The legislation could end a years-long cultural cold war with Russia, which has refused to loan works since 2010 due to lawsuits filed in the US over objects seized during the Bolshevik Revolution.
Author: Douglas McLennan
Study: Fewer Of Us Suffer Information Overload – Does This Mean We’re Tuning Out More?
It’s been almost a given for decades that increasing noise and distraction of the modern world has more people feeling like they’re on information overload. In the age of the ubiquitous smartphone it’s only seemed to get worse. For artists, floods of distraction have proved difficult to cut through. But a new survey from Pew delivers some surprising results:
A new Pew Research Center survey finds that, for the most part, the large majority of Americans do not feel that information overload is a problem for them. Some 20% say they feel overloaded by information, a decline from the 27% figure from a decade ago, while 77% say they like having so much information at their fingertips. Two-thirds (67%) say that having more information at their disposals actually helps to simplify their lives.
While these are the overall findings, the study did find some correlations between information access and anxiety about managing information; and in situations where institutions have high expectations for information management.
These findings suggest that information overload may not be the right way to frame anxieties about the volume of information in people’s lives. Rather, information overload is more situational: Specific situations may arise, such as when institutions impose high information demands on people for transactions, which create a sense of information burden for some Americans.
The silo-ization of our information consumption (as suggested by the recent election) suggests that people may be coping with the deluge of information by cutting off more and more of the world they don’t believe has credibility (or relevance) while burrowing deeper into the websites or sources they know and trust. While the entire web is at our fingers, it’s getting tougher to get people to explore much beyond the places they know. For artists this might require a rethink in how they get in front of people as general sources like newspapers see their audiences narrow.
First Look At A Massive New Project For LA’s Arts District
“The risk — as with all of the projects emerging from BIG’s huge and increasingly busy office — is that the project, in final form, won’t quite make the leap from clever and opportunistic to something more architecturally powerful or profound.”
The Big Data-Fication Of Everything Has Some Serious Flaws
In fact, the datafication of everything is reductive. For a start, it leaves behind whatever can’t be quantified. And as Cathy O’Neil points out in her insightful and disturbing book Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, datafication often relies on proxies—stand-ins that can be enumerated—that bear little or no relation to the things they are supposed to represent: credit scores as a proxy for the likelihood of being a good employee, for example, or “big five” personality tests like the ones used by the Cambridge Psychometrics Centre, even though, as O’Neil reports, “research suggests that personality tests are poor predictors of job performance.”
Golden Globes Surprise: Nominations Go To Youth Over Stars
“Awards shows have long tangled with a dilemma. As a venue for industry recognition, they tend to value dues-paying — rewarding personalities who have put together a long body of work and earned industry goodwill. But the shows also rely for income on a television world that tends to favor, particularly in its advertising dollars, younger viewers and newer talent.”
Study: Arts Schools’ Impact On The UK Economy
The study by GuildHE, a representative body for higher education, found creative-focused universities and colleges generate at least £8.4bn each year by meeting the needs of employers for creative, qualified, trained workers.
San Francisco Symphony Cancels Tour To North Carolina In Protest
“In the months after HB2 became law, we have closely watched the fluctuating political landscape in hopes that the law would be overturned,” said Executive Director Brent Assink in a statement. “Because that has not yet happened, and due to pressing internal travel deadlines, the San Francisco Symphony has made the decision to cancel its concerts at this time.”
An Astounding List Of Drunk Great Composers!
“The list of heavy-drinking composers is worthy of Monty Python’s ‘Philosophers’ Song’. It includes Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky and Sibelius. There are no reports of Bach getting drunk — but during a fortnight’s trip to Halle in 1713 his beer bill came to 18 grossen, which suggests that he got through eight gallons of the stuff (plus lashings of brandy). Berlioz and Wagner preferred opium, and it’s not fanciful to suggest that you can hear it in the Symphonie Fantastiqueand Tristan. Can you hear alcohol in the music of the boozers?”
Are Facts Knowledge? The Classic Essay Tries To Persuade
“There are genres whose principal business is fact—journalism, history, popular science—but the essay has never been one of them. If the form possesses a defining characteristic, it is that the essay makes an argument (and does so, unlike academic writing and other forms, for a general rather than a specialized audience). That argument can rest on fact, but it can also rest on anecdote, or introspection, or cultural interpretation, or some combination of all these and more. There are “public essays” and “personal essays” and essays that are both or neither; the form is broad and various and limitlessly flexible. Yet what distinguishes an op‑ed, for instance, from a news report is that the former seeks to persuade, not simply inform.”
Why Are Bookstores Thriving In Berlin?
“Despite the rise of the predatory online and mass-market bookseller, the dark specter of Amazon that has caused roughly one-third of indie bookstores in Britain to close in the last decade, Berlin is undergoing an analogue reading renaissance with more owner-run bookshops opening than shutting in recent times.”