ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

IDEAS

Is Our Definition Of Creativity Too Narrow?

You can show creativity in countless activities, from organising storage space to trimming shrubs to fixing a hole in your wall to training the local crows so they bring you shiny objects. I understand the art bias. - Aeon

This Is What AI Thinks Is Attractive Humans

When an AI image-generation tool—like the ones made by Midjourney, Stability AI, or Adobe—is prompted to create a picture of a person, that person is likely to be better-looking than those of us who actually walk the planet Earth. - The Atlantic

Are You Really Smart? Then You’re Humble

Being intellectually humble means being open to the possibility you could be wrong about your beliefs. - The Conversation

If Thinking Is Good, What Is Over-Thinking?

Is there really such a thing as ‘thinking too much’? After all, thinking a lot seems like what one has to do in order to be rational. - Psyche

The Evolving Notion Of Fame For Artists

Unlike El Greco or Van Gogh, very few artists are household names these days. Fame in the art world is about having currency in the right circles. As those chosen to be on show at the art fair Frieze testify to, some artists achieve ultra-recognition ultra-young. Surprisingly, this can be a disaster. - The Conversation

Study: Why Art Seems Better When You See Something Of Yourself In It

A recent set of studies in the journal Psychological Science suggests that a more personal factor – specifically, how much a piece of art seems to relate, in one way or another, to you – can contribute greatly to its aesthetic power. - Psyche

New Tool Lets Artists “Poison” Their Images At The Pixel Level To Thwart AI

Using it to “poison” this training data could damage future iterations of image-generating AI models, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, by rendering some of their outputs useless—dogs become cats, cars become cows, and so forth. - MIT Technology Review

Everyone Talks About The Humanities Being Endangered. But What Are “The Humanities”?

For now, let’s consider his plaintive question: “what the hell are the humanities?” - New Criterion

We Need A Tech Revolution To Save The Culture

"These platforms effectively position themselves between business customers and end users. They extract rent from the business customers who then raise prices on the end users. In doing so, they also manipulate and exploit the end users, all in the service of business customers and the bottom line." - Jacobin

Our Idea Of Attention Spans Came From 19th Century Factory Managers

So, stop worrying about whether your attention span is too short, and start understanding distractedness as "a radical alternative to an internalised puritan work ethic." - The Guardian (UK)

Consciousness Is So Mysterious, There Are 20 Scientific Explanations For It

A five-year full-on "test" to figure out which theory is right didn't figure it out - but that doesn't mean we didn't learn anything about our brains. - Wired

A Wild Ride Through Podcasting’s No Good, Very Bad Year

"Spotify laid off hundreds and effectively killed its in-house podcast production units, Gimlet and Parcast. It seemed like every entity, from public radio to news publishers, made cuts to their podcast units. Companies folded, and left their creators hanging." - The Verge

The Sydney Opera House, At 50

In 1956, Australia held an international competition "to design a national performance venue on Bennelong Point that would put Sydney on the map" - an idea that certainly worked. - BBC

Research: Public Radio’s Storycorps Debates Move The Dial

Jennifer Richeson analyzed questionnaires completed by 400 One Small Step participants before and after their conversations. Her analysis showed that both liberals and conservatives felt more empathetic towards their partners following their conversations. - Current

Culture Wars And The Shaping Of Language

The culture wars that take place over controversial moral questions are, in part, battles over which ethically loaded concepts should win out within a society. - Aeon

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