“The online translation tool recently started using a neural network to translate between some of its most popular languages – and the system is now so clever it can do this for language pairs on which it has not been explicitly trained. To do this, it seems to have created its own artificial language.”
Justin Davidson: Shouldn’t The Metropolitan Opera Be Doing A Better Job Of New Opera?
“Art demands openness, persistence, and a willingness to tolerate failure. You can’t expect an opera composer to write a great opera if she’s never had the chance to write a mediocre one — or five.”
Dance Magazine Awards 2016: Peck, Lubovitch, Adams, Garafola
“This year we celebrate four extraordinary dance heroes: New York City Ballet principal Tiler Peck, choreographer Lar Lubovitch, activist/teacher Carolyn Adams and historian Lynn Garafola.”
How A TV Show – Finally – Made Itself Into A Love Letter To Black L.A.
Issa Rae’s HBO show “Insecure” accomplishes something nothing else has: Showing the beautiful, complex tenderness of the Los Angeles that African Americans inhabit. “The city’s sprawl becomes a playground for both Insecure’s characters and its soundtrack’s artists, not a coincidence but an asset to the story itself.”
Why Don’t We Have More Famous Black Sci-Fi Writers?
Double problems: The U.S. literary fiction establishment’s problems with genre, and the genre’s racism. “The space for black authors in speculative fiction is continually being built, while the existence of those very spaces is still being challenged by their gatekeepers.”
It Can ‘Reach People Who Are Not A Captive Audience’ – Shepard Fairey On The Power Of Street Art
“If you are going to an artist’s gallery or museum show or website, you might find something interesting and new, but it’s not the same as the visceral experience of encountering something unexpected on the street.” A Q&A with correspondent Scott Timberg.
Poetry Plays An Important Role In Iceland
Poetry is a national pastime, but not a particularly “specialist activity,” said Sveinn Yngvi Egilsson, a professor of Icelandic literature at the University of Iceland. “It’s part of being an Icelander,” he said. “Yes, it’s charming, isn’t it?”
Why Language Wants To Be Free (And Evolve And Change)
“As people in a literate society, we think of language as what’s on the page. That’s the real thing; speaking is just an approximation. Language sits still. But then we hear new things coming in and unless it strikes us as catchy, we think, It’s not supposed to do that because that’s not what in the book. So when new things happen, they’re processed as vulgar and as broken. We don’t understand that no language could ever sit still.”
How An East Village Funhouse Became A Show Business Empire: The Blue Man Group At 25
“They are bald, blue and earless. They do not talk. They play with their food (and their paint), perform wild music on instruments of their own devising and are the centerpiece of an international entertainment empire with 550 full- and part-time employees and annual revenues of $100 million. But perhaps the most striking thing about the men of Blue Man Group … is how comprehensively they have moved from the fringes to the mainstream, and beyond.
Four Things That Would Change The Complexion Of Classical Music
“I am tired of picking up a classical music magazine plastered with middle-aged white faces. In the same way that a six-year-old boy in Tower Hamlets can run around the living room in his Cristiano Ronaldo-emblazoned jersey, screaming at the top of his lungs while he watches his hero play on the box, we need to ensure that the next generation of violinists, composers, marketers, vocalists, lighting technicians, managers, bassoonists and producers alike can have the same experience when they pick up their parents’ copy of Gramophone or Classical Music Magazine.”
Problem: It’s Becoming Increasingly Difficult To Define What/Where Home Is
“When the technology of the home was more like a tool to augment human muscle power – a place for the washing machine, the fridge, the boiler – the home was as a private, bounded space. Now technology is breaking down those boundaries. When parents worry about where their children are going (metaphorically) and to whom they’re talking on social media, they’re acknowledging that people can be at home, in their bedrooms, and yet somewhere else simultaneously. Young people seem to be most at home when they are on – or perhaps ‘in’ – their phones, flicking between apps, surfing their social networks.”
What Lessons Should Artists Learn From The Trump Election?
“History and our own recent experience suggest that some soul-searching assessment of the limits of our own gestures, and some clear-eyed analysis of what rhetoric is effective and what is not, is going to be very, very important in the years to come. It will not be enough to languish in mythological beliefs about art’s value as a humanistic salve, or even to fly the flag for “political art” as a genre. We have to debate strategy. Otherwise, we will delude ourselves with endless anti-Trump symbolic theater, applauding our own virtues and confirming our own righteousness within our prescribed sphere, but not advancing one step in the battle of ideas.”
Another Big City Newspaper Decimates Its Arts Coverage
It’s the Edmonton Journal: “Theatre writer Liz Nicholls and music writer Sandra Sperounes and have both taken buyouts and will leave the paper on Dec. 2. The owners PostMedia announced in October it was going to cut staff across the board by 20%, voluntary buyouts first, layoffs if there aren’t enough volunteers.”
I Am On The Professor Watchlist (Which Is Now A Thing)
“Honestly, being a black man, I had thought that I had been marked enough,” writes George Yancy, a philosophy professor at Emory who is one of a couple hundred individuals that “advance leftist propaganda in the classroom,” according to a website launched by conservative youth group Turning Point USA.
Sexual Assault Alleged In Lawsuit Against Royal Winnipeg Ballet
“The 35-year-old [plaintiff] accuses former dance instructor and photographer Bruce Monk of sexual assault, child exploitation and human trafficking, among other offences.” Monk allegedly pressured the young woman to pose for nude photos when she was 16.
Off-Broadway’s New Latino Theater Project In Action
In May, Jacob Padrón launched The Sol Project to help develop Latino/a theater artists and get their work produced at major Off-Broadway and regional companies. Laura Collins-Hughes looks at how, now that it’s up and running (the first of Sol’s 12 plays is already in previews), the Project works.
Choreographer Nancy Meehan Dead At 85
“[Her] evocative, plotless works on nature themes found a special place amid opposing trends in experimental dance after the 1960s … Unlike [other modern dance choreographers [of the time], who initially rejected dance technique, Ms. Meehan insisted that highly trained dancers execute her own nonballetic idiom with refined precision.”
Van Gogh Museum In Amsterdam Doubles Down On Rejection Of That Sketchbook
A statement this week from this museum (which declared the sketches to be clumsy copies back in 2008) criticizes the experts who are caliming that the sketchbook is real van Gogh for an “excessively easygoing attitude … towards questions of authenticity.” (They’re not the only ones who think so.)
Robert Lepage Explains The 28,000 LEDs He’s Using In The Met’s ‘L’Amour De Loin’ (And He Fesses Up About ‘The Machine’)
The director says that Kaija Saariaho’s opera is very much about water, “but when you take it literally and say, ‘I’ll put water onstage,’ water … will do what it wants, and you don’t have any control over it.” (LEDs – we hope – will do what they’re told.) (includes video)
Guggenheim Helsinki Plan Killed By City Council For Second Time (At Least)
Many ordinary Helsinkians have been ambivalent at best about this project (especially the part that involves spending public money), and at this point it has been rejected, restarted, put out to competition and designed, rejected by the full city council, rejiggered and re-approved, and now rejected again. Is this the end of it, or is this a Rasputin project?
Bad Sex In Fiction Award For 2016 Goes To Italy’s ‘Writer Of The Decade’
That’s how Corriere della sera described Erri de Luca, winner of the 2013 European Prize for Literature, who beat this year’s other Bad Sex finalists with a passage from The Day Before Happiness that reads, in part, “Our sexes were ready, poised in expectation, barely touching each other: ballet dancers hovering en pointe.” (Still, this isn’t nearly as godawful as last year’s winner.)
Prado’s Director To Step Down After 15 Years
In his resignation letter, Miguel Zugaza says, basically, “My work here is done,” so he’s going home to his old (and much smaller) job in Bilbao. And Spain’s leading newspaper allows as how he’s done an excellent job.
Top Posts From AJBlogs 11.30.16
Should We Bother?
My post reflecting on the presidential election, Blindsided, drew a thoughtful comment that seems to me to be worthy of a fuller response than a simple “Reply.” … read more
AJBlog: Engaging Matters Published 2016-11-29
Nine Ways the Arts Can Heal Our Hurting Civilization; or Lessons I Learned from Reading Comics to my Daughter
“This is the time when artists go to work. We speak, we write, we do language. This is how civilizations heal.” This is a quote from Toni Morrison. It has stuck with me. This is our power, and it is immense. But what will we do with it? … read more
AJBlog: New Beans Published 2016-11-29
The Cost of the Met Breuer (and other nuggets from Metropolitan Museum’s FY16 financials)
Back in April, the Metropolitan Museum’s president, Daniel Weiss, declined to disclose to me the cost of renovating the Whitney Museum’s Breuer building, now repurposed (at least temporarily) as the Met Breuer. Thanks to the Met’s annual report … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2016-11-29
Portland Jazz Bulwark To Close
There is news from Portland, Oregon, that Jimmy Mak’s jazz club will permanently close at the end of 2016. A leading west coast club for 20 years, Mak’s has been a primary outlet for the talents … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2016-11-30
New Evidence That The Brains Of Creative People Are Wired Differently
In their main finding, the researchers report the ability to make connections between distant concepts was associated with “structural variation” of several specific brain regions, one of which “was connected to distant regions through long-range pathways.”
American Television Struggles With How To Portray Muslims
“As an artist, you want to stay true to the narrative, and sometimes that goes against your activist agenda, which is to promote this positive image of Muslims. At the same time, to balance that with a truth that exists, in terms of my own experience with Islam, which may not always be necessarily positive.”