Reddit’s AskHistorians subreddit – one of the largest history forums on the internet – doesn’t bother debating Holocaust deniers. Instead, it bans them, and one moderator says Facebook should, too, because “deniers need a public forum to spread their lies and to sow doubt among readers not well-informed about history. By convincing people that they might have a point or two, they open the door for further radicalization in pursuit of their ultimate goal.”
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Talking Blockchain And What It Can – And Can’t – Do To The Art World
Is it time for new art funds? When people can trade portions of the value of an art work with blockchain tokens, what happens to the artwork’s value? And – er – what about the art itself? “Funds, tokenization and even digital art are all investments that don’t give investors anything to hang on their walls.”
Reminder: Noal Cohen’s Jazz History Website
Here’s a great place to learn jazz history, including a new retrospective of Miles Davis’ Capitol Records period.
New Yorkers Booked Almost 10,000 Free Museum Tickets In Four Days
As soon as the Culture Pass NYC site went live, it crashed for several hours under heavy traffic. Culture Pass is “an initiative that allows New York Public Library, Queens Library, and Brooklyn Library cardholders to book free passes at 33 of the city’s museums.” Some museums’ passes went quickly – the Whitney, MoMA – but they’ll drop more in August.
Art on Trains – July Edition
It takes two trains – and a lot of art, of various sorts – to get from Denver to Iowa.
Black Women Filmmakers In South Africa Face A Long, Obstacle-Filled Road To Success
Filmmaker Zamo Makhwanazi: “We’re all stuck in the same writer’s rooms, where we’re worked to death. … How is it that we’re carrying the industry on our backs, we are the creators, we are the hardest-working people in the industry, but we have the least power?”
People Are ‘Hacking’ Museum Tours To Make It All More Fun
More fun, or more efficient, or more in line with what specific visitors want to see, that is. “Third-party tour companies, especially those working in fine art museums, bring more external filters, from the comedic to the academic. Their tours range from special themes, like feminism or gay culture, to museum highlights designed for time-pressed or attention-deficit travelers.”
History – And A Lot Of Music – Gets Lost When Writers Think Women ‘Play Like Girls’
The problem starts with access to audiences and continues with the way women who produce, conduct, and play music get described in the media – which ends up leaving women, including an integrated all-women’s swing group that was a direct precursor to the Freedom Riders in Mississippi, out of the histories of their eras.
Stage Workers Picket Toronto Exhibition Space After They’re Locked Out By Management
The site’s board of governors locked out the union, IATSE Local 158, and then asked the stagehands and technical workers not to picket until after the Canadian National Exhibition. The union responded, “That’s not going to happen. … We are not going to surrender our rights under the law and jeopardize the safety of Torontonians and other visitors to Exhibition Place as a favour to Tory’s friends. Nor will we put visitors at risk.”
It’s Really Weird, Evolutionarily Speaking, That Humans Make Mental Representations Of The World
Instead of responding by reflex, we often respond to our mental representation of a thing. That’s an extra step. But it might, in the end, be more efficient. “The organism can just think: there is a large object ahead that is moving relatively fast, and the best thing to do when faced with oncoming fast-moving large objects is to get out of their way. In this way, the organism does not have to store a large number of behavioural dispositions (‘red bicycle ahead → move to the side’; ‘blue motorcycle ahead → move to the side’ etc), but it can just reason about what the right answer is.”