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How The FBI’s Art Crime Team Works

"Recently, two of the team's investigators … agreed to answer questions from The New York Times. They declined to comment on the Basquiat case, citing the ongoing investigation. But they discussed the origin and purpose of the Art Crime Team, and the public's increased interest in it. - The New York Times

For The First Time In Decades Vinyl Records Outsell CDs

Vinyl revenue grew 17% and topped $1.2 billion last year, making up nearly three-quarters of the revenue brought in by physical music. At the same time, CD revenue fell 18% to $483 million, the RIAA said. - NPR

A British Survey Finds Workers In The UK’s Public Arts Sector Are Massively Exploited And Underpaid

The survey "exposes how many artists, especially those from less privileged backgrounds, have to sustain multiple additional jobs to subsidise poorly paid commissions in the public sector. Some told of deciding to leave the art world entirely to protect their mental health and financial security." - The Guardian (UK)

All The Oscar Winners, In One Place, All At Once

A compact little list instead of a 3.5+ hour event? You're on. - Los Angeles Times

As Fraudulent Indigenous Art Floods The Market, Actual Indigenous Artists Suffer

Fake Indigenous art is a global market, and stamping it out "is like playing Whack-a-Mole." - CBC

YouTube Has Created A Huge Foreign-Language-Dubbing Industry

 “If you take the top 10,000 YouTube videos by performance and dub them in 20-plus languages, you could easily unlock an additional half a trillion to a trillion views,” he told Rest of World. - Rest of World

A Writing Apocalypse?

Think of it as an ongoing planetary spam event, but unlike spam—for which we have more or less effective safeguards—there may prove to be no reliable way of flagging and filtering the next generation of machine-made text. “Don’t believe everything you read” may become “Don’t believe anything you read” when it’s online. - The Atlantic

Rare Old Books Should Be Handled Bare-Handed, Not With Gloves. The Public Will Not Accept This.

Morgan Library director of conservation Maria Fredericks: "The glove thing. It just won't die."  Grolier Club director Eric Holzenberg: "Every time it comes up, I sigh deeply.  And then I give my three-sentence explanation of why it's ****."  And the explanation does make sense. - The New York Times

The Messy, Convoluted, Expensive, And Sometimes Ugly Business Of Campaigning For Oscar Votes

Studios, agents, and sometimes the talent themselves try to manipulate Academy voters and the press by hiring consultants, buying ads, throwing events, pestering people, staging photo ops, and sometimes even dropping dirt on competitors. - The New York Times Magazine

The Reality Of Artistic Success In Canada: “I Still Can’t Pay My Bills”

Molly Johnson has achieved at the highest level in Canada, with the awards to match: “I gotta say I was depressed. It saddened me, initially, deeply, that here I am in this stage of my career and I still can’t really pay my bills." - Toronto Star

Scientists Figure Out How To Turn Brain Signals Into Images

Using around 90 per cent of the brain-imaging data, the pair trained a model to make links between fMRI data from a brain region that processes visual signals, called the early visual cortex, and the images that people were viewing. - New Scientist

Will Your Next Radio Host Be An AI? (It’s Already In Testing)

One of the advantages of RadioGPT is that it knows about an artist or a song or about a current event, so it can speak to a broad range of topics concisely and in an entertaining way. When we set up RadioGPT voices, this is not text-to-speech. This is setting up character and personality in A.I. - Slate

Can The Famously Reverberant Acoustics Of Notre-Dame Cathedral Be Restored?  Should They Be?

Brian Katz, co-chief of the acoustics team for the medieval cathedral's reconstruction, has created a computer model — of which we can hear samples here — not only of how Notre-Dame sounded before the fire, but of how any changes might affect, and perhaps improve, the acoustics. - The New York Times Magazine

We Need To Rethink Political Art

Artists are a contentious lot and often downplay or deny that politics has any bearing on art and art making. Other artists fully accept that art is political and regard art as a necessary form of political engagement. I have reservations. - Discoveries in American Art

Impending US Supreme Court Ruling Could Upend The Arts World

Blame the appeals court judgment from 2021 declaring that Andy Warhol had no right to appropriate someone else’s photo of Prince into one of the Pop artist’s classic silk-screened portraits. - The New York Times

A Better Seat At The Movie Theatre Will Now Cost You More

For instance, movie theatres "have been pushing customers toward premium-priced specialty tickets" - IMAX? Dolby sound? Reclining seats? Or your regular, standard, much cheaper seat? - The New York Times

A 10-Year-Old Didn’t Want To Do Homework, So She Wrote A Score Instead

Then her mom posted it to TikTok, asking musicians to perform it. So far? "In the following days, musicians played the score on a violin, clarinet, guitar, harp, trumpet, flute, saxophone, cello and viola." And now it's at 6 million views plus. - Washington Post

Conservative Legislators In Tennessee, And Many Other States, Are Attempting To Crush Drag Performances

In their deeply hostile "think about the children" anti-drag legislation, they may be also trying to crush theatre. - The New York Times

Creating A Score For The Third Try At A German WWI Movie

Volker Bertelmann: "When I saw the film the first time, I was thinking I need an instrument from that time. And then my studio - there was the harmonium of my grand-grandmother that I refurbished a year before, and it was just, like, sitting there waiting for a job." - NPR

Objects Have Feelings Too?

In her view, we are often pushed around, one way or another, by the stuff we come into contact with on any given day. A piece of shiny plastic on the street pulls your eye toward it, turning your body in a different direction—which might make you trip over your own foot and then smash your head. - The New Yorker
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