The report describes the EU as being at a “turning point” due to societal and political challenges such as social cohesion, rising extremism and populism, global competition and “environmental emergency”. The culture and creative sectors, it says, have an important role to play in addressing these issues and can act as a positive, unifying force. – Arts Professional
Author: Douglas McLennan
Placido Domingo Resigns From LA Opera
“Recent accusations that have been made against me in the press have created an atmosphere in which my ability to serve this company that I so love has been compromised,” he wrote in a statement provided to The Times. “While I will continue to work to clear my name, I have decided that it is in the best interests of L.A. Opera for me to resign as its general director and withdraw from my future scheduled performances at this time.” – Los Angeles Times
Penguin Random House Defends Author Against Plagiarism Claims In Dr. Zhivago Book
Published in September, Lara Prescott’s The Secrets We Kept tells of how the CIA planned to use Doctor Zhivago as a propaganda tool during the cold war. But Anna Pasternak revealed in the Sunday Times that she had sent a legal letter to Prescott, claiming that the novel features “an astonishing number of substantial elements” copied from Pasternak’s 2016 biography Lara, which is about Olga Ivinskaya, Pasternak’s lover, muse and inspiration for his character Lara. – The Guardian
How Classical Music Has Become Big Video Game Business
In case you are unaware, video games and video game music have come a long way from the 8-bit MIDI sound effects of Donkey Kong. It’s a musical realm that has produced its own roster of superstar composers beginning in the 1980s with synthesizer “techno” scores created for games like The Revenge of Shinobi and Streets of Rage by Yuzo Koshiro; Koji Kondo’s accompaniment for Super Mario Brothers; and Nobuo Uematsu’s influential scores for the highly successful Final Fantasy series. To the point that Uematsu has gained the title of “the Beethoven of video games music.” – San Francisco Classical Voice
Lebanon’s Economy Has Collapsed. Some Artists See Opportunity
One small silver lining is that artists feel less pressure to churn out commercial material, freeing them up to experiment. “We are not expecting anything,” he says. “There are no big returns from the market during a time of economic collapse, which makes everyone feel more free to create and do as they want.” – artnet
The New Music Career: Mosaics?
“The 21st-century arts economy continues to evolve, and mosaic careers are what will enable us to keep pace with it. These are careers made up of many different parts, in different sizes. Some pieces are brighter and shinier than others; some are bigger and some are smaller. It is the combination of these parts that is essential.” – 21CM
AI Now Sees Better Than Humans Do. Also Differently. Does It Matter?
People don’t fully acquire the ability to suppress clutter in a crowded scene and focus on what they’re looking for until around age 17. Other research has found that the ability to perceive faces keeps improving until around age 20. Computer vision systems work by digesting massive amounts of data. Their underlying architecture is fixed and doesn’t mature over time, the way the developing brain does. If the underlying learning mechanisms are so different, will the results be, too? – Nautilus
Curious: LA Phil Names A New Executive Director But He Declines To Talk About It
The orchestra names Chad Smith new chief executive of the orchestra, succeeding Simon Woods. “In a sign of how awkward the upheaval has been, and how quickly the change of leadership was put into place, Mr. Smith declined to be interviewed, which is rare for the incoming chief executive of a major orchestra.” – The New York Times
Zadie Smith: On Reconsidering Fiction
What would our debates about fiction look like, I sometimes wonder, if our preferred verbal container for the phenomenon of writing about others was not “cultural appropriation” but rather “interpersonal voyeurism” or “profound-other-fascination” or even “cross-epidermal reanimation”? – New York Review of Books
Study: Inventors Are More Productive When They’re Geographically Clustered
Inventors are significantly more productive when they are working in larger geographic clusters. The study finds that when inventors move from a smaller to a large cluster, they experience increases in both the number of patents they generate and the impact of those patents, based on their subsequent citations. – CityLab