Public Theater Artistic Director Oskar in a statement said “Michael Friedman was one of the most brilliant, multi-talented theater artists of our time. He was also a miracle of a human being: loving, kind, generous, hilarious, thrilling. His loss leaves a hole in the theater world that cannot be filled, and a hole in the hearts of those who loved him that will last forever.”
Blog
A New String Quartet Festival Highlights Difficulties Of The Art Form
“Although one of the greatest in classical music, the quartet literature is designed to be played in small venues, and performance fees have to be divided four ways. Making a secure living is hard. With the honourable exception of the University of Victoria, which has engaged the Lafayette String Quartet, Canada’s universities seem reluctant to emulate the example of their American counterparts in providing a secure working environment for these custodians of some of our greatest music. Meanwhile, they soldier on.”
Inside Houston’s Flooded Alley Theatre
Grime-streaked floodwater nearly slapped the 10-foot ceilings of the lower of the building’s two chambers, lurching up a winding stairway and foreclosing access to the lobby below. But when the New York-based playwright Rajiv Joseph, who recounted his experience by telephone on Wednesday, peered down into the morass on Aug. 27, the grief was instant and deflating.
Finding Yourself? That Assumes There’s A “True” Self To Be Found. There Isn’t
“Finding one’s true place in the world is a massive trope, not just in film and theatre, but also in literature, education and motivational seminars – any place where young people are involved. In all these cases, the search for the ‘self’ is dubious because it assumes that there is an enduring ‘self’ that lurks within and that can somehow be found. Whereas, in fact, the only ‘self’ we can be sure of is one that changes every second, our decisions and circumstances taking us in an infinite number of directions, moment by moment.”
That Awkward Place Where Science And Religion Meet
“Why is the universe so well suited to our existence? The weakest answer is that it’s just a brute fact. If the constants of nature were any different, then we wouldn’t be here to ask why we’re here. The strongest answer verges on theism: The cosmological constant is so improbably small that a godlike fine-tuner must have fashioned it into existence.”
Do Languages Simplify Over Time?
That’s the theory, based on what we see with languages such as english, which seem to slim down over centuries. John McWhorter says that simply isn’t true.
Art Fairs Need Reinventing
“Art fairs represent as much as one quarter of total annual art sales worldwide—the figure is slightly over $13 billion annually. And fairs account for over 40 percent of most galleries’ annual revenue. Total art fair attendance numbers are in the millions and will only increase. If we accept that fairs are a kind of new cultural institution, cultural institutions of the future, say, then we should ask ourselves: What do we want these new cultural institutions to look like and how can they serve this diverse and growing audience?”
How AI Machines Are Learning To Create Music Audiences Respond To
“This very simple idea: can you have someone making something with a generative model, putting it out there, but then taking advantage of the fact that the feedback they get? “Oh, that was good, that was bad.” That feedback that we get, the artist can learn from that in one way, but maybe the machine-learning model can learn from it as well, and say, “Oh, I see, here are all the people and here’s what they think of what I’m doing, and I have these parameters.” And we can set those parameters vis-à-vis the feedback, using reinforcement learning, and we’re working on that, too.”
In Defense Of ‘Confederate’, HBO’s Planned If-The-South-Won-The-Civil-War Series
When the planned series was announced, the backlash came quickly. Roxane Gay called it “slavery fan fiction,” and many observers argued that, post-Charlottesville, as one put it, “we’ve already seen episode one of Confederate.” Yet, as Gavriel D. Rosenfeld reminds us, there have already been several Civil War counterfactuals, and they’re by no means all apologias for the Confederacy.
Movies Are For Everyone, Right? Now, More Than Ever, No
“Conservatives have long railed against liberal Hollywood, and liberals have bemoaned the racism, sexism and militarism of Hollywood products, but through it all red and blue states have come together to produce plenty of box-office green. Movies are a common treasury for everyone to share. Is that still true? Was it ever?”