According to MRC Data, old songs now represent 70% of the US music market. Those who make a living from new music—especially that endangered species known as the working musician—have to look on these figures with fear and trembling. - Ted Gioia
Following a full lockdown over Christmas, salons, gyms, and brothels were allowed to reopen this week while arts venues had to remain shuttered. So the Van Gogh Museum offered manicures, the Mauritshuis held fitness classes, and the Concertgebouw gave haircuts as Susanna Mälkki conducted Ives's Second Symphony. - France 24
We had to learn to insert ourselves into social media conversations, and that will continue to be a series of moving goalposts. Facebook, for instance, was still free when we started, but they now actively shut down any attempts to spread word if you aren’t paying for it. - LitHub
"She achieved literary celebrity but called herself a 'literary failure,' was supported in a marriage that ultimately collapsed, resisted her family but didn't denounce it, became an icon of the civil-rights movement she relentlessly criticized, and wrote a masterpiece only to watch as it was widely misunderstood." - The New Yorker
By the time the concert hall opened in 2017, it was six years late and had cost €866 million, ten times the initial budget. Five years on, concert audiences have tripled, subscriptions have quadrupled, and the "Elphi" is a beloved symbol of the entire city. - The Guardian
Besides the fact that "the NFT market is essentially a game of hot potato: Ditch it before the music stops, or you're stuck with some lines of code and a hefty financial loss. … The question is whether NFTs are the right medium to encourage connections" between artists and audiences. - Van
Ruth Slenczynska, the last surviving student of Sergei Rachmaninoff, will see her new recording of his music and that of Chopin issued on the Decca label, which first recorded her 66 years ago. - BBC
Consider those charitable foundations that have decided to stop funding the arts, or to only fund arts activities that explicitly promote diversity, equality, and justice. This is the reductionist notion that has steered philanthropic giving away from traditional “high culture.” - American Purpose
The petroglyphs, at least 4,500 years old, in Big Bend National Park were ruined by "Isaac, Ariel, Norma, (and) Adrian," who carved their names on the rock on the day after Christmas. - Texas Monthly
The complexity that this wealth of data has revealed to us cannot be captured by theory as traditionally understood. “We have leapfrogged over our ability to even write the theories that are going to be useful for description,” says computational neuroscientist Peter Dayan. - The Guardian
“It became clear, just in a matter of days, that the only way to salvage the school was to actually do a mass evacuation and airlift of the entire school community.” - Berkshire Eagle
Seattle Symphony music director Thomas Dausgaard has abruptly stepped down from his post, midway through his third season at the top of Seattle’s flagship orchestra. - Seattle Times
From a very early age, dancers are taught that pain comes with the territory. “Dance is not natural. We’re stretching our bodies to extremes.” Think of a young, impressionable dancer developing their splits or breaking in pointe shoes for the first time—basically everything hurts. - Dance Magazine
Some 90% of the world’s data has been created in the last 2 years alone. In total, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day, with the number continuing to grow. Yet while the amount of data that we produce has grown exponentially, our understanding of how to manage it has not. - VentureBeat
"(He) overcame an impoverished background in the Bahamas … to rise to the top of his profession at a time when prominent roles for Black actors were rare. … At the same time, as the lone Black leading man in 1960s Hollywood, he came under tremendous scrutiny." - CNN
For five years, someone has been impersonating various publishing industry figures (dozens of them) in order to obtain not-yet-published manuscripts — which were never posted online or held for ransom, baffling people in the field. The suspect is Filippo Bernardini, a young employee of Simon & Schuster. - Vulture
Researchers at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland trained the software on topographical scans of paintings (rather than the high-resolution digital images more commonly used) and found that it could match painting to artist with 96% accuracy. - The Art Newspaper
Now that we have more storytelling than ever, has empathy increased apace? If stories have such sunny effects, why has the big bang of storytelling coincided with an explosive growth of hostility and polarization rather than harmony and connection? - Boston Globe
