ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

IDEAS

Rethinking What Fatigue Is

“People often think about” fatigue “in terms of ‘oh, people are tired all the time.’ But fatigue is so much more pervasive and detrimental than that." - Washington Post

High Fashion: What Happens When Superfakes Are Indistinguishable From The Real Thing

My plunge into the world of fantastically realistic counterfeit purses — known as “superfakes” to vexed fashion houses and I.P. lawyers, or “unclockable reps” to their enthusiastic buyers — began a couple of years earlier, in what I might characterize as a spontaneous fit of lunacy. - The New York Times

The Pressures Of Beauty Have Ever Been Thus

In her 1991 book The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf argued that the standards of western female beauty were used as a weapon to stagnate the progress of women. But in medieval culture, such pressures were doubly weighted, since beauty was closely aligned with morality: beauty was associated with goodness and ugliness with evil. - The Conversation

The Essential Role Of Memory In Creativity

Over the past decade, our understanding of memory’s role in creativity has only grown. Researchers have linked false memories and forgetting to creative performance. And earlier this year, Schachter and colleagues published a paper that suggests that memory plays an extensive part in every stage of the creative process. - Nautilus

Zaha Hadid Architects Say They Are Developing “Most” Of Their Projects With AI

Zaha Hadid Architects is using AI text-to-image generators like DALL-E 2 and Midjourney to come up with design ideas for projects, studio principal Patrik Schumacher has revealed. - Dezeen

The Case For Being Able To See Inside AI Algorithms

If you want to trust a prediction, you need to understand how all the computations work. For example, in health care, you need to know if the model even applies to your patient. And it’s really hard to troubleshoot models if you don’t know what’s in them. - Quanta

Fetishizing Neutrality: The Mythologies Of Objectivity

Is neutrality even attainable? “No journalistic process is objective,” Wesley Lowery, a former Washington Post reporter, observed in a widely discussed New York Times opinion piece from 2020. “And no individual journalist is objective, because no human being is.” Given “the failures of neutral objective journalism,” he urged another ideal: “moral clarity.” - The Atlantic

The Ways We Must Change The ‘Nonprofit Industrial Complex’ For Artists

"Dignified wages and sufficient financial resources are the two most pressing areas of concern for artists," but arts organizations "overestimate the extent to which they provide critical income and support to artists." - Hyperallergic

We Need To Remember Not Just What We Listened To And Watched, But How

And that how is together. "The very idea of collectively tuning in to history as it happens has been altered, as the profusion of channels and platforms now funnels audience members into self-segregated affinity groups." - Nieman Lab

Three Ways To Think About Creativity And Artificial Intelligence

There are three responses we could have in response to my question, “What does it mean to be creative in the midst of ubiquitous tech?” - Fast Company

Why Our Brain’s Connections To Our Bodies Get Crossed

Nothing that we know of stops the right side of the brain from connecting with the right side of the body. That wiring scheme would seem much simpler and less prone to errors. - Quanta

The Allure Of Conspiracy Theories In A Time Of Complexities

"In a world overshadowed by immensely complex crises that demand cooperation across the human species, we are finding it necessary, as if we were toddlers, to identify fruits and colors..." We are standing... at the junction of many burned and sundered bridges; I received a vision of how truly fucked we are. - Guernica

Meaning And Machines And Making Sense Of How Art Works

There’s something irrevocably empirical about the fact that poems and novels and paintings and music and films stir cognitive-affective goings-on that have the bearings of sense. And there is something irrevocably empirical, too, in the pressure to admit these goings-on as ‘thoughts’ or ‘meaning’. - Aeon

The Usefulness Of Feeling Irritated

Something about this ordinary, negligible feeling seems to make it inaccessible to critical reflection. Perhaps because, when irritable, we tend to be at our least reflective – preoccupied with those diminutive miseries whose oversize effect we know would not stand up to criticism. - Aeon

The Emerging Science Of Hope

We might typically think of hope as a touchy-feely emotion that, almost by definition, is divorced from real-life experience. In fact, as more research is beginning to show, hope is an important scientific concept—something we can define, measure, analyze, and ultimately cultivate. - The Atlantic

Our Free Newsletter

Join our 30,000 subscribers

Latest

Don't Miss

function my_excerpt_length($length){ return 200; } add_filter('excerpt_length', 'my_excerpt_length');