“When our survival is threatened, we are going to reach out and strengthen our connections with people around us. We show generosity. We show compassion. We show gratitude. These are all emotions that function to connect us with each other.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Galleries Hit By A Wave Of Cyber-Scams
The fraud is relatively simple. Criminals hack into an art dealer’s email account and monitor incoming and outgoing correspondence. When the gallery sends a PDF invoice to a client via email following a sale, the conversation is hijacked. Posing as the gallery, hackers send a duplicate, fraudulent invoice from the same gallery email address, with an accompanying message instructing the client to disregard the first invoice and instead wire payment to the account listed in the fraudulent document.
Charge: Paul Manafort Bought Art With His Laundered Money, Say Feds
The purchases include $31,900 at an art gallery in Florida and a whopping $623,910 at a New York antiques dealer. All that pales in comparison, however, beside the staggering $1 million spent at a rug dealer in Alexandria, Virginia. Wires were also made for $849,215 to a “Men’s Clothing Store in New York,” $520,440 to a “Clothing Store in Beverly Hills,” and $655,500 to a “Landscaper in the Hamptons.”
Grantmakers In The Arts Is Moving From Seattle To NY. What Will It Mean?
“This is a rare opportunity for a national organization to re-think policy and protocol and move in new directions while solidifying its deepest commitments. It isn’t very often, that a new important organization leader gets the chance for a kind of clean break with the past operation, and the opportunity to mold a new future. Not jettisoning the past, but aligning it with a new future. A new location and a new staff are a big deal.”
How To Get Good At Literary Parties
“In general, I learned, you should stay away from parties for rich people, because their purpose is donations and having a good time is secondary. Never go to a networking event. Poetry readings are either the best or the worst things. You can skip any book party because they only happen once, they end too soon, and there’s no narrative to them, especially if you’re not there.”
How To Make Hollywood More Accessible To Deaf People?
“Closed captioning is widely but not unfailingly available in theaters; that should improve by next summer, when all theaters showing digital movies must comply with a new federal rule under the Americans With Disabilities Act. As for performers, ask people to name deaf movie actors — or films about deaf people starring deaf people — and you’ll probably get exactly one name and title: Marlee Matlin, who won an Oscar for her turn in “Children of a Lesser God” 30 years ago. Then, crickets.”
Google X: Where “Radical” Creativity Is Encouraged
“X is perhaps the only enterprise on the planet where regular investigation into the absurd is not just permitted but encouraged, and even required. X has quietly looked into space elevators and cold fusion. It has tried, and abandoned, projects to design hoverboards with magnetic levitation and to make affordable fuel from seawater. It has tried—and succeeded, in varying measures—to build self-driving cars, make drones that deliver aerodynamic packages, and design contact lenses that measure glucose levels in a diabetic person’s tears.”
The Movie That Savages The International Art World
The art world is a soft target for satire, not least because the art world’s appetite for satire of itself is limitless. Artists are constantly sending up tradition and the scene through their art, only to see the cycle repeat itself as their own work becomes staid and canonical. It’s unreasonable to expect any satire of the art world to be fresh, since knowingness is the first requirement to get in the door. The Square won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this spring not because it lashes the art world in a new way, but because Ruben Östlund delivers his lashings so exquisitely.
Change La Boheme? Are You Frickin’ Kidding?
“These new takes on this classic of classics raise the question of whether “La Bohème” should be messed with at all. We seem to have an almost instinctive desire for this piece to remain the same, to be the opera we encountered as children. Is that something we should resist or accept?”
The AI Bot That’s Great At Writing Horror Fiction
“It turns out, machines can be pretty damn good at spinning up a tale of murder, dread, despair, and supernatural terror. At least one is—Shelley A.I., a horror-writing bot created by researchers at the MIT Media Lab, debuting just in time for Halloween this year. Named after Frankenstein author Mary Shelley, the little horror-author-that-could is a deep learning algorithm that reads stories published in terror-inducing /r/nosleep subreddit and trains itself to write its own horror fiction.”