Conceiving of attention as a resource misses the fact that attention is not just useful. It’s more fundamental than that: attention is what joins us with the outside world. ‘Instrumentally’ attending is important, sure. But we also have the capacity to attend in a more ‘exploratory’ way: to be truly open to whatever we find before us, without any particular agenda. – Aeon
Author: Douglas McLennan
What Arthur Mitchell Meant To Dance
“Because of him, ballet could not exclude us,” said Virginia Johnson, one of Mitchell’s first dancers and the current artistic director of Dance Theatre of Harlem. “We were his army, united in the love of an art form.” Dance Theatre of Harlem’s entrepreneurship and success became “the impetus for what we know as culturally specific dance companies” today. – The Guardian
Mathematically, Where’s The Center Of The Art World?
We ranked each institution based on its “centrality” a mathematical concept drawn from Network Science and one that is at the core of the Google search ranking algorithm. We discovered that, among a large number of fairly ineffectual institutions, one hub stood out as truly transformative. The most central in this hub were two museums, the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim, followed closely by two commercial galleries, Gagosian, and Pace. – ARTnews
What We Learned Having AI Analyze A Book
Using AI tools to analyze this piece of literature shed new light on key elements of emotion and memory in the book – but they did not replace the skills of an expert or scholar at interpreting texts or pictures. As a result of our experiment, we think that AI and other computational methods present an interesting opportunity with the potential for more quantifiable, reproducible and maybe objective research in the humanities. – The Conversation
Getting Inside Our Obsession With Sleep (Or Lack Of It)
According to the neuroscientist Matthew Walker—in his 2017 book, “Why We Sleep”—insomnia, strictly defined, is a clinical disorder most commonly associated with an overactive sympathetic nervous system, and it is triggered, typically, by worry and anxiety. Insomniacs can write twee lists of their blessings until the cows come home, but their cortisol levels will still tend to look as if they’re gearing up to storm the Bastille. – The New Yorker
Artists Weigh In: What We Have Lost In The Contemporary World
Because the ideologies of the past century have been largely discredited as false utopias, we are bereft of the notion of a better future. Whether the idea of a utopia ever returns will depend on our spirit, our faith in what is to come. Yet who are we to make demands of the spirit, which will wander as it will? – The New York Times
Man Attacks Art At The Denver Art Museum
“Artworks were compromised,” museum spokesperson Shadia Lemus told Westword. “The individual was arrested at the museum and taken into police custody.” Whether the destruction of the works was some sort of artistic statement or just “a teenager on drugs,” as one museum visitor suggested, has not been determined. – Westword
Protesters Rally At The Whitney Museum Over Board Member
The protest, organized by a group called Decolonize This Place, was to demand the resignation of the museum’s vice chairman, Warren B. Kanders, 12 days after it was revealed by the website Hyperallergic that he is also the owner, chairman, and CEO of the company Safariland, which manufactures law enforcement gear—including the tear gas reportedly being used on migrants at the southern border. – The Daily Beast
City Versus Country: How Much Of The World Is Urban?
The current level of global urbanization is high: It estimates the world to be 84 percent urban already. The EC research team, led by Lewis Dijkstra, used satellite images to assess the share of the world’s population that is urban. While traditional estimates from the United Nations and elsewhere find Asia to be 50 percent urban, the EC team’s analysis of satellite images finds it to be 90 percent; while the UN estimates Africa’s urban population at 40 percent, the EC research team finds it to be 80 percent. – CityLab
Can You Be A Successful Artist Without Being On Instagram?
If an artist is supposed to propose new ways of seeing and creating, it’s worrying when social media platforms feel like they’re turning us all into sycophantic clones. – New York Magazine