post (MSN)
MEDIA
- The Film Director Whose Impossible Class Struggle Movie Won At Venice
Lee Chang-Dong: “I constantly asked myself: am I worthy of telling this story? And if I am, how do I tell it? Do I stand close to the workers, or keep my distance?” – The Guardian (UK)
- A Huge Fire Has Destroyed Hitler’s Nazi Guesthouse
For some reason (the reason being that after WWII, “local officials fought successfully to keep it, seeing it as a historical site that could attract visitors”), it was still standing, and had a popular restaurant. – The New York Times
- “Why Satire Is No Laughing Matter”: An Essay By Sacha Baron Cohen
“Satire doesn’t just needle politicians or regimes — it occasionally helps bring them down. … Historian Ben Lewis credits Soviet joke-telling with helping to topple communism, by making it impossible for even the system’s own enforcers to take it seriously. … ‘Every joke,’ George Orwell observed, ‘is a tiny revolution.’” – Time
- This Year’s Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Booted From The National Mall, Thrived On A Nine-Month U.S. Tour
“Clifford Murphy, the director of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, which runs the festival, called it a ‘democratizing experience’ — one that added up to more than just making lemons into lemonade.” – The New York Times
- Colombia’s National Museum Is The First Casualty In The New President’s Culture War
Last week, Abelardo de la Espriella, a far-right politician sworn in as President in August, declared a “cultural counterrevolution” and had dozens of artworks and historical objects removed from the Museo Nacional in Bogotá. In response, some 62,000 people demonstrated in the capital, arguing that the President’s action violates Colombia’s 1991 Constitution. – Artnet
MUSIC
- The Queer, Tattooed Colombian Author Who’s A National Book Award Finalist
Júlian Delgado Lopera: “‘Most of the catastrophic violence in our history can be traced back to a man who hasn’t allowed himself to feel tenderness,’ he affirms. … He’s referring to a kind of violence that goes beyond the long-running armed conflict.” – El País English
- Authors Are Angry And In Mourning As A Koch Scion Sells Off Catapult Books After Workers Unionize
Author Gina Frangello: “Catapult is intrinsic to L.A. culture and L.A. literature. So many of their writers are in this area. … It’s a huge loss for L.A. It’s a huge loss for the West Coast.” – Los Angeles Times
- Chatbots May Be Bad Writers. But So Are Most Humans
After all, we’ve been producing particle board for a long time. As Orwell observed (in pre-chatbot 1946!), “prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.” – The Walrus
- How Politics Has Hollowed Out Scientific American, The Oldest Magazine In The US
“Interviews conducted this summer and fall with a over a dozen current and former Scientific American employees depict a magazine that, especially over the past two years, has struggled to protect its editorial independence in the face of sometimes overwhelming pressure from its corporate ownership.” – The Nation
- Hundreds Of Authors Skip Class Action Case And Sue Meta/Facebook Individually
“Nearly 300 authors filed (separate) copyright infringement claims against Meta Platforms on October 19 in (Federal court in San Francisco), alleging the company trained its AI models on pirated copies of their books and, more recently, on physical books it bought and scanned without a license.” – Publishers Weekly
PEOPLE
- Our Playlists Are Filled With ‘Old’ Music
Is nostalgia – and not just A.I. – ruining popular music right now, when more than 100,000 songs are released to streamers every single day? – BBC
- Noise Laws, Drugs, And Cellphones Are Harming Dance Clubs In Britain
Or so lovers of (ridiculously) loud dance music claim. “At Gaffe, a DIY space in northeast London, a sign shows two arrows pointing in different directions. One says ‘Dancing,’ the other ‘Yapping.’” – The Guardian (UK)
- The Queer, Tattooed Colombian Author Who’s A National Book Award Finalist
Júlian Delgado Lopera: “‘Most of the catastrophic violence in our history can be traced back to a man who hasn’t allowed himself to feel tenderness,’ he affirms. … He’s referring to a kind of violence that goes beyond the long-running armed conflict.” – El País English
- The Film Director Whose Impossible Class Struggle Movie Won At Venice
Lee Chang-Dong: “I constantly asked myself: am I worthy of telling this story? And if I am, how do I tell it? Do I stand close to the workers, or keep my distance?” – The Guardian (UK)
- How Netflix Went From Zeitgeist To, Well, Zeitghost
“The main problem with 2020s Netflix: It gets eyeballs watching far more than it gets tongues wagging. If a Super Bowl-size event takes place and nobody talks about it, does it even matter?” – Fast Company
PEOPLE
- Our Playlists Are Filled With ‘Old’ Music
Is nostalgia – and not just A.I. – ruining popular music right now, when more than 100,000 songs are released to streamers every single day? – BBC
- Noise Laws, Drugs, And Cellphones Are Harming Dance Clubs In Britain
Or so lovers of (ridiculously) loud dance music claim. “At Gaffe, a DIY space in northeast London, a sign shows two arrows pointing in different directions. One says ‘Dancing,’ the other ‘Yapping.’” – The Guardian (UK)
- The Queer, Tattooed Colombian Author Who’s A National Book Award Finalist
Júlian Delgado Lopera: “‘Most of the catastrophic violence in our history can be traced back to a man who hasn’t allowed himself to feel tenderness,’ he affirms. … He’s referring to a kind of violence that goes beyond the long-running armed conflict.” – El País English
- The Film Director Whose Impossible Class Struggle Movie Won At Venice
Lee Chang-Dong: “I constantly asked myself: am I worthy of telling this story? And if I am, how do I tell it? Do I stand close to the workers, or keep my distance?” – The Guardian (UK)
- How Netflix Went From Zeitgeist To, Well, Zeitghost
“The main problem with 2020s Netflix: It gets eyeballs watching far more than it gets tongues wagging. If a Super Bowl-size event takes place and nobody talks about it, does it even matter?” – Fast Company
THEATRE
VISUAL
- Why Some Youth – The Ones Who Joust On Bikes, For Instance – Are Going Medieval
One “emerging medieval strand [is] ‘wenchcore,’ which offers ‘a more acceptable voracious sexuality, the ribald, singing, dancing, drinking, doesn’t-need-to-be-perfect idea of womanhood and of masculinity … more of just whatever goes.’” – The Guardian (UK)
- The Art Of Attention
“You can’t talk about aesthetics,” he wrote, “without talking about the principle of hope and the existence of evil.” Attention, for him, was a matter of life and death, or at least of their cultural equivalents, remembering and forgetting. – The New York Times
- Why Friction Is Necessary For Making Progress
The reality is that friction, despite seeming so antagonistic, is necessary and even productive. The force that resists motion has, since humans first struck a spark from a stone, been the very thing that propels us forward. – Aeon
- The Creative Mindset
Actively shaping this perception, rather than only letting it shape you, is a big part of what makes you creative. You need to actively create an attitude that enables you to do work amidst your circumstances, or even transcending it. – 3 Quarks Daily
- Research: Why AI Won’t Replace Humans At Creativity
While AI can bypass years of artistic training, it cannot replace the transformative experiences that give creativity its deeper meaning. The research suggests that the future of art may lie less in producing impressive works and more in using technology to inspire exploration, meaningful experiences and new ways of seeing the world. – TechExplore