Author: Douglas McLennan

Which Version Of Equal Are We Talking About?

One goal, “equality of resources,” might be achieved by dividing the inheritance evenly, but it has the downside of failing to recognize important differences among the parties involved. Another goal, “equality of welfare,” tries to take account of those differences by means of twisty calculations. Take the first path, and you willfully ignore meaningful facts about your children. Take the second, and you risk dividing the inheritance both unevenly and incorrectly. – The New Yorker

Experts: Don’t Blame Digital Effects For “Cats” Bomb

While the digital technology that helped create realistic fur in both films is “advancing all the time,” it can’t rescue a flawed approach to a project. “The techniques [you use] can’t do it. All movies are fake. There’s nothing real in them, and the illusion of that world that you’re building is created by the sum total of everything – not just one item in that.” – Variety

Darren Walker Joins National Gallery Board

Walker has emerged as one of the country’s preeminent voices for the arts, and social justice, and for new strategies to ameliorate inequality. He has delivered the annual Nancy Hanks Lecture sponsored by Americans for the Arts and was the subject of a glossy profile in the New York Times titled “The Man With the $13 Billion Checkbook.” And in September, the National Gallery of Art announced that Walker would be joining its board, one of the smallest and most exclusive governing bodies in the art world, with only nine members, four of them ex officio positions, including the chief justice of the United States and the secretaries of the Treasury and State departments. – Washington Post

How “The Irishman” De-Aged Its Stars With Artificial Intelligence

When it came to de-aging De Niro, Joe Pesci, and Al Pacino for The Irishman, the $140 million Netflix production opted for a specific kind of fountain of youth, created from artificial-intelligence software, first-of-its-kind motion-capture technology, and an experimental three-camera rigging system that rendered the Oscar-winning trio of septuagenarian actors as eerily smooth-skinned incarnations of their younger selves. – New York Magazine

Was John Baldessari The Most Important Art Professor Of The 20th Century?

Starting in the early 1970s, Baldessari became one of the first professors at the California Institute of Arts, a school in Santa Clarita that became a locus of artistic experimentation on the West Coast when the art scene there was perceived as less significant than New York’s. Baldessari, famously, taught a class whose name signified a lot: “Post-Studio Art.” – ARTnews

An Artist Using Virtual Reality To Make Climate Change More Real

“The technologies allowed me to show things to you—for example, how past landscapes can change overtime, how you can look from the scale of a beetle, how you can change your perspective. These things are what this technology is very good at. You can also jump around in time and you can slow down time in virtual reality—you can change your scale in different dimensions.” – Artnet

Woolly Mammoth Theatre’s New Leader Pushes To Be Artistic Leader In Fighting For Social Justice

To survive long-term, companies such as Woolly need to convince social-justice-minded, cash-challenged millennials to buy tickets. The crucial challenge: Can they do this without alienating a crowd who, liberal as they may be, might also be slower to get with the times? Or do you have to, in effect, fire one audience to lure the other? – Washingtonian

Closed Caption Glasses Extend The Audience Experience

The glasses are aimed at D/deaf audiences and offer personal captioning, flashing the production’s dialogue in front of the wearer’s eyes as the actors say it. They were developed by the NT and introduced in 2018, but will now be used at the London Short Film Festival for screenings of works by emerging directors, including Maxine Peake and Lena Headey. They will be used across four screens at the BFI Southbank. – The Stage