Author: ArtsJournal2

Arts Criticism Is Not A One-Way Street (Anymore)

Kris Vire: “What we have in this moment, I believe, is a theater community that feels newly empowered in the wake of last year’s explosive Profiles Theatre saga to root out bad behavior within its ranks, and a new generation of artists in the social-media age who believe criticism should be a back-and-forth conversation with many voices participating.” (Not that Hedy Weiss is planning to participate, of course.)

Audiobooks: They’re Just As Good As ‘Real’ Books

Seriously though, think of The Iliad. “Our cultural anxiety about audiobooks may have deeper roots in media and educational history, dating as far back as the beginning of the Enlightenment period, when the West made a general shift towards the privileging of sight over the other senses. After all, oral storytelling predates print and writing by thousands of years.”

Before The Internet

“You would lean against the lockers with a faraway expression on your face and let people assume whatever they wanted. Like that you were a girly girl but could also be a tomboy. Or that back in your home town you’d been friends with a bunch of crows. And everyone assumed that if they saw a crow it probably knew you, because you had some kind of understanding with crows owing to undefined telepathic abilities that made you look troubled now and then but also really important. And if anyone wanted to track down an old friend of yours and write her an actual letter to find out if any of this was true, well, best of luck to them.”

The Village That Used To Crank Out 60 Percent Of The World’s Art Output May Be Hitting Reset

“In the mid-2000s, Dafen’s copy industry was booming. It was at this point that auxiliary commercial avenues began to take root in the village. Quaint cafes, as well as more accessible ‘gallery shops’ (predominantly fronts for anonymous art workers and addresses from which to tout for business both wholesale and retail) lent the village lucrative tourist appeal.” But things have changed. Can Dafen become a creative hub instead of a copy factory?

The Writer Who Creates Romances For An American History That Actually Happened

Beverly Jenkins’ books teach the history between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement – almost all with romance as the focus. But she’s a little tired of the miscategorization of her books. She says, “African-American is not a genre! When they put us on a separate shelf, it cuts down on discoverability for people who may be white and looking for a good book. So when people say, ‘I don’t know if I can relate to that,’ I think, ‘But you relate to werewolves and vampires and shape-shifters and all kinds of other craziness. Why can’t you relate to people who are a different race?’”

Good News: Google Will Stop Scanning All Of Your Gmail To Help With Ad Targeting

Why? Because they care? Because they’re not doing evil? Ha! No: Because, even though the practice is only for personal email and not corporate email, the scanning “has made it difficult for Google to find and retain corporate clients for its cloud services business … due to general confusion over Google’s business tactics and an overall apprehension to trust the company with sensitive data.”