Karen Hao and Will Knight “fed plot summaries of 360 Christmas movies, courtesy of Wikipedia, into a machine-learning algorithm to see if we could get it to spit out the next big holiday blockbuster. Suffice it to say I now empathize with researchers who describe training neural nets as more of an art than a science. As I also discovered, getting them to be funny is actually pretty damn hard.” — MIT Technology Review
Author: Matthew Westphal
‘Merry Jinglelog’, ‘Cinnamon Hollybells’, And Other AI-Generated Christmas Carols
“[The Swedish firm Made by AI] fed 100 Christmas songs into a neural network, then waited for the bells to start ringing. While the resulting tunes are kind of a jingly mess, the titles are genius.” — Smithsonian Magazine
For His Final New York Times Dance Review, Alastair Macaulay Goes To Staten Island
And if that’s not surprising enough, he chose as his subject a local Nutcracker. Why? Well, in Europe he grew quite tired of the Christmas chestnut, but over here, “Nutcrackering became for me — a British dance critic working in New York since 2007 — a happy way to discover America.” — The New York Times
How I Choreographed Childish Gambino’s ‘This Is America’
Sherrie Silver: “Donald [Glover] is somebody who likes to learn, so that made my job easier. I changed the choreography quite a few times. It was really complicated at one point, then I made it simpler, then I changed my mind again and called another rehearsal.” — The Guardian
Artists We Lost In 2018, In Their Own Words
“Some people like to paint trees. I like to paint love.” (Robert Indiana)
“It never came to mind: ‘Maybe I’m not good enough.’ I never thought like that.” (Roy Hargrove)
“The myth was that because you were black that you could not do classical dance. I proved that to be wrong.” (Arthur Mitchell)
“Don’t shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over. My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.” (Ursula K. Le Guin)
— The New York Times
When Arts Funding Is Cut, Arts Orgs Lose More Than Just Government Money
An analysis of the situation in the English city of Bath, which steadily reduced its arts grants over a decade before ending them entirely last year, shows that such local funding leveraged three times as much money from other sources — and that those sources cut their giving in tandem with the cuts from the local council. — Arts Professional
Mexico’s Presidential Palace Had An Impressive Art Collection. Where Did It Go?
The official residence, known as Los Pinos, had been off-limits to the public ever since it was built in the 1930s, but new president Andrés Manuel López Obrador has opened it to the public. (He will live elsewhere.) But now that regular people can visit, the mansion’s art collection, including works by Diego Rivera and Rufino Tamayo, is nowhere to be seen. — The Art Newspaper
Actor-Director-Writer Peter Masterson (‘Best Little Whorehouse In Texas’) Dead At 84
He played key supporting roles in The Stepford Wives, In The Heat of the Night, and The Exorcist, and he directed the film adaptation of The Trip to Bountiful, but his biggest impact was probably with his musical about a brothel called The Chicken Ranch. — Houston Chronicle
The Hague’s Art Museum Changes Its Name Because Foreigners Can’t Pronounce It
As the director of what is currently the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag says, “The [Dutch] ‘G’ is a very strange sound for people from abroad.” Not to mention that most of them don’t understand the word gemeente (municipal). The new name will be Kunstmuseum Den Haag. — The Art Newspaper
Bruno’s Christmas Recital Revisited
Rifftides readers have asked the staff to again present Jack Brownlow’s Christmas recital that first appeared here in December of 2015. We are delighted to do so. — Doug Ramsey