Author: Matthew Westphal

In Wake Of Racial Incident, Boston’s Museum Of Fine Arts Works To Make Amends

Last spring, a group of black middle school students had an ugly encounter with a few museum patrons and a guard. “Critics rightfully pounced, and the museum moved swiftly to contain the damage. … It might have ended there. But in this city still scarred by court-ordered desegregation and the turbulent busing of minority students to white suburbs in the 1970s, the museum — which welcomes 1.2 million visitors each year — took it as a wakeup call.” – Yahoo! (AP)

Mayhem At New York’s WBAI: Network Fires Staff And Locks Offices As Staffers Go To Court

The city’s Pacifica Radio station, which for six decades has aired leftist-leaning news coverage and alternative programming, has been in chronic turmoil for the past several years, with constant financial crises, heavy employee layoffs, frequent management turnover, and vicious battles over governance. (Not to mention shrinking listenership.) Things came to a head early Monday morning, when, without warning, Pacifica changed the locks, fired the staff and volunteers by email, and started broadcasting a feed from its California stations. Staffers got a judge to block the shutdown and reopen the station, but Pacifica did not comply. (So staffers broke the new locks.) – Gothamist

Looking Hopeful, Long-Troubled English National Opera Appoints New Artistic Director

“Annilese Miskimmon, the Belfast-born opera director who has drawn influence from Sondheim, Shakespeare and the Muppets [and is currently director of opera at Norwegian National Opera and Ballet], has been named as the new artistic director of English National Opera, after a search to replace Daniel Kramer, who announced in April that he would step down in July.” – The Guardian

Where Are Artists Priced Out Of Gentrifying Berlin Neighborhoods Going? Here

They’ve been moving into abandoned East German factories along the Spree River. “Although the area’s landscape may look post-apocalyptic, with its giant weeds and empty power plants, strangely, the future here can seem positively Arcadian: Real estate is still cheap enough that artists are able to buy, rather than rent, their spaces. Here, four artists discuss how their work is shaped by the Spree.” – T — The New York Times Style Magazine

The Problem With Critics Who Worry That The New ‘Joker’ Movie Will Goad Crazy Incels Into Shooting People

Dan Brooks: “Ostensibly too sophisticated for superhero stories, our critics have accepted the Joker’s power to corrupt the masses in real life, on a more literal level than the most addled comic-book fan ever would. That’s a failure to maintain critical distance, but it’s being projected onto an audience that critics imagine to be more suggestible than themselves — insanely more suggestible, almost comically so.” – The New York Times Magazine

A.I. Software Is Learning To Write Prose — Could It Get Good Enough To Write A ‘New Yorker’ Piece?

John Seabrook does a deep dive into how artificial intelligence programs learn the rules of English grammar and syntax and teach themselves how to predict what you, at the keyboard, might write next — and even, eventually, to write the way you do. Then he and a computer scientist feed a program the entire New Yorker nonfiction archive as a dataset to learn from, and they ask it to try, based on the opening, to complete a real New Yorker article. – The New Yorker

Seeing ‘Slave Play’ As A Black Person, With An All-Black Audience

Aisha Harris: “At one point during the performance — as the white woman … used a black dildo on her [black] partner … while they pretended to be the mistress and slave on a plantation — my colleague, seated next to me, said, ‘Imagine seeing this with white people!’ I could absolutely imagine it, and thus understood why this specially curated audience needed to exist.” – The New York Times