The major thing is that the Paris myth, in some sense, creates its own death through saturation of believers. The truly exceptional people that came to Paris pave the way for the rest of us, but, their being truly exceptional, in some way, is what made the Paris we chase in our minds what it was. – The Smart Set
Let’s Delve A Bit Deeper Into How To Undermine Things You Think You Know (How Fake News Works)
“Suppose you think, as I do, that knowing that something is the case (e.g. that the MMR vaccine is safe) requires being reasonably confident that it’s the case and also having the right to be confident. In that case, anything that effectively undermines my confidence or right to be confident is a threat to my knowledge. So, for example, getting me to doubt the safety of the MMR vaccine by spreading spurious but convincing stories about links between MMR and autism can prevent me from knowing that it’s safe.” 3AM Magazine
Opera America And League Of American Orchestras Launch New Diversity/Inclusion Initiatives
Opera America’s IDEA Opera Grant Program (that stands for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Access) “will award grants to teams of composers and librettists of color to support and promote the development of new works.” The LAO’s Catalyst Fund “will provide grants to youth and adult orchestras to work with a consultant to create programs and strategies that promote equity, inclusion and diversity.” The CEOs of each organization talk to host Rachel Katz about how the programs will work. (audio) – WWFM
Publishers Fight Libraries Over Scanning Books
“If you thought the controversy over library book scanning ended with the Google case, think again. This week the National Writers Union became the latest organization to join the outcry over a practice known as “controlled digital lending” (CDL), by which a library (or a nonprofit, like the Internet Archive) scans a print copy of a book they have legally acquired, then makes the scan available to be borrowed in lieu of the print book, using a DRM-protected one user/one copy model, and, crucially, taking the corresponding print book out of circulation while the digital copy is on loan.” – Publishers Weekly
Machines Can Now Write Compelling Fake Stories. Soon We Won’t Be Able To Tell What’s Real
Jack Clark says it may not be long before AI can reliably produce fake stories, bogus tweets, or duplicitous comments that are even more convincing. “It’s very clear that if this technology matures—and I’d give it one or two years—it could be used for disinformation or propaganda,” he says. “We’re trying to get ahead of this.” – MIT Technology Review
Why Do The Covers Of Novels Always Have The Phrase ‘A Novel’ On Them?
“Books have used the ‘XYZ: A Novel’ format since the 17th century, when realistic fiction started getting popular. The term ‘novel’ was a way to distinguish these more down-to-earth stories from the fanciful ‘romances’ that came before … Then, as now, it was a tag that identified the kind of literature you were getting yourself into.” – Vox
‘Queen Of The Soundies’, Tap Dancer Mable Lee, Dead At 97
“Soundies” were three-minute musical films meant to be played on jukeboxes, and Lee starred in more than 100 of them. In a career that stretched from the age of nine to this past summer, she achieved dance stardom after graduating from the Apollo Theater’s chorus line, was part of the first all-black USO tour, starred in the national tour of Bubbling Brown Sugar, and took part in the tap-dance revival that started in the 1980s, teaching the likes of Michelle Dorrance. – The New York Times
What Comedy Tells Us About Ourselves — And How We’re Changing
Scholar of comedy Matthew McMahan: “Just as Michel Foucault encourages historians to look to moments of rupture and discontinuity when trying to decipher how a culture thinks and acts, I suggest students of comedy look to the moments when a successful joke simply stops landing with its audience. The moment when a loud guffaw quickly shifts to an appalled gasp can tell us a lot about how a culture is changing.” – HowlRound
Why Jessica Lang Decided To Shut Down Her Dance Company
“We didn’t lose our funding. … It was something I did. I approached the board. I told them the last thing I felt I had time to do was create, to make ballets. They agreed. This kind of structure and organization — I know I am not the only one to say it — doesn’t work for me now.” – San Francisco Classical Voice
California Fire’s Aftermath: A Prominent Artist Loses Decades Of Work, Documentation
All of it was gone. Five decades of artwork, tools and texts — crucial components of Liz Albuquerque’s archive and artistic legacy. Within a few hours, reduced to ash-covered rubble. – Los Angeles Times
Ryan Adams Is The Tip Of An Indie Male Iceberg Of Terrible Behavior ‘Visible From Space’
And every indie music journalist knows it. “Publicists for male indie stars ask for guarantees that allegations and evidence of an artist’s bad behaviour aren’t referred to in interviews, and often receive those guarantees. Managers intimidate women at public events because they don’t like the way they have written about their male charges. Music magazine editors sideline female employees who raise red flags when plans are made to cover well-known creeps. Publications continue to write about men outed as beasts once the heat has died down.” – The Guardian (UK)
Getting Fully Naked (And Getting It On) Onstage
The actors are OK with all of this: “The nudity has struck some theatergoers as so extreme and the sex so prolonged that the actors can hear members of the audience gasp when it begins. Occasionally someone will say, ‘Oh no, oh no, oh no! Cora Vander Broek says of the moment the stage lights rise on her character, Jules, straddling Wheeler (played by Ian Barford) in bed.” – Los Angeles Times
The Theremin Had A Life Before Sci-Fi Movies Took It Over
The original advertising campaigns for the theremin included it as a home music-making instrument. “This campaign primarily targeted middle and upper-class white women, a demographic frequently associated with (and compelled to take on) domestic music-making and most likely to select music technology purchased for the home.” – NewMusicBox
A San Francisco Theatre Has To Cancel A Show Because A Government Agency Decides It’s Not Unique Enough
Not unique enough for a visa for the Canadian artists, that is. EXIT Theatre’s founder had consulted a lawyer and submitted reams of information about why the play Crippled, by playwright Paul David Power, was indeed “culturally unique.” But a week before it was set to open, the visa was denied. – KQED
The Curious Story About The Musician Who Faked His Live Performances?
The Composer’s music moves people, and he is not characterized in the book as necessarily a bad person; he meets with every fan who stays after the concert to chat with him, and he knows his work provides comfort to people going through the hard years after September 11. And his CDs are his own compositions. It’s just that if you were to pay to see a performance by the Composer’s ensemble, it might not necessarily be a “live” rendition by the musicians on the stage in front of you. – New York Magazine
Canada’s National Gallery Gets A New Director
Alexandra Suda comes to the position from the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), where she is currently the curator of European art and the R. Fraser Elliott chair of prints and drawing. – CBC
Were The Arts Impacted By The American Government Shutdown?
Bob Lynch tries To Add it up: “A specific example of the chilling effect of the shutdown’s impact on arts organizations and local businesses comes again from the Smithsonian, which reportedly lost $1.5 million in revenue during the first 10 days of the shutdown. According to the Secretary of the Smithsonian David Skorton, the roughly $1 million a week that the institution lost is unrecoverable and will have long-term impact.” – Americans For The Arts
How Hip-Hop Choreographer Rennie Harris Makes A Major Piece On The Alvin Ailey Dancers
“I’m a street dance choreographer. I do street dance on street dancers. I’ve never set an hour-long piece on any other company outside my own, and definitely not on a modern dance company.” Nevertheless, Ailey artistic director Robert Battle decided that Harris was the right person to be the company’s first-ever choreographer in residence. – Dance Magazine
Arts Philanthropy Is Losing Out
Unfortunately, big-ticket philanthropy is in the middle of a protracted sea change that is already having a direct effect on the arts. Thirteen years ago, the Journal reported that younger new-money donors were increasingly choosing to give it not to fine-arts organizations but to humanitarian causes like AIDS research and education reform. In 2013, Bill Gates put his seal of moral approval on this new tendency by declaring in an interview with the Financial Times that donating money “to build a new wing for a museum rather than spend it on preventing illnesses that can lead to blindness” was, in his words, “slightly barbaric.” – The Wall Street Journal [paywall]
This Theatre Keeps 180,000 Bees On Its Roof
Sian Alexander, executive director of the Lyric Hammersmith theatre in London, writes about how, as part of the organization’s Green Strategy, three hives were installed on top of the building (with a substantial harvest of honey as a result). – Arts Professional
Study Suggests That Small Teams Of Scientists Are More Innovative Than Large Ones
In the largest analysis of the issue thus far, investigators have found that the smaller the research team working on a problem, the more likely it was to generate innovative solutions. Large consortiums are still important drivers of progress, but they are best suited to confirming or consolidating novel findings, rather than generating them. – The New York Times
Did Dan Mallory Also Plagiarize His Best-Selling Novel? (Along With His Other Problems)
The parallels are numerous, and detailed. Both novels feature anxiety-ridden, middle-aged female narrators who are afraid to leave their homes, and they witness something suspicious while spying on neighbors. The stories have nearly identical plot twists in the final act. “It is the EXACT same plot like down to the main characters’ back story,” one person wrote in an Amazon review comparing the two books. “Sorry but there’s no way the amount of stolen material is a coincidence.” – The New York Times
See What The Sydney Opera House Would Have Looked Like If They’d Chosen A Different Architect
The Herald offers visualizations, in situ on the tiny peninsula in Sydney Harbor, of half a dozen of the runners-up in the competition to design what was meant to be Australia’s new national opera house. (Personally, we think the panel made the right choice.) – Sydney Morning Herald
Minnesota Public Radio Opens New Online Portal For Immigrants
“Sahan Journal is the brainchild of Mukhtar Ibrahim, who began his career as MPR’s first Somali-American reporter before joining the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He … said he wants Sahan to be ‘a one-stop shop for all things immigrant in Minnesota.'” – Current
Art Dealer Mary Boone Sentenced To Prison For Tax Fraud
“After pleading guilty in September to filing false tax returns that claimed she had taken in millions of dollars less than was the reality, Mary Boone — an art dealer with roots in New York’s 1970s-era SoHo scene and galleries in the present in Midtown and Chelsea — was sentenced on Thursday to 30 months in prison in New York’s Southern District Court. – ARTnews