“World tours, fancy conferences, prestigious bylines and book contracts were bestowed on artists who hewed to political positions favored by the establishment, rather than on the most talented. In 1966, The New York Times confirmed suspicions that the CIA was pumping money into “civil society” organizations: unions, international organizations of students and women, groups of artists and intellectuals. The agency had produced the popular cartoon version of George Orwell’s anticommunist classic Animal Farm in 1954. It flew the Boston Symphony Orchestra on a European tour in 1952, to counter prejudices of the United States as uncultured and unsophisticated. It promoted the work of abstract expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock because their artistic style would have been considered degenerate in both Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
The International Language Of Science Is English. Alas, That Leaves A Lot Out
“This problem is a two-way street Not only does the larger scientific community miss out on research published in non-English languages. But the dominance of English as science’s lingua franca makes it more difficult for researchers and policy makers speaking non-English languages to take advantage of science that might help them.”
Translations Risk A Homogenization Of Ideas And Language
“While translations do cross borders, broadening our cultural knowledge as they present one language in the terms of another, they can also become an impediment to free communication. As a translator of contemporary Japanese fiction, I’ve seen both the flow and the congestion, and have witnessed at close range the unintended consequences—and our lack of control as translators—when it comes to the way our texts move or fail to move across borders.”
Recording Companies And Pandora Announce Bid For High Resolution Streaming
A new study commissioned ahead today’s announcement by UMG, entitled “Global Insight: The Appeal of High-Res Audio (Studio Quality Sound)” presents a variety of data supporting a growing market for hi-res audio. The findings claimed that 85 percent of U.S. consumers say audio quality is “very important” to them; 48 percent of U.S. consumers are willing to pay more for better audio quality; and perhaps most significantly that “71 percent of existing music streaming subscribers are interested in the option of studio quality sound.”
How Do We Make American Museums Multilingual?
“Making museums multilingual (and not just via wall text) is a gargantuan task. It’s resource-intensive, requiring the investment of capital as well as time and, in best-case scenarios, incorporation into the museum’s overall strategic, marketing, acquisitions, programming, and hiring plans.”
In An Era Of Viral Media And Fake News, What Is The Role Of Libraries
“Making sense of information is hard, maybe increasingly so in today’s world. So what role have academic libraries played in helping people make sense of world bursting at the seams with information?”
Louvre Lost $10 Million Last Year With Precipitous Visitor Decline
“2016, for the Louvre as for all sites in Paris, was a difficult year,”Jean-Luc Martinez, president and director of the Louvre, told Le Figaro. “We should finish the year at 7.3 million visitors, 15 percent less than in 2015, and a loss of at least €9.7 million ($10.2 million), not to mention the lower revenues in booksellers or restaurants,” he elaborated following the museum’s announcement.
The Coming Jobs Revolution Will Be Historically Profound. Are Artists Ready For It?
Many experts believe the biggest disruption in our lifetime is about to take place. Automation – robots and artificial intelligence – is going to eliminate a significant number of current jobs, say experts:
A recent study found 50% of occupations today will be gone by 2020, and a 2013 Oxford study forecasted that 47% of jobs will be automated by 2034. A Ball State study found that only 13% of manufacturing job losses were due to trade, the rest from automation. A McKinsey study suggests 45% of knowledge work activity can be automated.
94% of the new job creation since 2005 is in the gig economy. These aren’t stable jobs with benefits on a career path. And if you are driving for Uber, your employer’s plan is to automate your job. Amazon has 270k employees, but most are soon-to-be-automated ops and fulfillment. Facebook has 15k employees and a $330B market cap, and Snapchat in August had double their market cap per employee to $48M per employee. The economic impact of tech was raising productivity, but productivity and wages have been stagnant in recent years.
This will lead to profound changes in how our economy works and how our culture organizes itself. If most people won’t be able to get jobs in the traditional sense, one of the primary organizing principles of humankind – that our ability to survive, our success in life, is determined by the need to earn a living, by the jobs we’re able to get – will change.
As tech leader Ross Mayfield suggests in this LinkedIn piece, the automation of jobs could cause a backlash against technology and the people who create it as wealth becomes even more concentrated in the hands of a few. The original Luddites, hs reminds us, were not just people who had opted out of technology, but actively opposed and tried to destroy it.
The post-jobs world will be a transformation on the order of the industrial revolution, he says.
And artists? It’s at times of profound change in our culture that artists have the most to say. They comment on, critique, draw attention to, and interpret how the world changes in such times. So how will artists anticipate what could be one of the most profound changes in human history?
What Top TV Stars Make For Their Work
“The high fees for television’s 1% — at a time when business models, episode orders, and distribution strategies are in the midst of a massive transition — has exacerbated the earnings gap between stars and supporting players.”
Vinyl Record Sales Reach 25-Year High
Great – but vinyl sales only accounted for about two percent of the market. Still, it shows that “people want tangible objects – it’s human nature, and there is still nothing as satisfying as cracking open a new record, placing it with care on the turntable, and letting the sound take you away, as you look at the album sleeve. Formatting a Spotify playlist will never compete with that, no matter how many millions of songs are at your disposal.”