Against The Encroachment Of AI On Creativity
The Brutalist’s AI touch-up fits the broader culture’s fetishization of perfection and flattening, but image filters and technologies like Auto-Tune consciously draw attention to...
Interjections — Those Little Junk Words We Toss Into Conversation — Serve An Important...
“For many decades, linguists regarded such utterances” — mm-hmm, um, huh? and the like — “as largely irrelevant noise, the flotsam and jetsam that accumulate on the margins...
The New Cultural Critique: Anti-Fans
Anti-fans, as pop-culture scholars have termed them, are similar to hate-watchers: consumers who become fixated on what frustrates them. Both groups tend to target something...
Our Times Can Be Understood As A New Kind Of Cultural Revolution
Unlike the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, which imposed ideology on their populaces by means of culture and entertainment, America’s current reality is...
The Curious Case Of Francis Bacon’s Friend Barry
For over a decade before that spring day in 1992, Barry Joule, a Canadian handyman with a rock-star mane, had been one of Bacon’s...
Bong Joon Ho Intends To Destroy Yet Another Genre
As the Oscar-winning director/screenwriter (Parasite, Snowpiercer, Okja) once told an interviewer in his native South Korea, “Whatever genre I choose, I intend to destroy...
Delayed George Lucas Museum’s CEO To Step Down
Jackson-Dumont’s departure comes just months after the museum quietly delayed its opening from this year to 2026. The museum has now delayed its opening...
America’s Oldest University Is Threatened. Can It Survive?
Harvard is the flagship of American higher education ...and what started as a crisis of speech and authority on campus has grown into a...
The Main Oscars Message? Hollywood Is Afraid
I feel for public figures in a way: damned if they do, damned if they don’t. After Sunday night, the film industry looks craven...
The Case For Playing Tchaikovsky With Period Strings And Bows
David Faber, cellist of the Dudok Quartet Amsterdam: “In the early days of recorded classical music, string players exclusively used gut strings. Musicians like...
Artist Hal Hirshorn, Who Used Old-Fashioned Means To Make Unearthly Images, Has Died At...
“An artist known for his ubiquity around New York City’s cultural scene, (he) nevertheless managed to exist outside its manic commercial hustle, using antique...
New David Byrne Immersive Theater Piece To Set Up In Historic Chicago Landmark
The piece, titled Theater of the Mind and based on current research in neuroscience, will be housed in a 19,000-square-foot space inside the Reid...
Chicago’s Brand-New Social Change Theater Festival
“All of the performances (are) staged readings, with actors working from scripts without the costumes and sets of a full production. The goal is...
Writing Opera For Children Is Serious Business (And It Can Be Lots Of Fun)
“For contemporary classical composers, writing children’s opera (is) like casting a spell that lets them be both big and small. Artists with highly experimental...
Holland’s Famous Art Detective Locates Brueghel Stolen 50 Years Ago
“Woman Carrying the Embers vanished from the National Museum in Gdansk, Poland in 1974. Journalists from the Dutch culture magazine Vind spotted what they...
French Government Cuts Funding For Culture Pass By Half
“The French Government has announced a 50 percent cut in their lauded Culture Pass, four years after its nationwide launch for young people aged...
See Video Of Maurizio Cattelan’s Gold Toilet Being Stolen
“The heist of artist Maurizio Cattelan’s $6.1 million gold toilet from a British palace was caught on video that was just revealed to the...
The New Rationalism Versus The Humanities
In many ways, rationalism is the result of people with STEM educations attempting to tackle questions that had long been the purview of the...
Canada’s Quiet, Efficient System Of Book-Banning
Not all these phenomena constitute “banning” per se, but they all fall under what we might call the new “censorship consensus,” in which books...
This Year’s Oscars Show The Hollywood Dream Still Lives
If there is something that unites “Anora” and “The Brutalist,” in terms both of onscreen story and behind-the-scenes process, it’s a masterful dedication to...
New Zealand University Students Protest Decision To Use AI To Replace Traditional Lecture Slides
Three AI programs are set to replace lecture slides in the University of Auckland’s Digital Marketing 304 class when the first semester of the year...
Rethinking Swan Lake From The Point Of View Of, Well, The Swans
“They say a classical ballet isn’t over until the female protagonist dies.” Sure, OK, but what about the rest of the women/swans? - Dallas...
It’s Expensive To Make Culture. We’re Falling Behind
"We’ve now seen years and years of austerity, and it’s not just the arts that have taken a hit – it’s anything that sits...
We’ve Gotten Into A Zero-Sum Mindset. It’s Dangerous
This is what’s called zero-sum thinking — the belief that life is a battle over finite rewards where gains for one mean losses for...
Worries About This Year’s Oscars TV Ratings
In the run-up to the 97th Academy Awards on Sunday, worries about the size of the TV audience have rumbled through the movie capital....
