Despite the current limitations, fashion seems ripe for an AI invasion; it’s an arena that has great data sets on customers’ interests, and there is a lot of money at stake. Amazon, for one, is already working on AI systems to provide a leg up in spotting fashion trends, and it has also done some work with GANs (see “Amazon Has Developed an AI Fashion Designer”). Alibaba, meanwhile, just debuted FashionAI, a technology that can recommend items to shoppers on the basis of what they brought into the dressing room.
The Strange Case Of The Arab Whodunnit: Noir Fiction Sees A Revival In The Mideast
“Away from caliphate building and sectarianism, a neo-noir revolution has been creeping across the Middle East, allowing artists and writers to act as ombudsmen in the current political climate. Jonathan [Guyer] meets the writers who are latching onto the adventure, despair and paranoia prevalent in genre fiction to tell stories that transcend the present.” (audio)
This Is The Only Book Ever Banned By The US Supreme Court (And It’s Still Banned Today)
Here’s the story of The Housewife’s Handbook on Selective Promiscuity, the 1960 “sexual autobiography” of “Rey Anthony”, also known as Lillian Maxine Serett.
Pentagon Takes Away Gitmo Prisoners’ Rights To Their Own Art
“The military has decided that art made by wartime captives [at Guantanamo Bay] is U.S. government property and has stopped releases of security-screened prisoner art to the public. One attorney says the U.S. military intends to burn cellblock art. The new source of tension in the 41-captive prison is stirring a fundamental question: Who owns art? The state or the artist?”
Why Spoken English Is So Different From Written English
“Modern languages with a long literary tradition show a stark split between their written and spoken styles across many contexts. In current English, writing uses more varied vocabulary than conversational speech, and it uses rarer and longer words much more often. Certain structures (such as passive sentences, prepositional phrases, and relative clauses) appear more often in written than spoken language. Writers generally elaborate their ideas more explicitly through syntax whereas speakers leave more material implicit. And written language stacks clauses inside each other to a greater depth than spoken language. This is one of the most striking differences between speech and text; sentences like the opening line of the Declaration of Independence simply do not occur in conversation.”
Newly-Discovered Raymond Chandler Story Attacks US Health Care
“Found in Chandler’s archives at the Bodleian Library in Oxford …, the story, “It’s All Right – He Only Died,” opens as a ‘filthy figure on a stretcher’ arrives at a hospital.”
Hiking With John Adams In The Mountains Where His New Opera Is Set
“From time to time when driving in the High Sierra I’ll see amateur gold miners, panning in a river that 150 years ago gave up the best of its treasure to the first prospectors,” says the composer, “and I’ll be tempted to wonder if the image of these latter-day panners, hoping only for a tiny nugget, isn’t an illustration of my own predicament as a composer.”
The University Of Vermont Is Slashing Music And Dance Classes
Not only that, but the classes slashed were taught by part-time faculty – and the chair of the music department resigned in disgust. “A former part-time faculty member himself, Toner said he feels especially bad for the adjunct music faculty who arranged their schedules to accommodate spring classes. As musicians trying to make a living in the small state of Vermont, Toner said many count on their salary of $1,900 per class credit to augment their incomes.”
UK Lottery Sales Are Way Down. Arts Funding Is Suffering. Scottish Officials Say Other Arts Funding Is Needed
With National Lottery income making up nearly 40% of Creative Scotland’s and sportscotland’s total income, these reductions are of critical concern and put both jobs and provision at risk. Figures released by National Lottery operator Camelot in June 2017 showed arts funding was down £55m, with expectations that the “disappointing” sales would continue this year. Creative Scotland told AP its lottery income fell by £5.3m in 2016/17, to £29.1m.
Love The Art, Hate The Artist?
“I expect art to be troubling because I expect people to be troubling. I am prepared to like and dislike something in every work. I can also appreciate the aesthetic genius of a moral monster without feeling that I am becoming inured to monstrosity. Just as I can read Heidegger without becoming a Nazi, I can look at one of Adolf Hitler’s juvenile watercolour paintings and appreciate a bit of pink in the sky there, and understand it as a painting of its era and one by a tyrant at the same time. And if I do this and am judged immoral for it, is it because it is bad for just me or bad for society at large?”
What Place Do Art Fairs Have In Art-Rich Berlin?
“Yet another fair feels like a car company offering another new model: there are already more than enough different cars, besides other options like bicycles, trains and planes. But, like the possibility of a new and really interesting car model entering the stage—an electric one, for instance—there’s always a chance of a new and really interesting art fair showing up. Anything truly innovative could of course change my calendar.”
Memphis College Of Art Says It Will Close
The final decision had been made two weeks earlier, spurred by a combination of declining admissions — down by 35% just this year, according to High Ground Memphis — increasing real estate debt, and the school’s small endowment fund. Tuition at the school is $35,000 per year. While many remain optimistic that the school could remain open, it would take a miraculous $30 million endowment donation to make this possible.
French Teachers Suggest Practical Alternative For The ‘Masculine Prevails’ Grammar Rule
“The teachers’ objection was not just philosophical; it was philological. The rule, they said in the French version of Slate, was a parvenu (it was enunciated in the 17th century and became widely taught only in the 19th century) and politically motivated (it buttressed French laws that denied women equal rights). … In its place, the teachers suggested using ‘the rule of proximity,’ in which the adjective matches the gender of the noun closest to it, which was common practice for centuries.”
Now ‘Downton Abbey’ Has Its Own Traveling Museum
“All the old habitats, including Mr. Carson’s pantry, the servants’ dining room and Lady Mary’s bedroom (faintly scandalous with its memory of Kemal Pamuk’s coital demise) are painstakingly recreated, right down to the forks and spoons arranged just so on the Crawley dinner table. Behind the green baize door lies the servants’ quarters just as you left them, along with Mr. Carson’s old desk, complete with period-era bills and correspondence.”
So, When Are We Going To See The First Billion-Dollar Painting? (Probably Not For A While)
Some people are asking that very question following the record-smashing sale of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi for $450 million. But there were some special factors at play here that are unlikely to be repeated – as Robin Pogrebin reports, “the artwork achieved an unprecedented price because it was an unprecedented piece.”
*This* Is Probably The Right Way For An Orchestra To Do A Nightclub Concert
Anne Midgette on a National Symphony Orchestra concert at Anthem, a new riverfront club in southwest DC: “[Rather than] pander to a younger audience by giving it what they think it wants to hear, … this performance had the orchestra, in street clothes, simply playing the music it does well, including large chunks of this week’s subscription program. Rather than chasing the audience, it introduced itself as it is and let the audience come to it.”
Kyle Abraham Explains Why He’s A Political Choreographer
“There are times when I do just want to make a dancey dance. … But for me, I always get to a certain point when I feel it’s a waste of time and energy. Being black and gay there’s so much that I’ve faced in my life that I can’t be oblivious to what’s happening in the world. I can’t put all that aside and say: ‘Let’s just choreograph this pretty picture.'”
From A Rural South African Township To The National Ballet Of Canada
Siphesihle November, aged 19 and a new member of the NBC corps de ballet, talks to Q about his personal and artistic journeys to the far side of the globe. (audio)
L.A. Phil Picks Seattle Symphony’s Simon Woods As Next CEO
“The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s spring news earlier this year that its longtime president and CEO, Deborah Borda, was departing for New York sent the arts world spinning. Since then, one question has hung – or rung, like a symphonic triangle – in the air: Who would replace her?” We now have the answer.
Comcast In Talks To Buy 21st Century Fox: Report
“Comcast is interested in the same set of assets that Disney approached Fox about earlier this year, sources said. Also of interest to Comcast is acquiring the international assets of Fox, given that the Philadelphia-based company is heavily concentrated in the U.S.” (includes video)
‘How To Survive A Plague’ Wins UK’s Top Prize For Nonfiction
“Opening with a quote from Paul Monet, ‘Grief is a sword, or it is nothing’, [David] France’s book chronicles how the activist community fought to develop the drugs that would turn HIV into a largely treatable condition. … [The book] beat titles including Simon Schama’s Belonging and Christopher de Bellaigue’s The Islamic Enlightenment to win the £30,000 award,” the Baillie Gifford Prize.
Gaudí’s First Masterpiece, Casa Vicens, Opens To Public In Barcelona
“The Moorish-influenced Casa Vicens, commissioned by the stockbroker Manuel Vicens Montaner [as a residence] and built between 1882-88, was the architect’s first major project. … Fifteen lavishly decorated rooms by Gaudí have been restored with input from the descendants of its original tenants as well as extensive archival research.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 11.16.17
Did Ken Griffin Buy the Leonardo (or provide $$$ for Art Institute of Chicago to acquire it)?
While we’re all still coming to terms with the fact that a damaged 26″ x 18″ oil-on-walnut painted panel has just sold for $450.3 million, here’s a potential scoop that is based on some data, … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2017-11-16
“Sotheby’s Drudgery”: My Storify on Contemporary Art Sale Short on Excitement
Last night’s Contemporary Art sale at Christie’s, headlined by a certain very non-contemporary religious painting, was a hard act for Sotheby’s to follow. It did interpose its own anomalous lot to jazz things up – a red Ferrari. … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2017-11-16
Seattle: A Culture Of Growth (For Both Good And Bad)
“Over the past decade, Seattle has added 220,000 jobs, an increase of nearly 15 percent. Amazon, which employs 40,000 people here and holds about one-fifth of the city’s premier office space, has keyed that growth, but the revival has spilled far beyond it. Thirty-one Fortune 500 companies now operate research and engineering hubs in Seattle, up from seven in 2010. More construction cranes are working here than in any other U.S. city, many in the South Lake Union area where Amazon has centered its burgeoning operations. Seattle is now adding about 60 people daily, many of them well-educated Millennials. That’s the city’s most rapid rate of population increase since the Klondike Gold Rush around 1900.”
Kickstarter Launches New Artist Project Subscription Program
Individual artists and collectives, podcasters, and experimental groups create pages on the site, and visitors can subscribe to certain projects, or whatever else the artist decides to make available to them. Artists have the option to create tiers of membership for different kinds of access, and the goal is that these subscriptions will help fund the artist’s future projects, at the same time encouraging the artist to create more content for subscribers.