When processed by childhood Pokémon players, the images lit up a small groove in the temporal lobe that remained mostly inactive in the brains of Pokémon newbies. – Aeon
Author: Douglas McLennan
A New Tool That Lets You Curate Digital Shows
ArtUK has released a tool that allows anyone to build, annotate and share their own online show of digital art. Which art? Anything in public collections in the UK, so there’s a lot to choose from. – ArtUK
How You Build A Network Of Women Composers (From Iran, No Less)
Young Iranian composers have set up a network for mentorship, commissioning and presenting. – The New York Times
Painter Susan Rothenberg, 75
Rothenberg’s paintings are spare and stark—frequently understated in their color palette and simple in their form. But through even the vague suggestion of figures, Rothenberg was able to create memorable images that tease the brain and tickle the eye. – ARTnews
A Boom In Pandemic Books
Publishing books about an unfolding calamity, when the duration and outcome remain uncertain, carries obvious risks for authors and publishers. With so many unanswered questions about the virus, how it spreads and when a vaccine might arrive, works that are reported and written over the next few months risk being out of date, or dangerously incorrect, by the time they are published. The severity of the economic and political fallout is also still a big unknown. – The New York Times
Historically There Have Been Very Few Polymaths
Goethe genuinely advanced fields of scientific inquiry such as geology and colour theory; Nabokov is always said to have been an eminent entomologist. Leonardo da Vinci, naturally, is an obvious candidate, with his speculative drawings about engineering projects, though Michelangelo (strangely not mentioned by Burke) was probably just as successful a polymath, achieving masterpieces of the first rank in painting, sculpture, architecture and poetry. Beyond a handful of freaks such as these, we find a lot of experts who dabbled in something else — and we are left trying to admire the paintings of Churchill and Strindberg or the novels of C.P. Snow. – The Spectator
Will The Pandemic Persuade People Cities Are Unsafe?
“In fact, no correlation exists between population density and rates of COVID-19 infection, according to recent studies examining the disease in China and Chicago. But if state and local governments still conclude that density itself is a problem, they are more likely to promote suburban sprawl as a matter of law—instead of making the accommodations, in their housing stock and their streetscapes, that allow people to live in cities safely and move about them comfortably.” – The Atlantic
Art As Refuge For The Uber-Rich
The shift to an almost purely commodified art world surely begins with the rise of the art dealer as influential trend-setter and arbiter of taste from the 1870s onwards; it has reached its apotheosis with the dealer-led commodification of contemporary art. Instead of reflecting institutional, social or aesthetic preoccupations, much of contemporary art is primarily a refuge for oligarchs’ money and a prestigious type of investment in a world where the global über-rich have more wealth than they can imagine outlets for. – The Critic
How Do Electrical Impulses In The Brain Translate Into Feelings?
Understanding consciousness might be the greatest scientific challenge of our time. How can physical stuff, eg electrical impulses, explain mental stuff, eg dreams or the sense of self? Why does a network of neurons in our brain feel like an experience, when a network of computers or a network of people doesn’t feel like anything, as far as we know? – Aeon
Labor Stats: Arts Sector Employment Falls 54 Percent In Two Months
Nearly all the jobs in this supersector involve some form of in-person services rendered for gatherings of people — which, of course, became impossible to maintain when social distancing requirements were put in place by local authorities. – FiveThirtyEight