‘Art is about allowing people not to have limits on their imaginations. So if audiences are starting to look for something political in the work that may or may not be there, and then they are interpreting it in those narrow terms, that’s a dangerous direction for art to be heading. It’s reducing art to propaganda.’ - ArtsHub
Price isn't the only barrier for a classical newcomer, but it's a big one, and the few American organizations that have tried pay-what-you-wish — most notably, the Chicago Sinfonietta and, this past summer, Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra — say it works. But what about lost ticket revenue? - The New York Times
The tremendous success of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy (Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror and the Light) led to a reassessment of her other work (17 books in total, plus numerous stories and essays) that established her reputation of one of this century's greatest English-language novelists. - The Guardian
"While the streamers' appetite for documentary content has created a new golden age for nonfiction filmmaking, it's come with transformations that many find worrying: Doc subjects are being paid, timelines are getting scrunched, and the line between premium nonfiction and reality television is blurring." - The Hollywood Reporter
Deepfakes graduated from a looming threat to something an enterprising teenager can put together for a TikTok, and chatbots are occasionally sending their creators into crisis. - New York Magazine
The groups with blowhards were less neurally aligned than were those with mediators, the study found. Perhaps more surprising, the mediators drove consensus not by pushing their own interpretations, but by encouraging others to take the stage and then adjusting their own beliefs — and brain patterns. - The New York Times
“This is a concerted, organized, well-resourced push at censorship,” said Suzanne Nossel, the chief executive of PEN America. The effort, she said, “is ideologically motivated and politically expedient, and it needs to be understood as such in order to be confronted and addressed properly.” - The New York Times
The development means there is increased competition for photographers on what were traditionally called photography stock websites, but might be now better described as something else. - PetaPixel
"The new report by the Caucasus Heritage Watch (CHW) identified 108 medieval and early modern Armenian monasteries, churches, and cemeteries in Nakhichevan that were completely destroyed between 1997 and 2011 — an eradication." - Hyperallergic
I knew that if I merely retreated to my “side,” I would only contribute to the problem. With some trepidation, then, I set out to ask twelve scholars what they see as the main challenges facing literary studies and literary criticism today. - The Point
"M*A*S*H is in some ways the most contemporary of its contemporaries. Its blend of madcap comedy and pitch-dark drama — the laughs amplifying the serious stakes, and vice versa — is recognizable in today's dramedies, from Better Things to Barry, that work in the DMZ between laughter and sadness." - The New York Times
"I was looking for stories, each in a different way, that showed how everybody left the war with a wound of some kind. ... The crazy behavior wasn't just to be funny. It was a way of separating yourself for a moment from the nastiness." - The New York Times
"Preserving the rhythm, the sound, and the sensibility of the original musical while translating its dense libretto into a language characterized by multisyllabic compound nouns and sentences that often end with verbs, and all in a society that has minimal familiarity with the show's subject matter." - The New York Times
For instance, Alexander Hamilton in "The World Was Wide Enough" —
English: "America, you great unfinished symphony, you sent for me."
German: "America, durch deine Brust pumpt Sklavenblut, Moral und Wut."
("America, through your breast is pounding the blood of slaves, morality and rage.")
- The New York Times
Sak Tz'i' was an ancient but small city, caught between more powerful neighbors; scholars weren't aware it had existed until they found inscriptions describing its defeats. Nobody knew where Sak Tz'i' had been, until a Chiapas rancher showed a researcher a carved limestone slab he'd found. - The New York Times
Most college students, according to a FIRE report published this week, do not believe that speakers who hold various conservative beliefs should be allowed on campus; I am grateful that these students do not (yet) run a whole country, as the ayatollahs do. - The Atlantic
The arrival of widely available image synthesis models such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion has provoked an intense online battle between artists who view AI-assisted artwork as a form of theft (more on that below) and artists who enthusiastically embrace the new creative tools. - Ars Technica
These new AI capabilities confront the world with a mountain of questions over the rights to the images the programs learned from, the likelihood they will be used to spread falsehoods and hate, the ownership of their output and the nature of creativity itself. - Axios
"His use of long takes, jump-cuts and actors’ asides to the camera all changed the filmmaking vocabulary. He once famously stated that every film needs a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order." - MSN (The Washington Post)
