The Artist Whose Medium Is Big Data

Laurie Frick imagines a future in which your smart watch will know how your body is responding to someone. Then it will combine with Facebook data about their personality. And that will let you know whether that person makes you lethargic, raises your blood pressure or depresses you. “If you start training people that, ‘Look at what’s happening to your inflammation levels or whatever. This is the best thing for you and you can let go of the guilt.’ “

Those Articulate Florida Kids Leading The #NeverAgain Movement? Theatre Nerds

Are you surprised that these teenage drama nerds are now taking the international stage by storm? I’m not. A theatre class is more than an artistic distraction for students. It can serve as a lightning rod of empowerment for young people. For many teens, the experience of standing in a spotlight on a stage in a play or musical, galvanizing the attention of adults in the audience, is the first time a young person discovers that what they say matters. They learn that words have power, that their voice can move and inspire others.

JoAnn Falletta: Are Orchestras Opening Up To Women Conductors?

“It seems that orchestras are open to looking at women, at young women, at young conductors in general. It’s a time when people are saying, ‘Maybe we can change the way we think about programming and, hopefully, presentation.’ And it’s not as if women are not ready. All of these decades women have been studying, filling spots in smaller orchestras, and the women stepping into these roles come from solid backgrounds.”

How Cincinnati Invested In Selling The Arts To Sell Itself

Regional Tourism Network provided a half-million dollars that was matched by ArtsWave to co-create the region’s first arts marketing campaign outside of a 100-mile radius. The result: Their $1 million campaign in fall 2016 reaped $14 million in hotel stays. Arts audiences across the region increased 3 percent. Surveys showed that Cincinnati was gaining a reputation as a place people might like to live, work and visit.

Should The Press Really Be “Objective”? That’s A Relatively New Idea

Widespread objective, nonpartisan media did once exist in this country, from roughly the 1950s to the late 1970s. But at the time, that was something new, too. Before that, there was no press other than the partisan press. Newspapers controlled by the Federalists branded Thomas Jefferson an “infidel,” while the Democratic-Republican press called George Washington a “traitor.” Before journalism became a “profession” in the Progressive Era, newspaper editors organized parties and held meetings in their offices. So if the passage of modern objective news is lamentable, it is also not all that surprising.

The Goal: Learn All There Is To Learn About Vermeer’s ‘The Girl With The Pearl Earring’

The method: Use every noninvasive technique known to art, and medicine (yes, medicine), in a two-week blitz of discovery. The paintings conservator at the Mauritshuis Royal Picture Gallery says: “The expertise and the scientific equipment are coming from the whole world, converging on this one painting, this one masterpiece. … We’ll see how much information we can gain with the technology at our disposal in a very short period of time — two weeks, working 24 hours a day, day and night.”

An Author Apologizes After Lambasting His Book’s Cover (And The Cover Artist) In A Public Facebook Post

Fantasy author Terry Goodkind definitely does not like the cover of his latest book. “Offering 10 randomly selected readers a chance to win a hardback copy in return for their thoughts on the cover, Goodkind published a poll that included the voting options ‘laughably bad’ or ‘excellent.’ While almost 12,000 readers took part in the vote, some pledged to never buy another book by Goodkind again.” Even his apology was … well, some might call it laughably bad.

The Great Mound Cities Of The Midwest Were So Amazing, White Archaeologists Decided They Were Made By Aliens (Or Anyone But Native Peoples)

The large earthen mound complexes lie everywhere in the river valleys of the Midwest and Southeast. But “early archaeologists working to answer the question of who built the mounds attributed them to the Toltecs, Vikings, Welshmen, Hindus, and many others. It seemed that any group — other than the American Indian — could serve as the likely architects of the great earthworks.”