Mac made every recording session, every gig, and every musical encounter better just by being there. He knew what to add. He knew what to subtract. He brought the best out of everyone in the room and did it with such casual grace and style that it seemed effortless. That same sense of ease pervaded his wardrobe. – Paris Review
Prize-winning Architects Pledge To Combat Climate Change
A whole host of Stirling Prize-winning architecture practices have declared an emergency in response to accelerating climate change. Calling for a “paradigm shift”, they unveiled 11 pledges to bring architectural practice in line with planetary limits and called on other UK designers to sign up. – dezeen
The Mysterious Case Of Agatha Christie’s 11-Day Disappearance
It was 1926. “On the evening of Dec. 4, Agatha Christie, carrying nothing but an attaché case, kissed her daughter good night and sped away from the home in England that she shared with her husband, Col. Archibald Christie.” She disappeared for a week-and-a-half, without explanation. – The New York Times
Does Owning A McMansion Make You Happier?
To be clear, having more space does generally lead to people saying they’re more pleased with their home. The problem is that the satisfaction often doesn’t last if even bigger homes pop up nearby. “If I bought a house to feel like I’m ‘the king of my neighborhood,’ but a new king arises, it makes me feel very bad about my house.” – The Atlantic
The Bauhaus Was Built On Ambitious Ideas (That Both Succeeded And Failed)
This new vision for an art school was explicitly intended to combine knowledge of modern techniques for making things with a medieval attitude toward how and why you are making them. Gropius and his allies were going to save the modern world by shoving it as hard as they could both backward and forward at the same time. – The Easel
Why Medieval History(!) Has Become A Modern Battleground
Last week The New York Times reported in detail on YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, which is “capable of drawing users deeper into the platform by figuring out ‘adjacent relationships’ between videos that a human would never identify.” The Crusades are a plum example of a topic that turns into a thread, leading the viewer through a labyrinth towards potential radicalization. You can search “Knights Templar” on YouTube and reach conspiracy theories (“Ten Secret Societies Ruling The World”) within three intuitive clicks. – The New Republic
Allen Ginsberg Annotates Gay Pride March Photos
On the backs of pictures that photographer Hank O’Neal took of the marches in the 1970s, Ginsberg commented in Ginsbergian style. “Black white brown boy girl what idealism! — Wearing their hearts on a banner for nothing but love” – Hyperallergic
Worried About DeepFakes? How About CheapFakes?
Journalists, politicians, and others worry that the technological sophistication of artificial intelligence–generated deepfakes makes them dangerous to democracy because it renders evidence meaningless. But what panic over this deepfake phenomenon misses is that audiovisual content doesn’t have to be generated through artificial intelligence to be dangerous to society. “Cheapfakes” rely on free software that allows manipulation through easy conventional editing techniques like speeding, slowing, and cutting. – Slate
Where Did The Story Of Aladdin And The Magic Lamp Come From? Not ‘The 1,001 Nights’, It Turns Out
In fact, writes Michael Dirda, the tale came from one Antoine Galland, an early-18th-century Orientalist who was the first Westerner to translate the actual Thousand and One Nights from the Arabic. He was working from a manuscript that had only 35 stories in it — and, when his translations became hits, he (not unlike Sheherazad herself) had to come up with more material to meet reader demand. – The Washington Post
Remember ‘Dr. Strangelove’ And ‘The Day After’? Why Don’t They Make Movies Or TV About Nuclear War Anymore?
After all, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock is still set at two minutes to midnight, most of the Cold War-era nukes (or their replacements) are still here, and the world isn’t exactly seeming stable these days. Stephen Phelan looks at Hollywood’s portrayals of nuclear apocalypse, both older and more recent. – Boston Review
SFMOMA Will Be Sending Art To The Golden State Warriors’ New Arena
When the Chase Center opens in San Francisco in the fall, it will feature a 700-pound mobile by Alexander Calder and Isamu Noguchi’s 1975 Play Sculpture. “[They’re] part of a unique ongoing partnership to install four major works of art either borrowed from or commissioned by SFMOMA specifically for the Warriors’ new home court.” – San Francisco Chronicle
Museums And Galleries In Hong Kong Close In Support Of Demonstrations Against Extradition Law
“Around 100 Hong Kong arts organisations, including commercial galleries, signed up to call a strike on Wednesday as lawmakers were expected to begin a series of votes on the [law which would make it easier to extradite Hong Kong citizens to mainland China on political charges]. Those proceedings have been postponed as protesters and the police clash outside the legislature.” – South China Morning Post (Hong Kong)
The Choreographer Who Makes Theatre Move
Raja Feather Kelly: “I think of virtuosic behavior as what I like to do with my choreography. That’s where I can help: by making the behavior specific and virtuosic. I feel like I found a place — that directors and writers now are wanting to do something different and that makes a place for someone like me who is different.” – The New York Times
The New Arms Race: Information As Weapon
One side attempts to mislead the public over a key issue – the safety of a drug, whether climate change is real, or whether vaccines are dangerous, for example. At the same time, the other side works to combat this misinformation campaign. – Aeon
Ready For The Meritocracy Wars?
Much resentment focuses on the way in which the meritocracy is selected, through the education process, and on the winnowing effect of extensive standardized assessments that seek to measure and validate cognitive skills. – The New York Times
Streaming TV Is Racing To Its Next Phase
The siloed age of television has arrived, a time when people will be paying six or seven different monthly fees, if not more, to keep abreast of pop culture—and the cost will end up approximating the hefty cable bill that every cord cutter has sought to avoid. – The Atlantic
Why Did Artists, Historians And Academics Just Spend Nine Weeks Protesting At The Whitney Museum?
“We can no longer accept the art-world logic of career over cause, with artists and critics making politically engaged work against the backdrop of an institutional framework grounded in the art-washing of profits for figures like Warren Kanders,” the group wrote in a statement in February. – Pacific Standard
Canadian Senate Committee Proposes Putting Cultural Diplomacy At The Center Of Canada’s Foreign Policy
The report said “cultural diplomacy” — the exchange of ideas, art and culture across borders outside of official political channels — should take a central role in Canada’s relations with other countries alongside traditional considerations, such as the economy and trade. – CBC
New York Times Quits Political Cartoons
Beginning next month, the Times will cease running daily political cartoons in its international edition, editorial page editor James Bennet said Monday in a statement — a move that brings the overseas newspaper “into line with the domestic paper,” which in recent years had ceased running weekly roundups of syndicated cartoons and experimented instead with longer-form editorial comics. – Washington Post
Raja Feather Kelly: How A Downtown Pop-Queer Experimentalist Became Off-Broadway’s Go-To Choreographer
“One reason, an obvious one, had to do with a close friend. As soon as the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins started to pass his name along to people in the theater world, … he found himself filling a niche Off-Broadway. ‘I was working on new plays that wanted to have a physical life, but didn’t know how,’ he said.” – The New York Times
Erotica Arrives In The Podcast Marketplace
“Dipsea is just one of a growing set of companies that are developing audio porn, targeting both people who don’t get off on the extraordinarily explicit visuals provided on standard porn sites and those who want to take porn outside the bedroom without discomfiting others.” – OZY
Drag, Inc.: When A Subculture Becomes An Industry
“In part, what’s surprising is how long that process took: After all, the impulse to devour cool for profit is just capitalism. Like camp, which began as a private joy, an in-joke for outsiders, drag has become an open buffet for mass consumption. … RuPaul now regularly appears on talk shows, and the most successful queens from [Drag Race] have their own makeup lines, TV shows, and fashion campaigns while shilling everything from Starbucks to vodka to McDonald’s breakfast sandwiches.” – New York Magazine
Guggenheim Museum Staffers Begin Process Of Unionizing
“The proposed union would be a part of IUOE Local 30, a group that also includes MoMA’s union. … About 90 workers are involved in the potential Guggenheim union, including art handlers, installers, construction workers, maintenance workers, and others responsible for the painting and lighting involved in presenting exhibitions at the museum.” – ARTnews
Peter Max’s Wife, Embroiled In Battle Over His Care, Art, And Money, Dead In Apparent Suicide
“The death of [Mary] Max, 52, in the home she shared with Mr. Max, 81, comes in the midst of continued infighting in recent years regarding her husband’s legacy. In May, The New York Times wrote about how business associates and his son, Adam, had taken control of Mr. Max’s studio, with the intention of increasing production using assistant artists even though Mr. Max himself had not painted seriously in four years.” – The New York Times
UK Actors Equity Gets 9% Pay Raises, Possible Job-Sharing For West End Workers
“Performers and stage managers working in the largest West End theatres will earn more than £700 a week as a minimum for the first time, as part of a new agreement that also includes measures for job shares and flexible working.” – The Stage
London’s Tate Gallery Will Lend Lots Of Art To New Museum In Shanghai
“Under the new deal, three exhibitions of works drawn from Tate will be held at the Pudong Museum of Art. Tate will also assist with visitor services, operations, art handling, exhibition management, audience development and learning.” – The Art Newspaper
The Forces That Create Celebrity Culture
Social media amplifies and speeds up interactions between audiences, media and stars, but YouTube and Twitter did not invent modern celebrity culture. That happened more than 150 years ago, thanks to the popular press, commercial photography, railways and steamships, and national postal systems. – Aeon
Designing For A More Circular World
“Today’s linear economy is a straight line, no matter how efficient you make it. If you make a car with less material, if you make a car using less energy, you’re still using stuff. You’re still consuming materials. Whereas within a circular model, from the outset you design in a way whereby that product comes back into the system: the components are recovered, the materials are recovered.” – dezeen
David Lang holds no prisoners in his new, gloves-off opera
David Lang’s music is too pleasurable to be called experimental – it’s the message, not the music, that may make some listeners uncomfortable. – David Patrick Stearns
Propwatch: the seeds in ‘King Hedley II’
Some props haul their own metaphors on stage with them. – David Jays