“Filling in missing text starts with being able to read and understand the original text. That requires much donkey work. Now an Israeli team [of researchers] has reinvented the donkey in digital form, harnessing artificial intelligence to help complete fragmented Akkadian cuneiform tablets.” – Haaretz (Israel)
Tag: 11.29.20
How Pittsburgh’s Arts Groups Adapted To COVID
“It’s bringing up the inequities that exist for folks who don’t have access to a laptop or all these technical tools or even technical literacy. For others in this time, it’s actually kind of equalized the stage. You just turn on your phone and there’s your stage.” – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
‘Black Magic’ — Voguers Will Loom Over Times Square At Midnight
“Just before midnight every evening in December, some 70 digital billboards encircling the gaudy canyon of Times Square will be co-opted for three minutes by slow-motion images of Black voguers, performing dances of resistance, resilience and liberation. The video installation is the work of the multidisciplinary artist Rashaad Newsome, who has remixed footage from live performances of his 2019 piece Black Magic.” – The New York Times
COVID May Have Changed Arts Criticism For Good — And For The Better
Philip Kennicott: “Freed from the obligation of keeping up with a regular calendar of exhibition openings, or a concert schedule or a weekly march of theatrical premieres, critics have written more about the personal experience of art rather than the specific content of art in particular. … This more reflective, more personal [approach] may widen the audience for arts writing. Because critics deal with art on a daily basis, they sometimes fail to communicate something more fundamental: the daily, lived experience of having art in one’s life, the ‘why it matters’ that keeps you coming back, again and again, year after year.” – The Washington Post
Ancient Cave Art Masterpieces Discovered In Colombia
Hailed as “the Sistine Chapel of the ancients”, archaeologists have found tens of thousands of paintings of animals and humans created up to 12,500 years ago across cliff faces that stretch across nearly eight miles in Colombia. – The Guardian
A Better Way To Give Concerts?
Stephen Hough: “One issue I wrote about that seems to have struck a chord with readers was the idea of removing the interval and having shorter concerts, lasting around 60-80 minutes, perhaps at different starting times, and even repeating them on the same night. Since the pandemic struck this shrunken format has quickly become the norm, a neat solution to comply with new health and safety requirements … and I’ve loved it.” – The Guardian
The Carols From Kings Will Go On, To An Audience Of No One
No one except the BBC, of course. “For many of us, it is the moment when Christmas really starts: the soaring voice of a boy soloist at King’s College, Cambridge opening its iconic Christmas Eve service with Once in Royal David’s City.” No one will be in the pews this year. – The Observer (UK)
When ‘The Last Gasp’ Isn’t The Final Breath For A 40-Year-Old Theatre Company
The 76- and 71-year-old women who founded and run Split Britches were in London when COVID-19 hit New York hard, so they didn’t come back for a while – but where to stay, and how to make the new work they were supposedly putting up at La MaMa in April and the Barbican in June? And where to stay in London? Enter an empty house with running water, electricity and one chair. – The New York Times
What Fairytale Of New York And It’s A Wonderful Life Have In Common
And what they tell us about a culture that celebrates Christmas above all, decontextualizing the artists’ other work. “The Pogues had already put out two of the most original albums of the decade by the time they released ‘Fairytale’ in 1987; I can’t remember the last time I heard anything from either played on the radio. Were Frank Capra around today, he would be able to relate.” – The Guardian (UK)
The UK’s Culture Secretary Asks Netflix To Label ‘The Crown’ As Fiction
Who would write this twist into the series? Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden “is expected to write Netflix a formal request that a label is added to the beginning of each episode, clearly stating that the series is fictionalized. Dowden’s demands echo worries that the series will do lasting damage to the image of the British monarchy.” Ahem. – Variety