“Sometimes my work is considered as activism,” he adds. “It is not. There are people who do that. My work is just trying to engage my identity.” - BachTrack
I’ve known writers who used to submit, literally, the manuscript of a work. It might loiter for six months in some publisher’s office before being returned. Under the conditions of print, a dozen failures a year were difficult to accumulate. Today, if you work at it, you can fail a dozen times before lunch. - The Atlantic
Music is a sphere where young performers and composers tend to look to their teachers and bosses as mentors. This can give rise to all sorts of power abuses, especially in the cut-throat entertainment world where everybody is hustling for the next job. - The Guardian
"Founded by refugees fleeing the Khmer Rouge regime, which sought to eradicate most religious institutions, (the Buddhist temple) Watt Munisotaram and its troupe hope that teaching young children sacred dance will strengthen their ties to both Buddhism and Cambodian traditions." - AP
The deliberate attempt to emulate music culminated in the works of abstract artists like Kandinsky, where colours and shapes, devoid of representational contents, are art in their own right. But just how can an abstract painting imitate music? How can the two be associated in a deep and meaningful way? - Psyche
"The innovative structure of Barter Theatre's new Black Stories Black Voices program ... could well serve as a national model for inclusive art-making that embraces and empowers Black communities at mainstream theatres." - American Theatre
Think of ChatGPT as a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a jpeg retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it. - The New Yorker
"The (works were) taken from houses in Barcelona last year, sparking a major police investigation that led authorities to a hideout in Catalonia. Officers found (them) alongside a hoard of stolen money, watches, jewelry, and expensive pens. ... The police have arrested five suspects, including three brothers aged 50, 53 and 55." - Artnet
“Si collected Johns in depth, but can we sell more than 10 Johns for $10 million apiece all at once? Absolutely not. So instead we’re selling a group that feels holistic and feels like Si.” - Wall Street Journal
"If opera in the form that its creators imagine it becomes for toffs, that is nothing to do with opera itself. It is absolutely extrinsic to the art form, and precisely the result of neglect, and underfunding, and starving of resources, and shame, and embarrassment, and lack of care." - The Guardian
What does it matter if Homo sapiens no longer exists? The astonishing fact is that, despite acquiring the ability to annihilate ourselves back in the 1950s, when thermonuclear weapons were invented, very few philosophers in the West have paid much attention to the ethics of human extinction. - Aeon
"Pictures of the city showed gondolas stuck in canals reduced to muddy ditches, revealing the ancient foundations of buildings. ... The problems in Venice are being blamed on a combination of factors — the lack of rain, a high pressure system, a full moon and sea currents." - The Independent (UK)
The rare marble of which the Duomo is built may be lovely, but it's particularly fragile and susceptible to breakage from temperature changes — and that's on top of the usual modern stressors such as corrosion due to air pollution. - The New York Times
"Baldwin still faces one count of involuntary manslaughter, a fourth-degree felony that carries a sentence of 18 months in prison. But prosecutors have removed what's known as a firearm enhancement, a part of the criminal code that extends prison sentences when firearms are involved in the commission of a crime." - NPR
Salman Rushdie spoke out, as did PEN America: "If we start down the path of trying to correct for perceived slights instead of allowing readers to receive and react to books as written, we risk distorting the work of great authors and clouding the essential lens that literature offers on society." - CNN
