ArtsJournal (text by date)

MOST RECENT

• What The Success Of Netflix Tells Us About Competition, Ideas, And Data July 18, 2018
  Here are three lessons from the rise of Netflix that apply to every company: Big data is powerful, but big data plus big ideas is transformational. Netflix is a technology juggernaut whose analytics, algorithms, and digital-streaming innovations have changed how customers watch movies and TV shows. But this technology has always been in service of a unique point […]
  Harvard Business Review
• Why It’s Difficult To Tell Whether Things Are Getting Better Or Worse July 18, 2018
  Was the past good or bad? Are we on the right track or the wrong one? Is life getting better or worse? These questions are easy to ask—pollsters and politicians love asking them—but surprisingly hard to answer.
  The New Yorker
• After All The Digital Theory, A Return To Making Real, Physical Art July 18, 2018
  Many of them, after having been exposed to the high-tech side of what a well-equipped institution has to offer, change direction to embrace a more hands-on, traditional way of making and ultimately learning. These students, after graduating, end up being builders of things — and not very interested in creating objects without having some physical […]
  The Conversation
• Stan Dragoti, Director Of ‘Love At First Bite’ And ‘Mr. Mom,’ Dead At 85 July 18, 2018
  “A son of an Albanian immigrant, Dragoti came from the world of New York advertising. He made his Hollywood debut by writing and directing Dirty Little Billy (1972), a Western about the early years of the outlaw Billy the Kid (played by Michael J. Pollard). Dragoti then helmed Love at First Bite (1979), the great […]
  Hollywood Reporter
• What Iris Murdoch Said About The Role Of Artists In Fraught Times July 18, 2018
  “Good art is good for people precisely because it is not fantasy but imagination. It breaks the grip of our own dull fantasy life and stirs us to the effort of true vision. Most of the time we fail to see the big wide real world at all because we are blinded by obsession, anxiety, […]
  Brain Pickings
• That News Report About The Clay Tablet With The Oldest Known Excerpt Of The ‘Odyssey’? Almost Everything About It Was Bogus July 18, 2018
  Yes, it is a clay tablet from the early centuries CE and it does have a passage from Homer’s epic inscribed on it, but that’s about all that the English-language stories got right. (For a start, we have plenty of excerpts from the Odyssey that are older.) Emily Wilson, whose widely-praised translation of the work […]
  London Review of Books
• Next Year’s Venice Biennale: May You Live In Interesting Times July 18, 2018
  About the title’s provenance as an aged curse with a note of wryness in it, curator Ralph Rugoff said, “In this case it turns out that there never was any such ‘ancient Chinese curse,’ despite the fact that Western politicians have made reference to it in speeches for over a hundred years. It is an […]
  ARTnews
• How An Isaac Asimov Sex Scene Changed My Life July 18, 2018
  Slate writer (and trans man) Evan Urquhart: “I knew [when I was 12 that] I preferred old-fashioned books by men for men (or adolescent boys), and I read these as if I were a native rather than a visitor to their world. This stood in contrast to the way I consumed girl culture: by trying […]
  Slate
• Toasters Are Your Gateway To Artificial Intelligence July 18, 2018
  Developers who train machine-learning algorithms have found that it often makes sense to build toasters rather than wonder-boxes. That might seem counterintuitive, because the AIs of Western science fiction tend to resemble C-3PO in Star Wars or WALL-E in the eponymous film – examples of artificial general intelligence (AGI), automata that can interact with the world like […]
  Aeon
• Cirque Du Soleil Is Working With Neuroscientists On Locating And Quantifying The Emotion Of Awe July 18, 2018
  “In exchange for free tickets to [the Cirque show] O and an upgrade to one of the VIP suites, [60 volunteers] agreed to be poked and prodded, and have their brain activity observed during a performance. Twice each night for five nights, Lab of Misfits techs” – yes, that’s the name of the neuroscience research […]
  Fast Company
• Can New Technology Finally Read Ancient Scrolls Buried By Vesuvius? July 18, 2018
  The scrolls represent the only intact library known from the classical world, an unprecedented cache of ancient knowledge. Most classical texts we know today were copied, and were therefore filtered and distorted, by scribes over centuries, but these works came straight from the hands of the Greek and Roman scholars themselves. Yet the tremendous volcanic […]
  Smithsonian
• Barnes Foundation Offers Tours Guided By — Anyone But Tour Guides July 18, 2018
  In a summer series called “Barnes Jawn(t)s” (referencing Philadelphia’s strange all-purpose noun), the museum is turning docent duties over to a bicycle transport advocate, an Indian classical dancer, a queer Latinx social worker, and a black female comic-book maven.
  Philadelphia Inquirer
• How Helen Keller Watched Martha Graham’s Company Dance July 18, 2018
  “Graham, always on the lookout for ways in which people use their bodies to make meaning of the air around them, observes that Keller ‘could not see the dance but was able to allow its vibrations to leave the floor and enter her body.’ … She has taught herself to pay attention using the vibrations […]
  The Paris Review
• ‘Hamilton’ Director Thomas Kail On How The Musical Has Gotten Young People Excited About American History July 18, 2018
  “We have students presenting their own material, and you’ll see a poem about Phillis Wheatley by a 17-year-old student, and you’ll see a song from Abigail Adams’s perspective. Neither of them are characters in our story, but for some reason they spark for those students. And that’s my hope, that this is just an ignition […]
  Washington Post
• Is UNESCO World Heritage Status A Kiss Of Death For Sites In Developing Countries? July 18, 2018
  Looking at Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Luang Prabang in Laos, and the Vietnamese town of Hoi An (whose historic buildings and streetscape miraculously survived the 20th-century wars), art and cultural management professor Jo Caust argues that the mass tourism that comes with the coveted World Heritage designation can turn such places into theme parks and […]
  The Conversation
• Did Michel Houellebecq Predict The ‘Incel Rebellion’? (Yeah, Basically) July 18, 2018
  “For the last 25 years, in novel after novel, Houellebecq has advanced a similar critique of contemporary sexual mores. And while Houellebecq has always been a polarizing figure — admired for his provocations, disdained for his crudeness — he has turned out to be a writer of unusual prescience. … Houellebecq, whose work is saturated […]
  New York Times Book Review
• Why Isn’t Art Criticism More, Well, Critical? That’s Not Really The Problem July 18, 2018
  Melissa Gronlund: “Critics, this thinking runs, need to hold artists’ feet to the fire. Now, I would love for a more ambitious art world to emerge, but I’m not sure more stringent criticism is the means towards it. If anything, the answer is art education: better educated people make better art and provide better critiques. […]
  The National (Abu Dhabi)
• Producers Of Hit Podcast ‘S-Town’ Sued By Estate Of Main Subject July 18, 2018
  “According to plaintiff Craig Cargile, who filed on Thursday in Bibb County, Alabama, on behalf of [John B.] McLemore’s estate, [senior producer and host Brian] Reed, Serial Productions, This American Life, Chicago Public Media, and others allegedly used ‘McLemore’s indicia of identity in a commercial manner’ and seeks damages. Echoing concerns of some listeners, Cargile […]
  Vulture
• In A Rio Favela, Ballet Classes As ‘Anesthetic’ And Aspirational Tool July 18, 2018
  An Afro-Brazilian phys-ed teacher keeps her free program running through funding cuts, building closures, negotiations with drug gangs, and the ever-present threat of violence, all to give her students discipline and a taste of things beyond the slums.
  New York Times
• Laid-Off Educators Sue UK’s National Gallery To Be Compensated As Employees, Not Freelancers July 18, 2018
  A group of 27 lecturers, art historians, and artists who provided services for the museum’s education department (until they were made redundant last October) “say that they were paid through the National Gallery payroll, taxed at source and wore staff passes. ‘We were required to attend staff training and team meetings and received formal reviews […]
  The Art Newspaper