The real tell is that in a statement he [Darren Walker] said that to mount the exhibition now would have been “tone deaf.” That’s the language of corporate image control. To many of the people who run our museums—not art people but bean counters—art is merely branding for the institution. – The Nation
Author: Douglas McLennan
Prominent Director At NY Gagosian Gallery Fired
A prominent figure within the New York art market, Sam Orlofsky had been one of the most visible leaders at Gagosian, where he recently helped launch a program known as its “Artist Spotlight” series, through which works by Damien Hirst, Jenny Saville, and more were sold for large sums of money online. – ARTnet
Calculating The Value Of A Single Vote (Precisely)
“If you’re in a competitive district in a competitive election, the odds that your vote will flip a national election often fall between 1 in 1 million and 1 in 10 million. That’s a very small probability, but it’s big compared to your chances of winning the lottery, and it’s big relative to the enormous impact governments can have on the world.” – 80,000 Hours
Scientists Are Applying Electricity To The Brain Again In Search Of Therapies
The breadth of mental processes and behaviours for which stimulation has been argued to have an effect is quite staggering, including creativity, appetite, multitasking, memory, mind wandering, attention, motoric processes, sensory processing and theory of mind, to name but a few. – Psyche
Hollywood Likes Broadway Again
After decades of sporadic adaptations, Hollywood has suddenly thrown a lot of financing — and entire brass sections — at theatermakers. Which means that film’s latest special effect is a millenniums-old art form that’s mostly feet and breath and plywood. – The New York Times
Creating DeepFakes To Make Controversial People Confess
Recently, Stephanie Lepp has been experimenting with a maligned technology, deepfakes, to create Deep Reckonings, a series of synthetic videos that imagine controversial public figures having a reckoning; in the deepfake footage, Alex Jones, Brett Kavanaugh, and Mark Zuckerberg reflect on the damage they have inflicted on society. – Forbes
Why Americans Think It’s All About Us
“American thought has always tended to a certain solipsism, a trait that has become more prominent in recent times. If Fukuyama and his neoconservative allies believed the world was yearning to be remade on an imaginary American model, the woke movement believes “whiteness” accounts for all the evils of modern societies.” – New Statesman
Canada Proposes Treating Streaming Like Broadcast Services
The regulations put forth by the Liberal government today in a new bill focus on clarifying that online streaming platforms like Netflix and Spotify will fall under the Broadcasting Act through a new category called “online undertakings.” – CBC
New Research: Van Gogh’s Mental Illness
“Experts at the University Medical Centre Groningen conducted a psychiatric examination based on hundreds of letters he wrote – the majority to his beloved brother, Theo – as well as existing medical records. They found that the artist probably experienced two episodes of delirium caused by alcohol withdrawal after he cut off his own ear.” – BBC
Fierce Debate About Whether Iowa Senate Candidate Should Have A Wikipedia Entry
During the past several months, while Joni Ernst and Theresa Greenfield debated each other (and gave us viral clips about the break-even price of corn and soybeans), a separate debate raged among Wikipedia’s volunteer editors about Greenfield’s eligibility for a page of her own. – Wired