Blog – Page 2212 – ArtsJournal Wayback

Top Posts From AJBlogs 01.16.18

Baby Steps
Over the last eighteen months I have begun to put greater emphasis on the need for (and advantages of) simplicity and gradualism in beginning community engagement efforts. … read more
AJBlog: Engaging Matters Published 2018-01-16

Pay-to-Play? Maezawa Bankrolls Brooklyn Museum Show of His $110.5-Million Basquiat
Should a museum accept money from a private collector to show a work (or works) from his personal collection? Unless the work in question has been promised to the museum, such arrangements reek of pay-to-play, … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2018-01-16

America’s Most Exceptional Orchestra
Setting aside PostClassical Ensemble, the guerrilla DC chamber orchestra I co-founded fourteen years ago, the most exceptional American orchestra I know is the South Dakota Symphony. South Dakota’s “Copland and Mexico” festival, which concluded last … read more
AJBlog: Unanswered Question Published 2018-01-16

Tracking Everyday Mysteries
RoseAnne Spradlin’s X at New York Live Arts, January 13 and 14. … read more
AJBlog: Dancebeat Published 2018-01-16

Marlene VerPlanck Is Gone
From New York comes news that the singer Marlene VerPlanck died today at 84. She reportedly had pancreatic cancer but managed to keep the illness a secret from nearly everyone. … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2018-01-16

Reconstructing An Ancient Board Game (Now There’s A Challenge For You)

“Imagine you find a Monopoly board and a handful of street cards plus one little tin hat and a little tin shoe, nothing else,” says game historian Ulrich Schädler. Reporter Natasha Frost looks at some games from the ancient world – and at the ways scholars try to figure them out.

Why Missy Mazzoli Is The Composer Of Her Generation

“Seven or eight years ago, she started making waves with her chamber-ensemble-cum-girl-band, Victoire, a group with a funky alt-classical vibe that she formed as an outlet for performing her own music. Listening to the band’s post-minimalist drones overlaid with expressive spasms of melody in an electronic haze, playing at the Atlas on H Street in 2011, you might not have guessed that Mazzoli’s work was going to veer into the world of mainstream opera. But on Friday, the Washington National Opera will be presenting the world premiere of her third opera, a 70-minute piece called “Proving Up,” and the opera world counts the company lucky to get it.”

Decline Of The Working-Class Actor

“For British actors, ever-growing division is a fact of life. The erection of roadblocks for working-class actors now begins at state schools, where drama has been squeezed out by slashed teaching budgets and a narrowing curriculum. Then come rising fees at drama schools. Overcome those and you get to chase dwindling roles in soaps and bad gangster movies.”

Is Waterstone’s Books For Sale? (It’s Not A Good Time)

“It’s not a good time to be trying to sell a UK High Street retailer in light of higher [business] rates, Brexit, and some tough leases. That worries me. It’s important that it’s bought by a good owner, but who? It could even be Amazon, which would be disastrous and one would hope for Competition Authority intervention in that case, although they sometimes look the other way.”

Art World Expresses Concern Over The Future Of Ailing Documenta

The signatories of the letter expressed concern that recent decisions made by Documenta’s supervisory board “have considerably damaged one of Germany’s internationally active and influential cultural institutions, and thus also the image of Germany abroad.” They said the city is debating changes that will lead to the “restructuring of Documenta in the direction of a pure commercialisation and marketing of the Documenta brand.”

What, Me Worry? Reading Robots Are Smart But Not Wise

“Advances in word recognition and comprehension can only make AI better at handling those kinds of requests. Machines that can better understand our questions will give us better answers. That could mean a doctor getting more accurate and actionable information with which to base a diagnosis, or a teacher more clearly representing a concept to a student.”

For The First Time, Robots Can Now Read Better Than Humans

“The AI algorithm, developed by Chinese retail giant Alibaba, outscored humans in the Stanford Question Answering Dataset—a global reading test consisting of more than 100,000 questions. Using natural-language processing, the machine-learning model developed by Alibaba’s Institute of Data Science of Technologies beat rival humans with a score of 82.44 versus 82.305, the company said.”

Everyone’s Talking About A Backlash Against Tech. It’s More Complicated Than That

“Our technological evolution is happening faster than most people ever imagined, and it is clearly happening faster than society is able to deal with it. How should we respond?”

‘Am I A Bad Feminist?’ Margaret Atwood Worries About Fairness And Due Process In #MeToo, And About The Backlash She Suffered For Worrying

“The #MeToo moment is a symptom of a broken legal system. All too frequently, women and other sexual-abuse complainants couldn’t get a fair hearing through institutions – including corporate structures – so they used a new tool: the internet. … [But] if the legal system is bypassed because it is seen as ineffectual, what will take its place? … In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn’t puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated.”