Ross Douthat: “The problem is the one that Auden identified seventy years ago: In an Apollonian culture, eager for “Useful Knowledge” and technical mastery and increasingly indifferent to memory and allergic to tradition, the poet and the novelist and the theologian struggle to find an official justification for their arts. And both the turn toward radical politics and the turn toward high theory are attempts by humanists in the academy to supply that justification — to rebrand the humanities as the seat of social justice and a font of political reform, or to assume a pseudoscientific mantle that lets academics claim to be interrogating literature with the rigor and precision of a lab tech doing dissection.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Declining Skills Or Age Discrimination? Longtime Orchestra Musicians Quit Rather Than Be Evaluated
Steven Reed’s letter said he failed to blend with other players in the section and came in late to solos. He said he doesn’t need the hassle of the evaluation procedure. “My impression is that it is a form of discrimination,” Reed said. Once an orchestra member receives a warning letter, a meeting is held with the music director to discuss issues.
How Books Let Us See Inside Others’ Brains
“There are many things that would be lost if we slowly lose the cognitive patience to immerse ourselves in the worlds created by books and the lives and feelings of the “friends” who inhabit them. And although it is a wonderful thing that movies and film can do some of this, too, there is a difference in the quality of immersion that is made possible by entering the articulated thoughts of others. What will happen to young readers who never meet and begin to understand the thoughts and feelings of someone totally different?”
How Musicians Make Money Today (Or Don’t)
By recent research estimates, U.S. musicians only take home one-tenth of national industry revenues. One reason for such a meager percentage is that streaming services — while reinvigorating the music industry at large — aren’t lucrative for artists unless they’re chart-topping names like Drake or Cardi B. According to one Spotify company filing, average per-stream payouts from the company are between $0.006 and $0.0084; numbers from Apple Music, YouTube Music, Deezer and other streaming services are comparable.
Oscars To Feature New Category: Popular Movies
At one point in its history, Oscar voters routinely named blockbusters such as “Titanic” or “Gladiator” as the year’s best. That’s changed. Recent best picture victors such as “Moonlight,” “Spotlight,” and the 2018 winner “The Shape of Water” have been firmly ensconced in the arthouse world, whereas well-reviewed hit films such as “Guardians of the Galaxy” or “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” have only been recognized for their technical achievements.
More Popular Oscars? There’s A Better Way…
Creating a category that segregates popular films from more elevated fare hardly seems like an improvement or likely to keep the academy relevant, since it calls attention to the awards’ elitism rather than actually broadening their appeal. If the academy really wants to make the Oscars more appealing to a wider audience, it should consider just recognizing the artistic merit of deserving popular films instead of cordoning them off in their own category. After all, wasn’t that part of the justification for expanding the Best Picture category in 2009, that having more than five nominees would allow room for both obscure indies and more popular fare that might otherwise be squeezed out of the race?
More Museums Look To Diversify Curatorial Ranks
Eager to attract a broader cross-section of visitors at a time when the country’s demographics are changing — and, in New York, facing an ultimatum linking city funding to inclusion plans — a growing number of museums are addressing diversity with new urgency.
Studies: Music Has A Significant Impact On Pain
“Most of the reviews found a significant effect of music on pain,” writes a team led by Colombian researcher Juan Sebastian Martin-Saavedra. It concludes music should be considered “a clinically significant complementary therapy to be used for the management of pain.”
Is QAnon Really An Activist Art Hoax?
In its fundamentals, the idea is that the QAnon conspiracy seems suspiciously similar to the plot of Q, a best-selling novel by a team of anarchist media activists collectively known as “Luther Blissett,” first published in Italian in 1999. The suggestion, evidently, originates with Twitter posts by the “Wu Ming Foundation,” the name of a present-day literary collective formed by former Luther Blissett members
When Algorithms Decide Your Creativity
Words matter to me. I am a professional writer, after all. But then Gmail made it tantalizingly easy to say “hi” instead of “hey,” and Google’s prediction, albeit wrong at first, became self-fulfilling. It wasn’t until two weeks after I began using Smart Compose that I realized I had handed over a small part of my identity to an algorithm.