On its face and despite the criticisms, the Staunch Prize succeeded in doing exactly what it set out to do, “to draw attention to the plethora of violence towards women in fiction, and make space for exciting alternatives.” But as the Staunch Prize accepts entries for 2019, it has taken an even firmer stance against thrillers with violence against women, and one inflammatory claim in particular has upset crime writers anew. – Slate
Author: Douglas McLennan
What Artificial Intelligence Is Showing Us About How We Perceive The World
The power to see the future was previously limited to psychics and shamans. Now researchers (and, increasingly, anyone with a computer) use pattern recognition to precognitive ends, feeding their programs artifacts of the past to generate data on the future. – Hyperallergic
Why Wealthy Art Collectors Are Turning Away From Abstract Art
The art that is doing well in the market provides a place of escape from society. Right now, that’s an escape to rules and boundaries and to easily digestible culture. But the inverse is also true: when there is greater social stability, even ennui, as there was in mid-century America, the preferred art becomes that which allows for a flight into messiness and multiple interpretations. Crucially, however, this current turn toward the figurative and its stabilities seems to be particular to the rich, to those who are actually buying the art. It has not always been so. – The Baffler
Los Angeles Is Losing Its Dance Studios As Rents Rise
Several L.A. dance spaces have faced displacement in recent months, posting pleas to save their studios on crowdsourcing sites like GoFundMe as rising rents create the same pressures that have threatened to push artists out of their longtime studios and theater companies off their home stages across the city. – Los Angeles Times
What It’s Like To Try To Drag The 92-Year-Old Academy Of Motion Pictures Into The Present
Eight years of change, controversy, criticism and occasional chaos have turned a Hollywood fixture, with all the pertinent connotations of calcification, into a roiling center of conversations about inclusivity, sexual harassment, digital disruption and globalization. – Los Angeles Times
After 67 Years, Mad Magazine Will Stop Publishing
It was subversive material at a time when there was not much out there. Early on, in the 1950s, it broke with other comic books in being satirical. And then when other comics were forced to clean up their act during the McCarthy era, Mad Magazine dodged that by becoming a magazine. That’s why it’s called a magazine instead of a comic. – NPR
Increasingly, Donald Trump Is Showing Up In Opera Productions
These appearances may seem like acts of protest or provocation, signaling a viewpoint that opera audiences abroad are likely to share, tapping into an easy laugh along the lines of “Saturday Night Live,” which has helped to propagate many features of the Trump iconography. But they also downplay the actual political issues: A singing Trump is a comic Trump and not a very serious Trump. – Washington Post
West End London Theatre To Be Renamed For Stephen Sondheim
The composer will become the only living person to have a theatre dedicated in their honour in both the West End and on Broadway, which is already home to the Stephen Sondheim Theatre. – The Stage
Thirty Years Ago A Wave Of Black Directors Hit Hollywood. So What Happened?
“You think, ‘It’s O.K. — you’re like every other filmmaker,’ but then you realize, ‘No,’” she said. “It’s like they set us up to fail — all they wanted was to be able to pat themselves on the back like they did something.” – The New York Times
Mapping Artists And Geography The Whitney Biennial Has Included Over The Decades
The New York area still supplies the lion’s share of participants. Los Angeles still runs a distant second. This year’s exhibition has no artists located in the Great Plains or Mountain West, and only three currently working in the South. For all of the country’s regional art scenes, artists who made the cut for the most prestigious American contemporary exhibition still work in many of the same places as they did decades ago. – The New York Times