“Fuller put his faith in technology as a means to tame the messiness of humankind. ‘I would never try to reform man – that’s much too difficult,’ Fuller told The New Yorker in 1966. Appealing to people to remedy their behaviour was a folly, because they’d simply never do it. Far wiser, Fuller thought, to build technology that circumvents the flaws in human behaviour – that is, ‘to modify the environment in such a way as to get man moving in preferred directions’. Instead of human-led design, he sought design-led humans.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Israel’s Culture Minister Goes To War Against… Culture
Miri Regev has done just about everything she can to alienate and enrage those she considers the elites, or the “cultural junta,” of Israel. Leftists. Secularists. Tel Avivians. Ashkenazim — Jews of European origin. People who, as she told me recently, think that “classical music is better than the Andalusian music” of Morocco, or that “Chekhov is more important than Maimonides.”
London Gallery Sues Authentication Committee Over Agnes Martin: Decision Rendered Paintings “Worthless”
Mayor Gallery says that the authentication committee acted wrongly when it rejected 13 works submitted to it by the gallery’s clients. Neither Sotheby’s nor Christie’s will accept a work by Martin for auction or private sale unless it has been or will be included in the catalogue raisonné, the complaint says, so “a refusal by defendants to include an artwork [is] recognised in the worldwide marketplace as a conclusive statement that the artwork is a fake”, rendering it effectively “worthless”.
Diversity Might Be Good For Canada. But Will It Translate To The Theatre Box Office?
In a much-shared speech last year, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said: “We know that Canada has succeeded – culturally, politically, economically – because of our diversity, not in spite of it.” But it’s still not known whether greater diversity and inclusion are good for the bottom line in the arts.
Report: The Biggest Arts Funding Continues To Go To The Largest Organizations. And So…
“The lion’s share (60%) of funding – grants, gifts and contributions – continue to go to the largest budget cultural institutions across the country (those with budgets over $5 million) and that, in fact, the funding to the smaller organizations, with budgets under $1 million has actually declined, and ‘that is a drearier future than we saw in 2011′.”
How The UK’s Video Game Industry Demonstrated Its Impact To Policy-Makers
“For many, feeling forced to demonstrate evidence of the impact of something as personal as art can be more than unsettling. Concerns that any attempt to measure impacts may not sufficiently capture the work’s full effects is understandable. But with art there is always an impact.”
Report: Fear Is The Biggest Barrier To Diversity In the Arts
The third and final report on the survey, which was published this week, revealed that the sector is split on whether or not audiences actually resist ‘more diverse artistic product’, but this appears to be enough to put organisations off programming, producing and exhibiting it. Respondents indicated that these fears are compounded by ‘inadequate funding’. One respondent said: “When you are struggling to survive, your priorities and passions focus on playing to the paying gallery! We become risk-averse and for us, this means programming rich old white acts for a rich old white audience.”
Turns Out Our Brains Are Wired To Light Up When We See Something Cute
“Cute judgments might be fundamental to human perception. Examining magnetic brain activity in subjects presented with infant and adult faces, Kringelbach and his colleagues at Oxford have found that the brain starts recognising faces as cute or infantile in less than a seventh of a second after the face is presented to subjects. His group has concluded that cuteness is a key that unlocks the brain’s fast attentional resources before also influencing slower brain networks responsible for compassion and empathy.”
Science Fiction Writers Have Done A Dreadful Job Of Dealing With The Future
Typically, as noted above, science fiction authors posit a united world under benign or tyrannical world government. How our present divided world came to be united in the future is seldom explained. Science fiction authors are notorious for getting out of plot holes by inventing new technologies like “handwavium.” The political equivalent of handwavium is the World Federation of Handwavia.
Canada Will Be 150 Years Old Next Year And There Will Be Big Celebrations. But What Culture Are We Celebrating?
“What effect will all this well-meaning cultural, environmental and athletic activity produce? As the optimistic descriptions washed over me, I had to remind myself that public celebrations of a national birthday can indeed be transformative: just look at centennial year. To author and historian Pierre Berton, it may have been “the last good year,” as he would subtitle his history of 1967 published in 1997, but to those of us who were very young in the Summer of Love, the centennial celebrations shone a warm light into our childhoods that we have carried with us through life.”