Says Negin Khpelwak, the 22-year-old leader of the Zohra Orchestra, “We can bring freedom, peace and honor to Afghanistan. Women can’t go back to the dark days — they can break our instruments, they can ban the music, but they never take it from our hearts.” – Bloomberg
Blog
Italy’s State Broadcaster Proposes Separate Channels For Men And Women
“A source at RAI said the plan was about repositioning programmes to better target male and female audiences, rather than gender segregation, but the potential move has been lambasted by opposition MPs and women’s groups.” – The Guardian
Canadian Court Rules That Art By Foreign Artists Can Be Deemed Of National Importance And Prevented From Being Sold Outside Canada
On Tuesday, the appeals court restored a decision by the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board preventing a Canadian auction house from shipping a painting by French artist Gustave Caillebotte to a buyer in London, England. – CBC
Who’s Funding Culture In The EU? Eastern European Nations (And The UK Is Way Behind)
Overall, the report finds total government expenditure in 2017 across the 28 EU member states was 38% higher in 2017 than in 2004 (using current prices), driven by the 11 post-communist countries. As part of this group’s increase in overall expenditure, spending on culture rose from €1.8bn in 2004 to €4.4bn in 2017. – Arts Professional
Nobel’s Science Prizes Don’t Reflect The Ways Research Is Done Today
“The Nobel committee seems not to recognise how collaborative science is today; their paradigm remains the lone genius, or a duet or troika at most. Year after year, they perform their arbitrary and often cruel calculus, leaving deserving physicists shivering in the pool without any medal to show for it.” – Aeon
London’s Royal Opera Loses Appeal Over Damage To Violist’s Hearing
Christopher Goldscheider sued the London opera house, claiming damages for acoustic shock – a condition with symptoms including tinnitus, hyperacusis and dizziness – after being exposed to noise levels exceeding 130 decibels during a Walkure rehearsal in 2012. – BBC
Warning: AI Research Is Being Compromised
The lack of diversity within artificial intelligence is pushing the field to a dangerous “tipping point,” according to new research from the AI Now Institute. – Engadget
If AI Composes Music, Does That Make It An Artist?
Music is based on influences of music that has come before. So music created by artificial intelligence is composed based on the data and algorithms provided to it. So if AI-made music sounds like say, Beyonce, does that mean Beyonce is owed something? – The Verge
New Orleans African American Museum Opens — For The Third Time
“Last week, in the historic (and historically black) Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans, the city’s African American Museum officially opened its doors to the public after a six-year closure.” Well, part of it did. “So, what is behind the re-reopening — or more importantly, the repeated closures — of a nonprofit cultural institution that debuted in 1998 but has since been shuttered twice, in each instance for several years at a time?” – Nonprofit Quarterly
The Complexity Fetish
If you’ve been to any leadership development or organizational change workshop lately, you’ve heard about complexity quite a bit. But I’ve slowly (slowly) started to realize that I, and many in my crowd, love complexity just a bit too much. – Andrew Taylor