What then makes a great patron? Bags of cash, obviously, but what else? The best patrons — the ones you can count on to cough up the green year after year — have guilty consciences. Or, at least, an image they need to burnish with good works. - The Critic
"Awards ceremonies are back, baby. For the first time since 2019, your favorite writers got to dress up and attend a fancy party or two this year. From the Pulitzer to the Booker, the Nebula to the Edgar, here are the winners of the biggest book prizes of 2022." - Literary Hub
No matter that she founded the city of Odesa. She was a Russian empress, one who conquered large parts of modern Ukraine — and this year Ukrainians have had enough of the Russian Empire. - ARTnews
Among the intellectual property copyrighted in 1927 and available for you to have your way with as of Sunday are the last Sherlock Holmes stories, the films The Jazz Singer and Metropolis, the final volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. - Smithsonian Magazine
"At the top levels, where base salary is over $100,000, it takes years of training and experience and an intense audition process to get a job. Here, the difference in the two positions is more about function than skill." - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"Stone heads of Eros, Dionysus, Herakles, and others were uncovered, as well as a full statue of an unidentified hero of Azanoi, of which there are many. The statue measures at over two meters, or just over six-and-a-half feet, and is missing a few chunks from its pedestal and foot." - ARTnews
"His prolific career spanned more than six decades, with over 100 completed buildings erected. ... The bold, helical Art Tower Mito in Japan, the Sidra tree-inspired Qatar National Convention Center in Doha and the Palau Saint Jordi, created for the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, are among his best-known works." - CNN
GPT may be not so much a revolutionary leap forward as another step down a long, well-trodden path. Insofar as it is used for cultural production and commentary, it will streamline already well-established tendencies toward imitation, repetition, and pastiche. - Commonweal
The equation of anonymity on the internet with deviance, mischief and hate has become a central plank in the global war on “misinformation”. But for many of us, anonymity has allowed us to pursue our passion for scholarly research in a way that is simply impossible within the censorious confines of modern academia. - Unherd
If a computer system has no intelligence, creativity, or understanding but can mimic these qualities, when does it become a distinction without a difference? ChatGPT still falls short, but ChatGPT 2031 may be a different story. What is our place in such a world? - 3 Quarks Daily
The word “information” predates Gutenberg. But once printing took off and books proliferated, new kinds of books had to be invented to track, organize and summarize the relentless flood of data they generated: encyclopedias, bibliographies, dictionaries, multilingual bibles, summaries, herbals. - The Wall Street Journal
For the 2022 edition, we examined representation in U.S. museums and the art market for work by Black American artists, female-identifying artists, and Black American female-identifying artists, by tracing museum acquisitions (a total of almost 350,000 objects) and exhibitions (nearly 6,000). - Artnet
The Avatar sequel comes at a time of great debate in the VFX world about the working environment and treatment of VFX artists in the blockbuster movie space. - BBC
Despite a highly misleading headline, Ivan Hewitt uses a West End show called "Handel's Messiah: The Live Experience" to consider the various things that get added (frequently high-tech and sometimes thoughtful) and taken away (religious content) to attract younger adults to classical music. - MSN (The Telegraph, UK)
