ArtsJournal Classic

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

DANCE

    IDEAS

    • LaScalaTV Drops Its Paywall, Is Now Free

      “From Tuesday 1 September, every title in the LaScalaTV catalogue will be available to watch for free, following simple registration – a shift made possible by continued support from the platform’s Principal Sponsor, Intesa Sanpaolo.” – Gramilano (Milan)

    • Who’s Left To Tell You What’s Good?

      Good Morning,

      Judgment is having a day. A critic makes the case that a review’s job isn’t to relay one listener’s experience but to offer something “extra-human” — a perspective the concert itself can’t supply (San Francisco Classical Voice). Read that next to the discovery that academic papers are citing experts who don’t exist, names that language models reliably invent when asked to produce authorities in a field (404 Media).

      A second look at the violinist data found that the merely-good had logged more practice hours than the best — another crack in the 10,000-hour story we tell about how excellence gets made (Science Blog). And a look inside the book trade names the people who actually decide what you read: supermarket buyers, publicists, and BookTok (The Guardian).

      The Met Museum has finally canceled its Galliano show (AP) after an upwell of protest. And Google shipped an AI reading tool publishers actually like, largely because it asks permission first (Publishers Weekly).

      Also: Miss Piggy, the last real movie star (Vulture). Hard to argue.

    • Summer Movie Box Office Is On The Verge Of An All-Time Record

      Currently, per Rentrak, the North American box office for the first Friday in May through EOD today stands at $4.598 billion, officially the second-highest summer ever behind 2013. If this summer is going to beat 2013’s all-time high, it has $158M to gross. – Deadline

    • What I Learned From China’s Robot Games

      For the first hour or so, I found the Robot Games enthralling. What can robots already do, and where do they still fall short? Which robot will manage to crawl under an obstacle, and which will pitifully get stuck? But after a while, I suddenly realized that I had grown deeply bored. – Yascha Mounk

    • Why Would We Fear AI Music?

      It would be an understatement to say that the growing prominence of A.I. music is generating backlash—sometimes it seems this music generates nothing but backlash. – The New Yorker

    ISSUES

    • Met Museum Calls Off John Galliano Costume Institute Show

      “The Metropolitan Museum of Art is canceling its planned exhibit honoring British designer John Galliano, which had led to severe backlash in the Jewish community and beyond because of the designer’s past antisemitic and racist statements.” – AP

    • Like It Or Not, Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms Changed Visual Art

      “She made more than 20 variants of her mirrored chambers, which use light, sculpture and reflection to create a kind of 360-degree celestial infinity. They have traveled around the world and reached enormous popularity, forever changing the types of exhibits that are staged and the way the public engages with them.” – CNN (Yahoo!)

    • Rotterdam’s Major Art Museum Caught Up In Alleged Municipal Corruption Scheme

      “Two municipal employees in the Dutch city of Rotterdam have been dismissed following an investigation into alleged corruption involving construction contracts. They include work connected to asbestos removal at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, one of the country’s most important museums.” – ARTnews

    • Controversy Over Peter Thiel’s Private Viewing Of Bayeux Tapestry

      While the exhibition of the massive medieval embroidery at the British Museum hasn’t yet opened to the public, the right-wing tech billionaire was hosted by the museum’s director of development for a private viewing — for which he is reported to have made no donation — on August 18. – The Guardian

    • The Ridiculous Claims For Trump’s Ballroom

      The design is rapidly descending into parody—even as Sauer told the court it has been built so solidly that it cannot be demolished, should the court (correctly) so rule. Just like the “unsinkable” Titanic. The ridiculous grand stair from nowhere to nowhere has reappeared on the prominent elevation facing President’s Park. – Architecture and the City

    MEDIA

    MUSIC

    • What — Or Who — Persuades You To Buy That Particular Book?

      “The reality is that our reading choices are directed and massaged at every turn. … And who are the persuaders? They’re the booksellers, the supermarket stock buyers, the publishing houses and their ranks of marketers and publicists. And, more recently, persuasion often comes from (social media). How is all this changing publishing?” – The Guardian

    • Yayoi Kusama Also Had A Career As A Serious Author

      “(She) produc(ed) 12 novels, four volumes of poetry, one collection of short stories, and an autobiography between 1977 and 2002. … Kusama’s novels are dark, violent, and, in many cases, clearly informed by her decade in New York, no matter how emphatically she entreated readers to interpret them otherwise.” – Artnet

    • Google Releases An AI Tool For Books That Publishers Actually Like

      “Expert Intelligence (is) a feature that allows someone reading an e-book purchased on Google Play’s e-bookstore to interact with the title — by asking questions about the book, taking a quiz after reading it, or producing an infographic of key data.” And it respects copyright. – Publishers Weekly

    • AI Paul Gigot Responds To WSJ Opinion Page Editor Paul Gigot

      “I have been thinking about this for close to 20 minutes, and I have concluded that human writing is finished.” – The Atlantic

    • Making Books The Old Fashioned Way

      Arion bills itself as the only printer in the country that makes books entirely by hand under one roof, from casting metal type to printing pages to binding them together into exquisite volumes prized by collectors. – The New York Times

    PEOPLE

    • LaScalaTV Drops Its Paywall, Is Now Free

      “From Tuesday 1 September, every title in the LaScalaTV catalogue will be available to watch for free, following simple registration – a shift made possible by continued support from the platform’s Principal Sponsor, Intesa Sanpaolo.” – Gramilano (Milan)

    • Who’s Left To Tell You What’s Good?

      Good Morning,

      Judgment is having a day. A critic makes the case that a review’s job isn’t to relay one listener’s experience but to offer something “extra-human” — a perspective the concert itself can’t supply (San Francisco Classical Voice). Read that next to the discovery that academic papers are citing experts who don’t exist, names that language models reliably invent when asked to produce authorities in a field (404 Media).

      A second look at the violinist data found that the merely-good had logged more practice hours than the best — another crack in the 10,000-hour story we tell about how excellence gets made (Science Blog). And a look inside the book trade names the people who actually decide what you read: supermarket buyers, publicists, and BookTok (The Guardian).

      The Met Museum has finally canceled its Galliano show (AP) after an upwell of protest. And Google shipped an AI reading tool publishers actually like, largely because it asks permission first (Publishers Weekly).

      Also: Miss Piggy, the last real movie star (Vulture). Hard to argue.

    • Summer Movie Box Office Is On The Verge Of An All-Time Record

      Currently, per Rentrak, the North American box office for the first Friday in May through EOD today stands at $4.598 billion, officially the second-highest summer ever behind 2013. If this summer is going to beat 2013’s all-time high, it has $158M to gross. – Deadline

    • What I Learned From China’s Robot Games

      For the first hour or so, I found the Robot Games enthralling. What can robots already do, and where do they still fall short? Which robot will manage to crawl under an obstacle, and which will pitifully get stuck? But after a while, I suddenly realized that I had grown deeply bored. – Yascha Mounk

    • Why Would We Fear AI Music?

      It would be an understatement to say that the growing prominence of A.I. music is generating backlash—sometimes it seems this music generates nothing but backlash. – The New Yorker

    PEOPLE

    • LaScalaTV Drops Its Paywall, Is Now Free

      “From Tuesday 1 September, every title in the LaScalaTV catalogue will be available to watch for free, following simple registration – a shift made possible by continued support from the platform’s Principal Sponsor, Intesa Sanpaolo.” – Gramilano (Milan)

    • Who’s Left To Tell You What’s Good?

      Good Morning,

      Judgment is having a day. A critic makes the case that a review’s job isn’t to relay one listener’s experience but to offer something “extra-human” — a perspective the concert itself can’t supply (San Francisco Classical Voice). Read that next to the discovery that academic papers are citing experts who don’t exist, names that language models reliably invent when asked to produce authorities in a field (404 Media).

      A second look at the violinist data found that the merely-good had logged more practice hours than the best — another crack in the 10,000-hour story we tell about how excellence gets made (Science Blog). And a look inside the book trade names the people who actually decide what you read: supermarket buyers, publicists, and BookTok (The Guardian).

      The Met Museum has finally canceled its Galliano show (AP) after an upwell of protest. And Google shipped an AI reading tool publishers actually like, largely because it asks permission first (Publishers Weekly).

      Also: Miss Piggy, the last real movie star (Vulture). Hard to argue.

    • Summer Movie Box Office Is On The Verge Of An All-Time Record

      Currently, per Rentrak, the North American box office for the first Friday in May through EOD today stands at $4.598 billion, officially the second-highest summer ever behind 2013. If this summer is going to beat 2013’s all-time high, it has $158M to gross. – Deadline

    • What I Learned From China’s Robot Games

      For the first hour or so, I found the Robot Games enthralling. What can robots already do, and where do they still fall short? Which robot will manage to crawl under an obstacle, and which will pitifully get stuck? But after a while, I suddenly realized that I had grown deeply bored. – Yascha Mounk

    • Why Would We Fear AI Music?

      It would be an understatement to say that the growing prominence of A.I. music is generating backlash—sometimes it seems this music generates nothing but backlash. – The New Yorker

    THEATRE

      VISUAL

      • What I Learned From China’s Robot Games

        For the first hour or so, I found the Robot Games enthralling. What can robots already do, and where do they still fall short? Which robot will manage to crawl under an obstacle, and which will pitifully get stuck? But after a while, I suddenly realized that I had grown deeply bored. – Yascha Mounk

      • The Fake Experts That AI Keeps Citing

        The authors don’t actually exist, but are instead names that large language models repeatedly produce when tasked with generating experts in certain fields. – 404 Media

      • How Social Media Changed The Ways We Remember

        There were ups and downs in the stories I saw people telling, but the trajectory I observed most frequently was an upward one. Growth, expansion, improvement, overcoming. Vacations as burnishments to the image. Illnesses as stress tests, ways of ultimately proving fitness. – The Walrus

      • Why Dictators Fear “Common Knowledge”

        The difference between private knowledge, even when widely shared, and common knowledge is not a mere logical nicety. It can unify knowers in coordinated action and sometimes explode a social status quo. – Persuasion

      • The Very Definition Of Kitsch

        In one moment, you see children playing on the grass, and you are genuinely moved. In the second moment, you see the children playing, and you think how nice it would be to be moved. The latter is the substance of kitsch. – 3 Quarks Daily

      WORDS