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Museums Are More Popular Than Ever. But Are Museums Offering Anything More Than Entertainment?

“I wanted the museum people to give me a hint of why they chose to emphasise one exhibit over another or, more important, why their curator valued one work over another. Especially when the relativist, multicultural talk got thick, and the professionals, unbidden, emphasised how no one piece was inherently superior to another, I felt a powerful impulse to ask, “Then why this particular stuff?” Usually I resisted that urge. It seemed too aggressive in the circumstance. When frustration forced out the question anyway, some condescend and some tried to clarify. Nothing satisfied.”

Neuro-bollocks: Neuroscience’s Clumsy Attempts To Explain Empathy (And Everything Else)

As well as the obligatory fMRI-based neuroanatomy, all contemporary meditations on empathy contain earnest accounts of mirror neurons, described as “the most hyped concept in neuroscience”. These cells were first described in the 1990s by the Italian neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti, who studied macaque monkeys. He found that some motor cells (involved in the control of movement) are activated by the sight of the same movement in others (humans and monkeys). Since then, outlandish claims have been made for these neurons

Finally (With The Help Of Kickstarter) Copies Of Recordings On Voyager’s Golden Record Are For Sale

From the very start, many people on the production team expected and hoped for the record to be commercially released soon after the launch of Voyager.c”Carl Sagan tried to interest labels in releasing Voyager,” Ferris says. “It never worked.” Timothy Ferris says that’s likely because the music rights were owned by several different record labels who were hesitant to share the bill. So — except for a limited CD-ROM release in the early 1990s — the record went largely unheard by the wider world.

Five Great Dance Films

Richard Brody picks them: There’s plenty of great dancing in studio-era Hollywood, but the cinematic master of dance is Busby Berkeley, whose career and creativity were at their zenith in the nineteen-thirties and early forties but whose genius reached a latter-day height in the musical “Small Town Girl” (YouTube, Vudu, and Google Play), from 1953.

The Race To “Reinvent” Paris

Deputy Mayor Jean‑Louis Missika: “The role of the city is changing. Thus far, Paris has been pursuing its architectural interests through public buildings, such as libraries, museums, and schools. As for other buildings and property suitable for revitalization, it was mostly about maximizing profit. In this competition, it is the most inventive and truly innovative project that wins.”

WESTAF Survey: Many States Have No Organizations Advocating For The Arts

“Nearly a third of the states had virtually no functioning general arts advocacy organization.  An additional 15% had a barely functioning organization.  That’s nearly half of all states with only minimal assets and resources to carry on the important work of arts advocacy – at the federal, state and local levels.  This is a major issue for the field, and has been percolating for quite some time.”