“With the election less than two months away, Hyperallergic looked at the Democratic candidate and his running mate’s track record in the field, from legislative achievements to museum affiliations and general support of the industry.” – Hyperallergic
Blog
TikTok Says It’s Paying Out Hundreds Of Millions To Video Creators. Some Of Those Creators Are Ticked Off
It seemed like very good news when the company said it was setting aside $200 million to compensate the users who make its mini-videos. It seemed even better news when TikTok raised the amount to $1 billion in the U.S. and at least $1 billion more overseas. Now some of those creators say they’re getting a few dollars a day even when they get six-figure view numbers; others say their traffic mysteriously drops after they sign up. Many say the program is far from transparent. – Wired
Canceled And Online Shows Will Be Eligible For 2020 Pulitzer For Drama
“Traditionally, eligibility rules required in-person productions. This year, plays that were scheduled to be produced in theaters during 2020 but postponed or canceled due to the pandemic, as well as plays produced and performed in places other than theaters, including online, outside or in site-specific venues, will be considered.” – Deadline
Ben Brantley Retires As New York Times Co-Chief Theater Critic
“‘This pandemic pause … seemed to me like a good moment to slip out the door,’ Brantley said in a statement. … [He] joined the Times as its second-string theater critic in 1993, taking the chief critic job three years later. His last day on the job will be Oct. 15. The paper’s newish co-chief critic title currently is shared by Brantley and Jesse Green, who will remain on board.” – Deadline
At This Point, Should Australia Even Have A National Opera Company?
“Opera is an urban art form par excellence. … Now, however, under the shadow of COVID-19, the future of the city itself is under question; the rise of video platforms like Zoom seems to make the necessity of ‘being there’ no longer a necessity.” Opera Australia gets more government funding than any other performing arts institution in the country, but for the company to travel even from Sydney to Melbourne twice a year is very expensive, let alone touring anywhere else. Peter Tregear argues that it’s time to consider a more grassroots, locally-based approach to the art form. – The Conversation
A ‘Hunger Games’-Style Arts Bailout In Australia’s Largest State, Say Smaller Groups
“The New South Wales government has been accused of creating ‘a Hunger Games atmosphere’ among 84 arts organisations over its $50m Covid-19 [‘Rescue and Restart’ program], which remains shrouded in secrecy. … There are misgivings among small-to-medium companies that the NSW government has elected to watch them drown, while the major flagship companies – a few with healthy reserves to ride out the rough seas – are thrown multimillion-dollar lifelines.” – The Guardian
Jazz Bassist Gary Peacock, 85
Peacock’s personal philosophy enabled him to work with a wide variety of musicians and facilitate great depth in those sessions. In a 2017 interview, he told Ken Bader of the Arts Fuse,“I’m not after my statement or my identity as a bass player or improviser. It’s not about me. It’s about the music. It’s about my responsibility to be in a particular place that other people can share, enjoy and feel something.” – NPR
Film Festivals Lose Something Essential When They Go Virtual
From the outside, many of these events look incredibly glamorous, even excessive — none more than Cannes, with its black-tie premieres in the Palais and its exclusive yacht parties off the shore. As such, it’s not hard to imagine civilians questioning why the world might need such gatherings during a time of austerity and caution. But the truth is, film festivals serve an essential function to the ecosystem of cinema that can’t be reproduced by virtual events. – Variety
Turns Out Most Of Scots Wikipedia Is Fake. What To Do About It?
If there is any reason to think the situation with Scots Wikipedia will improve over time, it might simply be that Wikipedia editors themselves are quite industrious—and, relatively speaking, more forgiving. – Slate
Meet The New Artificial Intelligence That’s Got Everyone’s Attention
GPT-3 is a marvel of engineering due to its breathtaking scale. It contains 175 billion parameters (the weights in the connections between the “neurons” or units of the network) distributed over 96 layers. It produces embeddings in a vector space with 12,288 dimensions. And it was trained on hundreds of billions of words representing a significant subset of the Internet—including the entirety of English Wikipedia, countless books, and a dizzying number of web pages. Training the final model alone is estimated to have cost around $5 million. – Nautilus