The move, said director Neal Benezra, will “enhance (the museum’s) contemporary holdings, and address art historical gaps.” Significantly, he said, it will also address the need “to broadly diversify SFMOMA’s collection.” – San Francisco Chronicle
Blog
Stop For A Moment To Appreciate How Much We Depend On Standards
The basic irony of standards is the simple fact that there is no standard way to create a standard, nor is there even a standard definition of “standard.” There are, however, longstanding ways that industries and nations coordinate standardization efforts. In the United States, the system of voluntary consensus standards is coordinated by ANSI, the American National Standards Institute. – The New York Times
California Fire’s Aftermath: A Prominent Artist Loses Decades Of Work, Documentation
All of it was gone. Five decades of artwork, tools and texts — crucial components of Liz Albuquerque’s archive and artistic legacy. Within a few hours, reduced to ash-covered rubble. – Los Angeles Times
“Telegraph” Gaffe: Louvre Affirms Its Hope to Display the Elusive Leonardo “Salvator Mundi”
Seemingly the go-to journalist for scholars seeking to debunk the painting’s attribution to Leonardo da Vinci, Darya Alberge wrote about “an apparent snub from the Louvre in Paris, which is understood to have cancelled plans to display Salvator Mundi in its major Leonardo exhibition.” But a passage, tacked on at the end of her article, seems to contradict that statement. – Lee Rosenbaum
Portrait of a good bad guy
Edward G. Robinson was Hollywood’s first major art collector, and in 1939 he and his (first) wife and son had a family portrait done in pastels by Edouard Vuillard. La famille d’Edward G. Robinson “passed to his former wife” (i.e., in the divorce settlement) and seemed to have disappeared, but Terry has tracked it down. – Terry Teachout
Buddy DeFranco’s Birthday
What is your favorite key? Assuming that it’s not Z-minor, you will find it in the video below, as vibraharpist (vibraphonist, if you prefer) Terry Gibbs explains in his introduction. – Doug Ramsey
The “Most Bananas Artistic Undertaking Of This Century”?
Rachel Donadio: “To DAU’s producers and editors, and some of its celebrity-artist guests, the project has become a vibrant creative and intellectual community, even a way of life. To anyone outside it, the project can seem unwelcoming. I’ve spent many long hours visiting DAU since it opened here on January 24, and I’ve found the films at turns maddening, boring, and pornographic. I’ve never encountered a project whose monumental, megalomaniacal ambitions are so dramatically at odds with the uneven final product. Although maybe that’s the point. Maybe it’s all a big metaphor for the Soviet Union.” – The Atlantic
Large Study Shows Students Do Better All Around If They Get Education In The Arts
It’s just the latest study to find that giving students more access to the arts offers measurable benefits. And adding time for dance, theater, or visual arts isn’t at odds with traditional measures of academic success, according to the research — which amounts to one of the largest gold-standard studies on arts education ever conducted. – Chalkbeat
The Former Dancer Who Brought The Joy (And Big Success) Back To Gymnastics
“I know what it’s like to have to go through puberty in a leotard,” said Kondos Field, a former professional ballerina who had little experience in gymnastics instruction when she joined the UCLA program nearly four decades ago. “I know what it’s like to have disordered eating. I know what it’s like to have to go out there by yourself.” – The New York Times
AI Researchers Made A Bot That Wrote Convincing News Stories. It Was So Good They Shut It Down
These excellent results have freaked the researchers out. One concern they have is that the technology would be used to turbo-charge fake news operations. The Guardian published a fake news article written by the software along with its coverage of the research. The article is readable and contains fake quotes that are on topic and realistic. The grammar is better than a lot what you’d see from fake news content mills. And according to The Guardian’s Alex Hern, it only took 15 seconds for the bot to write the article. – Gizmodo