Last year Dr. Monica Gagliano published a heady and meandering memoir about the conversations with plants that inspired her peer-reviewed work, titled “Thus Spoke the Plant.” She believes, like many scientists and environmentalists do, that in order to save the planet we have to understand ourselves as part of the natural world. It’s just that she also believes the plants themselves can speak to this point. – The New York Times
Christian Marclay Turns Snapchat Into Sound Into (Fleeting) Images
“What’s surprising is the similarity and the banality,” he says. “And the fact that people around the world do the same things with their phone. … It’s a new form of language — a very visual language.” – Los Angeles Times
Is A Market Correction Coming To Humanities Studies?
“There is a certain truth to this recent narrative of humanistic decline as it plays out in liberal arts schools, but it is not that of obsolescence or expense. Nor is it reducible to the liberal arts school itself, even as such schools often stand in for the fate of humanities in recent academic debates. Rather, this moment reveals shifts in the coalition among the humanities, government budgets, and institutional finance as each has assumed new dimensions since the 1970s.” – Los Angeles Review of Books
Conductor Daniel Harding Will Take Year Off To Work As Commercial Pilot
“‘I am fascinated by the feeling of flying a plane,” said the 43-year-old, who has just stepped down as music director of the Orchestre de Paris. “In the spring I will join Air France as a co-pilot and in the 2020/21 season I will take a sabbatical as an orchestra conductor … to dedicate myself to flying.” – The Strad
Major Portions Of Paris’s Pompidou Center Closed For Renovation
“The museum said Tuesday that the ‘caterpillar’ escalator as well as the sloping stone plaza in front of the iconic structure were closed to the public Tuesday for work expected to last until September 2020. As a result, the centre’s three million annual visitors will have to use an entrance around back.” – Yahoo! (AFP)
“Context Collapse” Theatens The Art World
“Content collapse” and “narrative deficiency” are phenomena that characterize social media, where users have multiple distinct communities—friends, family members, colleagues—collated into a single audience. The differences between traditional face-to-face relationship-based interaction and the potentially infinite audience of social media—or, we might logically extrapolate, businesses that scale in a parallel manner, such as big art fairs—is an issue that these industries are beginning to face. – artnet
Share The Wealth: A New Model For Art Fairs?
For the first four editions of Future Fair, all 36 of the “Founding Galleries” who participate in the first version will split 35 percent of the profit. That might be nothing the first time around, Mijares Fick admits, explaining that, as is often the case with new businesses, the first year’s goal is just to break even. After that, she and Rebeca Laliberte expect galleries to get a return of “three to four figures.” – artnet
We Need A Plan To Survive Artificial Intelligence
“The more time we have to prepare before superintelligent AI is achieved, the more likely we’ll survive what follows. But you’ll get total disagreement from scientists on how soon this might happen, and even whether it will happen at all.” – LitHub
Creating Comic Books For The Blind
“Working in a highly visual art form, [Chad] Allen managed to create an auditory experience that closely mimics the sensation of reading a comic book. A whooshing sound occurs whenever a panel changes; the intentionally stilted delivery of lines, as well as narration that prompts mental images, conjure a feeling of being inside a high-stakes comic book world.” – Los Angeles Times
Using Science Fiction To Teach Computer Science Students Ethics
“There’s a long, tangled debate over how to teach engineers ethics — and whether it’s even worth doing. … But Team Ethics is making a comeback. With the morality of Big Tech again called into question, schools like MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Stanford have launched new ethics courses with fanfare” — and with the quandaries posited in many science fiction narratives making them very useful texts. – Wired
New York’s Public Theater Tries Doing Without That Long, Long Ticket Line In Central Park
For years, standing and sitting in that hours-long queue for free Shakespeare in the Park tickets has been almost as much a part of the experience as the performance itself. But not everyone is able to take a day off work and sit out in the elements. So, for its last Central Park production of the season, the Public is making its tickets available only by lottery. – The New York Times
People Who Attend Cultural Events Feel Better About Their Lives And Hometowns: Study
“A new study [commissioned by Arts Council England] has quantified just how much arts offerings influence people’s choice to relocate or stay in a particular city. And as it turns out, the presence of arts and culture overwhelmingly affected respondents’ sense of well-being and satisfaction, their attachment to a place, and their sense of community.” – Artnet
Tech Giants Are Hiring Philosophers. Will It Help?
“Tech companies seem to be recognizing that they need advice on the unprecedented power they’ve amassed and on many challenging moral issues around privacy, facial recognition, AI, and beyond. Philosophers, who contemplate these topics for a living, should welcome any interest in their work from organizations that are set on shaping humanity’s future. But they need to be wary of the potential conflicts of interest that can arise from these collaborations, and of being used as virtue-signaling pawns for ethically problematic companies.” – Wired
The Comic Books About Great Artists (A Good Idea?)
“There’s something inherently odd about using one artistic tradition to depict the life (to say nothing of reproducing the work) of an artist from a different tradition. And yet, not only are a growing number of cartoonists creating books about famous artists, but their approaches are dizzyingly varied. When is a comic book a fitting tribute to an icon?” – NPR
Watching The Chief Lighting Technician Of ‘Hamilton’ At Work
“Brian (Rizzo) Frankel, … a veteran of both the Air Force and Broadway — he’s been in the business since 1980 — is long-haired and goateed, with necklaces, bracelets, a wildly patterned shirt, and a genial, easygoing manner. Since 1994, hes worked at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, on West Forty-sixth Street, Hamilton’s home for the past four years. He’s in charge of the show’s spotlight, and also all of its electricity.” (video) – The New Yorker
How Spain Became A Case Study For The Global Streaming Wars
“Netflix may have been the first to crack the key European market, with locally produced hit Money Heist, but the streamer is now facing heated competition from the likes of Amazon, HBO, Viacom and local player Movistar, which are all vying for Spanish talent and content.” – The Hollywood Reporter
An Exit Interview With The Two Teens Who Debated Heidi Schreck In ‘What The Constitution Means To Me’
With the Broadway run of the show having ended, 14-year-old Rosdely Ciprian will travel with the production to the Kennedy Center whole 17-year-old Thursday Williams heads off to college. The pair talk to a reporter about juggling a Broadway schedule with high school and the thrill of having two Supreme Court justices (Sotomayor and RBG) visit them backstage. – The New York Times
To Desegregate Public Schools, NYC Proposes To Eliminate Gifted Programs
Gifted programs and screened schools have “become proxies for separating students who can and should have opportunities to learn together,” the panel, made up of several dozen education experts, wrote in the report. – The New York Times
A First? Actual Self-Effacing Conductor Takes Helm At Berlin Philharmonic
A self-effacing conductor may seem almost impossible in itself, but in the job held by Wilhelm Furtwängler, Herbert von Karajan, Claudio Abbado and Simon Rattle? Kirill Petrenko — who was elected chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic four years ago but is only now taking up the job — refuses to give press interviews or schmooze VIPs. But musicians absolutely love the man. – The New York Times
In Response To Lara Spencer’s Mockery Of Boys Doing Ballet, Two Of Dance’s Biggest Male Stars Lead A Giant Class In Times Square
On Monday morning, as Good Morning America host Lara Spencer was trying to make amends for her faux pas of last week, Travis Wall (of So You Think You Can Dance) and Robbie Fairchild (formerly of New York City Ballet, now well on his way to a Broadway career) led about 400 dancers through a ballet workout. – The New York Times
The International Ballet Competition That Feels More Like Summer Camp
“What qualifies as artistry is ultimately a subjective assessment. Winning medals – or not winning them – has little bearing on whether a dancer will progress to a successful career. Even so, the Genée competition maintains high standards. The coveted gold medal is sometimes withheld if the judges decide no one has achieved the required level.” – Toronto Star
Philanthropic Giving Was Down Last Year (But Not On PayPal)
Experts have speculated last year’s tumultuous stock market, combined with tax code changes that doubled the standard deduction without a need to itemize charitable contributions, has led to less middle-class giving. That may be true for the average gift size for PayPal givers, but the company’s data shows that those in the lowest income brackets still tend to give a higher proportional share of their net income, something that’s fairly common across the giving world. – Fast Company
How Film Festivals Are Dealing With #MeToo
This year more than ever, we are seeing a transatlantic schism between film festivals over how to handle these acclaimed directors, each of whom have very different backstories. – Deadline
Is Surfing Being Ruined By Ubiquitous Video?
“One of the true gifts of surfing is the privacy of it. That’s going away, and it’s at a great, great, great hazard to the experience. We’re so infatuated with getting looked at now—look at me, look at me, and look at me!—that we’re losing the magic of surfing being a low-profile activity.” – The New Yorker
Books Are Forever. Is Reading?
“It was never the books as objects that people worried would vanish with the advent of e-readers and other personal devices: it was reading itself. The same change was prophesied by Thomas Edison, at the dawn of the movie age. People fretted again with the advent of the radio, the TV, and home computers. Yet undistracted reading didn’t perish the moment any of these technologies were switched on.” – The New Yorker