AJ Four Ways: Text Only (by date) | headlines only
DANCE
IDEAS
- Opera contra opera
Good Morning,
Two opera pieces landed on ArtsJournal today, pointed in opposite directions. In Opera America, an argument that the form will die unless it can wrest itself back from Big Tech — “irreplaceable” has to be made explicit when AI generates infinite aesthetic stuff at zero cost. The New York Sun counters that the death of opera has been greatly exaggerated, citing successful adaptation. Both can be true. The question is what kind of adaptation, and toward what.
Governments are pressing on artistic speech this week. Germany’s culture ministry phoned novelist Matthias Jügler to demand his historical sources for a popular novella about the GDR’s stolen children (The Guardian). US librarians are still triaging book bans amid culture-war funding cuts (Salon). And news publishers are now blocking the Wayback Machine to stop AI scraping — incinerating an irreplaceable archive in the process (Nieman Lab).
Elsewhere: a $100 million judgment in the long-running Robert Indiana mess (NYT), the WGA ratifies its new four-year contract (Hollywood Reporter), and Mark Swed argues that Michael Tilson Thomas was, deep down, the embodiment of L.A., not San Francisco (LA Times).
All of our stories below.
- The German Government Really Isn’t Happy About This Guy’s Popular Novella
A fiction author gets a phone call from the government: “Jügler was asked to explain what historical source material he had consulted for Mayfly Season and which period he was planning to tackle in his next book.” – The Guardian (UK)
- How Do K-Pop Performers Maintain Their Dance Routines On Four Hours Of Sleep A Night During Tours?
Sure, they’re relatively young, but that doesn’t avoid the energy and kinetic demands of high-energy dance and music performances. The stars “must train to develop stamina and prevent injuries while also maintaining the specific physique that their industry demands.” – The New York Times
- Sorry, Emmys, ‘Heated Rivalry’ Can’t Make You Popular Again
“Heated Rivalry became a bona fide great TV show, as worthy of Emmy consideration as shows about emergency medicine and international diplomacy and AI. But we’re not having that conversation for the dumbest of all possible reasons: the rules.” – Vulture
- How Are U.S. Libraries Doing Amid Book Bans And Culture Wars?
It’s rough in these reading streets. “Librarians across the country are fighting to maintain students’ access to books and to keep their jobs amid cuts to library programs and persistent efforts to restrict reading materials.” – Salon
ISSUES
- The Next Director Of The Tate Has To Confront An Unwieldy ‘Beast’ Of An Institution
“Visitor numbers have indeed recovered after falling from their peak in 2019, but finances were hit hard during the pandemic. Those financial headwinds have led to multiple rounds of redundancies, restructures and several ‘culture war’ battles.” – The Guardian (UK)
- In Lawsuit Over Unlicensed Robert Indiana Art, Indiana’s Former Business Partner Is Awarded One Hundred Million Dollars
“The wide-ranging battle over control of the Indiana legacy — which included accusations of forgery, unpaid royalties, elder abuse and copyright infringement — clouded the market for the artist’s work.” – The New York Times
- The Ideas Challenging This Year’s Turner Prize Finalists
This year’s prize arrives at a moment when sculpture, funding structures and art education are becoming unusually entangled. – The Conversation
- Cutting The Baby In Half? Venice Biennale Jury Says It Won’t Consider Russia Or Israel For Top Prize
The Venice Biennale‘s jury said on Thursday that it would not consider nations whose leaders have been charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court—a move that effectively tosses Israel and Russia out of the running for the top honors at the world’s greatest art exhibition. – ARTnews
- Yet Another Construction Delay For Berlin’s Modern Art Museum
“Another day, another setback for Berlin‘s long awaited Berlin Modern, as moisture damage in the building’s shell and microbial contamination in other parts of the structure have forced the postponement of the museum to 2030. … The latest delay adds approximately eight months to the construction timeline for the Herzog & de Meuron-designed building.” – ARTnews
MEDIA
- Ireland’s Artist Basic Income May Not Account For Artists With Disabilities
“Ó Ceallacháin says many artists with disabilities feel as though they need to “]exist between ‘professional enough’ to be a ‘real’ artist for the Department of Culture and ‘disabled enough’ to receive support from the Department of Social Protection.” – Irish Times
- The Deep, Inescapable Unease Of The New Michael Jackson Biopic
And ‘unease’ is too kind a way to put it: “Everything left unsaid still lingers between the lines, sandwiched between the formidable melodies of his greatest hits, like toxic ooze leaking out from the middle of two slices of Wonderbread.” – Salon
- News Publishers Are Trying To Prevent AI Scraping, But They’re Killing A Valuable History Service
Talk about the baby and the bathwater: “History needs stewards. The people of the Internet Archive do an outstanding job of preserving irreplaceable work and making it available to journalists and researchers.” – Nieman Lab
- A Binational $1.3 Million Program To Fund Individual Creatives In San Diego And Tijuana
“At its core, Artists Count consists of a $1.3 million fund, available to active artists in both San Diego and Tijuana. In addition, a companion study will focus on communities with the least access to resources, examining ‘the realities, challenges, and economic impact of working artists’ on both sides of the border.” – SanDiegoRed
- Send In The Pool Guy: Trump Wants To Replace The Capitol Mall Reflecting Pool
He complained that the 2,030-foor by 167-foot pool, which was built in 1922 between the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument, “never looked great” because the stone on the bottom of the pool was “not really meant to be a stone that’s underwater for that much of a period of time.” – The Independent
MUSIC
- The German Government Really Isn’t Happy About This Guy’s Popular Novella
A fiction author gets a phone call from the government: “Jügler was asked to explain what historical source material he had consulted for Mayfly Season and which period he was planning to tackle in his next book.” – The Guardian (UK)
- How Are U.S. Libraries Doing Amid Book Bans And Culture Wars?
It’s rough in these reading streets. “Librarians across the country are fighting to maintain students’ access to books and to keep their jobs amid cuts to library programs and persistent efforts to restrict reading materials.” – Salon
- It’s Been A Century Since The Term ‘Scientifiction’ Was Coined
That was for Amazing Stories, a magazine that published Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and other stories driven both by ideas and some possibly limited characters (who could, however, fill science books with their thoughts). – NPR
- As Indie Bookstore Day Gives Stores A Boost, They Talk About Battling Amazon
“There are about 70% more bookstores now than there were six years ago in the United States. After 20 years of declining numbers, they’re coming roaring back.” – Fast Company
- no the english language is not like literally goin to pot as we watch lol
While these common gripes point to eccentric speech patterns, they don’t point to grammatical annihilation. English has weathered far worse. … English has lost almost all of the more complex linguistic trappings it was born with to become the language we know and — at least, sometimes — love today.” – The Conversation
PEOPLE
- Opera contra opera
Good Morning,
Two opera pieces landed on ArtsJournal today, pointed in opposite directions. In Opera America, an argument that the form will die unless it can wrest itself back from Big Tech — “irreplaceable” has to be made explicit when AI generates infinite aesthetic stuff at zero cost. The New York Sun counters that the death of opera has been greatly exaggerated, citing successful adaptation. Both can be true. The question is what kind of adaptation, and toward what.
Governments are pressing on artistic speech this week. Germany’s culture ministry phoned novelist Matthias Jügler to demand his historical sources for a popular novella about the GDR’s stolen children (The Guardian). US librarians are still triaging book bans amid culture-war funding cuts (Salon). And news publishers are now blocking the Wayback Machine to stop AI scraping — incinerating an irreplaceable archive in the process (Nieman Lab).
Elsewhere: a $100 million judgment in the long-running Robert Indiana mess (NYT), the WGA ratifies its new four-year contract (Hollywood Reporter), and Mark Swed argues that Michael Tilson Thomas was, deep down, the embodiment of L.A., not San Francisco (LA Times).
All of our stories below.
- The German Government Really Isn’t Happy About This Guy’s Popular Novella
A fiction author gets a phone call from the government: “Jügler was asked to explain what historical source material he had consulted for Mayfly Season and which period he was planning to tackle in his next book.” – The Guardian (UK)
- How Do K-Pop Performers Maintain Their Dance Routines On Four Hours Of Sleep A Night During Tours?
Sure, they’re relatively young, but that doesn’t avoid the energy and kinetic demands of high-energy dance and music performances. The stars “must train to develop stamina and prevent injuries while also maintaining the specific physique that their industry demands.” – The New York Times
- Sorry, Emmys, ‘Heated Rivalry’ Can’t Make You Popular Again
“Heated Rivalry became a bona fide great TV show, as worthy of Emmy consideration as shows about emergency medicine and international diplomacy and AI. But we’re not having that conversation for the dumbest of all possible reasons: the rules.” – Vulture
- How Are U.S. Libraries Doing Amid Book Bans And Culture Wars?
It’s rough in these reading streets. “Librarians across the country are fighting to maintain students’ access to books and to keep their jobs amid cuts to library programs and persistent efforts to restrict reading materials.” – Salon
PEOPLE
- Opera contra opera
Good Morning,
Two opera pieces landed on ArtsJournal today, pointed in opposite directions. In Opera America, an argument that the form will die unless it can wrest itself back from Big Tech — “irreplaceable” has to be made explicit when AI generates infinite aesthetic stuff at zero cost. The New York Sun counters that the death of opera has been greatly exaggerated, citing successful adaptation. Both can be true. The question is what kind of adaptation, and toward what.
Governments are pressing on artistic speech this week. Germany’s culture ministry phoned novelist Matthias Jügler to demand his historical sources for a popular novella about the GDR’s stolen children (The Guardian). US librarians are still triaging book bans amid culture-war funding cuts (Salon). And news publishers are now blocking the Wayback Machine to stop AI scraping — incinerating an irreplaceable archive in the process (Nieman Lab).
Elsewhere: a $100 million judgment in the long-running Robert Indiana mess (NYT), the WGA ratifies its new four-year contract (Hollywood Reporter), and Mark Swed argues that Michael Tilson Thomas was, deep down, the embodiment of L.A., not San Francisco (LA Times).
All of our stories below.
- The German Government Really Isn’t Happy About This Guy’s Popular Novella
A fiction author gets a phone call from the government: “Jügler was asked to explain what historical source material he had consulted for Mayfly Season and which period he was planning to tackle in his next book.” – The Guardian (UK)
- How Do K-Pop Performers Maintain Their Dance Routines On Four Hours Of Sleep A Night During Tours?
Sure, they’re relatively young, but that doesn’t avoid the energy and kinetic demands of high-energy dance and music performances. The stars “must train to develop stamina and prevent injuries while also maintaining the specific physique that their industry demands.” – The New York Times
- Sorry, Emmys, ‘Heated Rivalry’ Can’t Make You Popular Again
“Heated Rivalry became a bona fide great TV show, as worthy of Emmy consideration as shows about emergency medicine and international diplomacy and AI. But we’re not having that conversation for the dumbest of all possible reasons: the rules.” – Vulture
- How Are U.S. Libraries Doing Amid Book Bans And Culture Wars?
It’s rough in these reading streets. “Librarians across the country are fighting to maintain students’ access to books and to keep their jobs amid cuts to library programs and persistent efforts to restrict reading materials.” – Salon
THEATRE
VISUAL
- A Cultural Critic Admits They Were Very Wrong About A 2010s Flashpoint
“There was something very intentional to Girls, something that spoke to me. I could’ve connected with it. Instead, I rejected it dramatically. I wasn’t the only one.” – Slate
- The Deep, Strange Comfort Of A Rewatch
“Familiar things require less from us; they deliver the emotional payoff we expect. But repetition is also a way of revisiting earlier versions of ourselves.” – The Atlantic
- I Am Anti-AI. How Do We Get It Out Of Schools?
At times, I find myself speaking with my kids about A.I. in the same terms that we might discuss a creepy neighbor who lives down the block: avoid eye contact, cross the street when you walk past his house, and, when in doubt, call on a trusted adult. – The New Yorker
- Blame It On The Culture
Someone observes a behavioral difference between groups or countries. They can’t immediately identify the mechanism. So, they invoke “culture” as an explanation or, even worse, “the culture.” The word lands with a satisfying thud that sounds like an explanation but isn’t one. It is the terminus of inquiry, not the beginning. – Laissez Faire
- The Complicated Calculations Behind FOMO
By recognising the social orientation of the experience, we can take a step towards understanding the nature of FOMO and what it can do for us. Emotions that feel bad often serve important purposes. Anger can help us realise when things are unjust, regret can motivate us to make amends. – Psyche
