“White-collar service industries are currently witnessing a huge increase in automation. Artificial intelligence, analytics and voice-recognition technologies are taking over more and more tasks employees used to do. Retailing is another example: we’re moving from physical to virtual retailing. Even lawyers, accountants or radiologists are afraid of the prospect of losing their job to a machine or algorithm.”
Russian Opera Director Faces Criminal Charge For Offending Religious Believers
“Thirty-year-old director Timofei Kulyabin told AFP he has been charged over his production of Wagner’s Tannhäuser at Novosibirsk’s State Opera and Ballet Theatre in Siberia, which premiered in December. ‘It’s absurd and I don’t want to take part in something absurd, to be honest,’ he said.”
How Did This ‘Jeopardy’ Winner Become A Cultural Critic And An ‘Ombudsman’ To Nerds?
After his win streak, Arthur Chu called publicists and PR firms “and said straight up, ‘Hey, do you work with viral celebrities?’ Then I’d ask, ‘If you were me, how would you hang on to the fame, how would you monetize it?'”
“The Brother From Another Planet”: J. Hoberman on Godard
“Taken with cinema, but not taken in by it, … [Godard] is also the brother from another planet, at once straightforward and cryptic, an epistemologist of cinema, wondering why the film frame became a square and why lenses are round. … What to make of the Godardian mind? You might say that, as prolific as he is, Godard suffers from the attention-deficit disorder of genius.”
Who Should Decide How Students Learn About America’s Past?
“This school year, the fury is over the new U.S. History Advanced Placement course – in particular, whether its perspective is overly cynical about the country’s past. The controversy raises significant questions about the role of revisionism in education: How should students learn about oppression and exploitation alongside the great achievements of their country? And who decides which events become part of the national narrative as more information comes to light?”
Richard Linklater Considering Sequel To “Boyhood”
“I wake up in the morning thinking, ‘The twenties are pretty formative, you know?’ That’s where you really become who you’re going to be. It’s one thing to grow up and go to college, but it’s another thing to … So, I will admit my mind has drifted towards [this sequel idea].”
How Ballet Dancers Learn Their Steps: Music, Muscle Memory And Mystery
Jenifer Ringer, late of New York City Ballet, explains the process and the factors that affect it.
Hard Feelings: Science’s Struggle To Define Emotions
“The debate over the nature of emotion has been reinvigorated in recent years. While it would be easy to paint the argument as two-sided – pro-universality versus anti-universality, or Ekman’s cronies versus his critics – I found that everyone I spoke to for this article thinks about emotion a little differently.”
Ancient Frescoes In Roman Catacombs May Undermine Church Teaching About Women Priests – Or May Not
The wall paintings in the Catacombs of Santa Priscilla “have sparked controversy over the role of women in the Church, and helped scholars re-evaluate the importance of the Virgin Mary in early Christian history.” Some claim that one fresco even provides evidence that female priests served the Eucharist, though others are skeptical.
“Amadeus” The Movie At 30 – And Everything It Got Wrong About Mozart And Salieri
BBC Radio 3 presenter Clemency Burton-Hill reviews the liberties writer Peter Shaffer and director Milos Forman took with the historical record (and the device they used to get away with it) – and nevertheless finds that Amadeus is “arguably the finest movie ever made about the process of artistic creation and the unbridgeable gap between human genius and mediocrity.” (text-only)
“Not Useful For Creating Original Work”: Why John Cameron Mitchell Avoids Social Media, Even For “Hedwig”
“It’s hard to keep up with that; it takes a lot of energy and recently [there was] some study that overusing social media can make you depressed and jealous, so I actually chose not to go there. … User comments-culture is not useful for creating original work, I think. I’m all for information diets, which are helpful for the mood and for the art.”
Study: Violent Video Games Are Less Violent For Good Players
“The level of aggression and hostility such games produce varies considerably depending upon the skill of the individual player.”
Results: Arts Rank Low In Survey Of Essential Skills Students Need
“Despite decades of work citing and arguing the value and benefit of the Arts as a core subject important to the education of our children, despite substantial research on that importance, despite the flourishing of hundreds, if not thousands, of exemplary programs across the country, and despite all our efforts, the public seemingly STILL thinks of the arts (at least as important in education) as a frill, a luxury.”
The Arts Are Always Talking About Being Inclusive. And Yet Hypocrisy Is Rampant
“In the face of such bleak statistics, it’s time for us to ask why the industries with some of the loftiest ideals and the most vocal commitments to progressivism still far so far short of reasonable expectations.”
Why Can’t Art Just Be Art?
“Cultural institutions once saw it as their priority to cultivate, preserve and display the best of the arts. Their unique contribution was to cultivate culture in the public sphere, for anyone to enjoy, by developing public understanding of the arts and sciences that have shaped the world we live in today. Through providing access to their collections and archives, they offered inspiration to, and sometimes platforms for, writers, painters, dramatists, architects, and many more.
Now they are desperate to be seen as inclusive, non-elitist public spaces.”
The Murky Gay (And Not-Gay) Politics Around Graham Moore’s “Stay Weird” Oscars Speech
“A lot of people assumed that by comparing himself to Turing, Moore was specifically addressing the plight of people who aren’t straight … But knowing that he’s straight, and knowing the primary controversy surrounding The Imitation Game has been about its minimization of the gay experience, makes Moore’s Oscars moment a somewhat strange one. In fact, it’s striking how much his speech is decidedly not aimed at gay people.”
Heart Of A Ballet Superstar: Wendy Whelan At 47
“She was, and is, longer than most. More angular. Like calligraphy, critics said. And that’s just the start. They go crazy for her work ethic. Her astounding strength. Her rapturous, incandescent spirituality. So have choreographers. … Last fall, at 47, Whelan left the New York City Ballet. But she’s still dancing.” (audio; includes video clips)
Robert De Niro To Direct Stage Musical
Along with theater veteran Jerry Zaks, the Oscar-winning actor will direct a musical adaptation of Chazz Palmintieri’s play A Bronx Tale, a film version of which De Niro directed in 1993.
U.S. Officials Return Tiepolo Painting and Etruscan Bronze to Italy
“Federal law enforcement authorities in New York announced Tuesday that they had returned to Italy two pieces of that country’s cultural heritage stolen decades ago before being brought to the United States: a painting attributed to the 18th-century artist Giambattista Tiepolo and an ancient Etruscan bronze statuette of Herakles.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 02.24.15
Superstars have always been with us
AJBlog: For What It’s Worth Published 2015-02-24
From “Griddle Griswold” to “Twister Griswold”: New Outreach by Cleveland Museum’s Playful Director
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2015-02-24
The Future of the Arts
AJBlog: CultureCrash Published 2015-02-24
Elling And Iyer At The PDX Festival
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2015-02-24
Hail to college jazz radio stations like WHPK
AJBlog: Jazz Beyond Jazz Published 2015-02-24
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Writing As A Lonely Tortured Struggle? Not So Much
“Take those demons, for example. For some of us, writing is not a matter of being driven by them, but casting them out. Difficult family relationships? Sort them out on the page. Horrible love life? Write it again with a better ending. Feeling your age? Slip into the skin of a 20 year old and go off and have some fictional adventures. It’s not a horrible, exhausting struggle; it’s therapeutic.”
Oscars Mop Up: Viewership Down, Petty Controversies, Relevancy Questions, And Then The Boringness Factor
“It’s sad, but most people have to finally accept that the Oscars have become, well, elitist and not in step with anything that is actually popular. No one really believes anymore that the films they chose are the ones that are going to last over time.”
Family Sues Germany Over Treasure Looted By The Nazis
“Two claimants to a collection of medieval Christian treasure filed a suit in the U.S. District Court in Washington on Monday against the German government and the government-controlled museum that owns the artifacts.”
John Luther Adams: Making Music In A Time Of Crisis
“Today a growing number of geologists believe we have left the Holocene and entered a new period—the Anthropocene—in which the dominant geologic force is humanity itself. What does this mean for music? What does it mean for my work as a composer, or for any artist working in any medium today?”