Arts news

• Alphabet Mystery Writer Sue Grafton, Dead At 77

  29-12-2017 23:29 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Husband Stephen Humphrey said Grafton had been struggling to find an idea for “Z’’ while undergoing treatment and losing weight. “Nothing’s been written,” he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. “There is no Z.” He added with a laugh, “Nobody in this family will ever use the letter Z again.”
  
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• What Would A Self-Aware Machine Be Like?

  29-12-2017 23:04 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "Most computer scientists think that consciousness is a characteristic that will emerge as technology develops. Some believe that consciousness involves accepting new information, storing and retrieving old information, and cognitive processing of it all into perceptions and actions. If that's right, then one day machines will indeed be the ultimate consciousness. They'll be able to gather more information than a human, store more than many libraries, access vast databases in milliseconds, and c
  
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• The Top-Grossing Actor Of 2017: Vin Diesel

  29-12-2017 22:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Vin Diesel has been named the top-grossing actor of 2017 by Forbes. His global ticketing receipts were listed at $1.6 billion, largely in part to being the face of the “Fast and the Furious” franchise.
  
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• A Comeback For CDs?

  29-12-2017 21:58 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "David Bakula, who oversees Nielsen's industry insights operations, said the changes in digital habits mean the CD is representing a larger share of the declining album sales market. He believes that writing the obituary for the CD is premature as labels look to bolster album sales however they can, while older listeners stick to their usual buying habits."
  
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• Breaking Out Of The Same Old Book Choices And Recommendations

  29-12-2017 21:36 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  I love books that make me backtrack my own declarations of preference, ones that catch me off-guard, surprise me, keep me on my toes. I want stories that don't fit into easy boxes, ones that defy their own ostensible categorization, that make those who recommend them stumble, before finally saying, "Just trust me." The problem, of course, is that in most cases, we aren't offered this kind of tailored option.
  
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• George C. Wolfe And Joe Mantello Talk About Directing

  29-12-2017 21:04 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "George C. Wolfe and Joe Mantello go back to the 1990s, when Mantello, as a young actor, starred as Louis in Wolfe's Broadway production of Tony Kushner's Angels in America. In the years that followed, Mantello found himself acting less and directing more. Now, they're formidable colleagues in their prime, as well as great friends, to boot. In the latest edition of TheaterMania's Artist to Artist series, Wolfe and Mantello discuss what their successes and failures mean to them, how they approach
  
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• Five Ways Technology Is Changing The Music Experience

  29-12-2017 20:34 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "3D mapping manipulates the look and feel of a 3D object. It's been done on castles to make them look like they've fallen down. Now people can experience being on the stage with the artists. Or the gig could move off the stage. We are a generation spoiled with possibilities."
  
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• Ridley Scott Explains How He Rescued 'All The Money In The World' From The Kevin Spacey Disaster

  29-12-2017 20:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Kyle Buchanan: "I met with Scott recently in Beverly Hills to discuss how he did it, and what I found was a filmmaker who has the stamina of a man half his age and an octogenarian's give-no-fucks bluntness."
  
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• The Least Powerful People In The Art World

  29-12-2017 19:24 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Every year the list of most powerful in the art world is read with interest. But who are the least powerful?
  
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• Colonial America's Most Notorious Poet Was An Enslaved Teenage Girl

  29-12-2017 19:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Phyllis Wheatley was abducted from the West African coast and sold to a Boston couple at roughly age seven. Their daughter taught the young slave to read, and within two years, Phyllis fluently read and wrote English and started learning Latin. When she was 18, her owners took her to London to publish a book of her poems, and - once disbelieving publishers and others were convinced that Phyllis had written them herself - she became famous on both sides of the Atlantic.
  
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• When People Claim They're Defending Against A 'War On Christmas', What Exactly Is It They're Fighting For?

  29-12-2017 18:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Adam Gopnik: "Christmas has always been a happily mixed-up holiday for mixed-up people and confused cultures. It is, at its roots, the very model of a pagan-secular-synthetic festival as much as it is a religious one - just the kind, in fact, that the imaginary anti-Christmas forces are supposed to favor."
  
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• As Broadway Has Become More About Tourists, Musicals Have Crowded Out Plays

  29-12-2017 17:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  For decades, the theaters of Broadway — now numbering 41 — were the moneymaking breeding ground for these plays. But what was once the rule on Broadway is now the rare exception. And the traditional for-profit, new Broadway play is disappearing almost as surely as the dodo.
  
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• How Airline Safety Videos Evolved From Boring Instructionals Into Comic Extravaganzas

  29-12-2017 17:04 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  It all started with Richard Branson's Virgin Atlantic ("make flying fun again"), which used hand-drawn cartoons. "In the ensuing years, airlines have pulled out nearly every gimmick imaginable to make their safety video a YouTube sensation. A Qatar Airlines video takes place at an FC Barcelona match, an El Al video takes the form of a cringeworthy Devo tribute, and ... even sedate, legacy brands like British Airways, Singapore Airlines, United, and Air France have succumbed to the trend in recen
  
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• From the Archives: The Most Notable Art from 100, 75, 50, and 25 Years Ago

  29-12-2017 17:00 via artnews.com
  Selections include the 1917 Society of Independent Artists exhibition and "Young British Artists" at the Saatchi Gallery in 1992. Read More
  The post From the Archives: The Most Notable Art from 100, 75, 50, and 25 Years Ago appeared first on ARTnews.
  
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• Nightmare First Date Ends With $1 Million Worth Of Art Destroyed In Drunken Rampage

  29-12-2017 16:36 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Texas attorney Anthony Buzbee probably thought his evening was going well when he brought 29-year-old blonde Lindy Lou Layman to his $14 million mansion. But she got overly inebriated, and when he tried to send her home in an Uber, she hurled two sculptures across the room, ripped three paintings - including two original Warhols - off the wall, and poured some as-yet-unidentified liquid on them.
  
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• How Spalding Gray Became An Actual Paint Color

  29-12-2017 16:05 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Reporter Judith Newman recounts a story that takes in the late monologuist, a Cleveland architect, his Weimaraner, his clients, Sherwin Williams, and, in the end, Gray's widow and old house.
  
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• A Year in ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’

  29-12-2017 16:00 via artnews.com
  A look back at the daily feature's most notable posts from 2017. Read More
  The post A Year in ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ appeared first on ARTnews.
  
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• You Can Now Read The Editor's Savage Notes On Milo Yiannopoulos's Cancelled Book

  29-12-2017 15:34 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Thanks to Milo's breach-of-contract lawsuit against Simon & Schuster for withdrawing publication of his book Dangerous, the draft manuscript with comments by editor Mitchell Ivers is now public record. So the Internet is having a high old time with it, and you can join in. (Our personal favorite note: "Beauty regime moved to box at end of chapter, after Nietzsche section.")
  
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• 'We Should Do Nothing': An Archaeologist Argues Against Rebuilding Palmyra

  29-12-2017 15:18 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  In an extensive Q&A that also covers the history of the ancient Syrian city, its destruction by ISIS, the lack of an international or UN intervention to save it, and the trade in looted antiquities, Andreas Schmidt-Colinet, an archaeologist who worked at Palmyra for three decades, makes his case for what the West should and shouldn't do at the site now that the shooting there is over.
  
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• The Ten Worst Parts Of Being An Arts Fundraiser

  29-12-2017 15:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Karen Brooks Hopkins, longtime president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM): "As fundraisers, we are constantly told to look at the bright side: If at first you don't succeed; smile though your heart is breaking, etc. But as a former president and chief fundraiser for a large multidisciplinary arts organization, I have decided, in the spirit of the season, to present my 'bottom 10 list' delineating the worst, most excruciating parts of the job."
  
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• Morning Links: New Orleans Restaurants Edition

  29-12-2017 15:00 via artnews.com
  Here's what we're reading this morning. Read More
  The post Morning Links: New Orleans Restaurants Edition appeared first on ARTnews.
  
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• Nine Top Architects Share Their Dream Projects to Improve (or Save) New York City

  29-12-2017 14:47 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  These dreams range from the very-much-doable (Norman Foster extending Madison Square Park) to the interesting-but-unlikely (requiring the new super-tall apartment towers to provide public space) to the good-but-too-expensive (elevated bike lanes) to the insane (damming and draining the East River and using the riverbed as farmland) to why-aren't-we-doing-this-already? (a "cultural Airbnb" offering vacant storefronts for temporary use as performance or art venues).
  
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• Look At How The Met Opera Put Together It Big New Production Of 'Tosca'

  29-12-2017 14:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Sure, the casting may have been ill-starred, but backstage, in the "opera factory, ... the company's army of artists and artisans started work nearly a year before its opening night, on New Year's Eve." Photographer Todd Heisler and reporter Michael Cooper give us a look at what the troops have been whipping up.
  
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• Great Exhibition of the North: an event to transform and delight

  29-12-2017 14:30
  Newcastle and Gateshead will host the biggest event in England next year with an exhibition designed to challenge preconceptions of the northIt has been billed as the biggest event in England next year: a cultural and technological blizzard of all things northern where visitors could see art by Hepworth, Lowry and Hockney, Stephenson’s Rocket, Helen Sharman’s space suit and a spectacular 80-metre river sculpture.Details are beginning to emerge of what will be included in the Great Ex
  
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• Rose Marie, 94, Comic Actress And Singer Who Had 90-Year Career

  29-12-2017 14:16 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  She began working as a singer at age 3, had a national radio show at 5 (she went on a national vaudeville tour at 7 to prove she wasn't really an adult), and had a decades-long television career that included three Emmy nominations for playing comedy writer Sally Rogers on The Dick Van Dyke Show and nearly 20 years as a favorite on Hollywood Squares. She was doing voiceover work as late as this year, and a documentary about her came out just last month. (Fun fact: she says her father was an arso
  
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• America's Smallest Museum Wants To Become Its Most Visited - And It Could Succeed

  29-12-2017 14:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Scientist Amanda Schochet and designer Charles Philipp are the founders of MICRO, which creates six-foot-tall pop-up museum kiosks that can be installed in hotel lobbies, transit stations, office buildings - even DMVs and post offices.
  
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• The Latest Dance Series To Hit Netflix Is A World Tour Of Styles And Genres

  29-12-2017 13:45 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Ashley Rivers talks to Vandana Hart about We Speak Dance, in which Hart travels from Bali to Vietnam to France to Nigeria to Lebanon to watch and meet with dancers - traditional and contemporary - and sees how the art form is used for everything from religious ceremony to political weapon.
  
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• Kennedy Center TV Broadcast Gets Its Lowest Ratings Ever

  29-12-2017 13:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  CBS’ broadcast of Kennedy Center Honors clocked its lowest ratings result in people-meter history, dating back to 1987. The Tuesday 9-11 PM broadcast fumbled 28% of last year’s 8.620 million total viewers, to 6.169 million. The demo dive: 30% from last year’s 1.0 rating to 0.7.
  
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• Pavel Filonov’s Shostakovich’s First Symphony: art at its most musical

  29-12-2017 11:00
  This piece from 1935 reflects the artist’s theory of ‘analytical realism’, in which minutely realised, obsessively detailed individual parts form a wholeIn Pavel Filonov’s response to the expressionist composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s First Symphony, the canvas swarms with abstractions. They feel like notes or beats, from which faces emerge; thoughts taking shape. Continue reading...
  
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• The 10 best things to do this week: Raymond Briggs’ The Bear and the Turner prize

  29-12-2017 10:00
  Top up on festive cheer with Pins and Needles’ enchanting production and catch 2017’s best contemporary art before the exhibition closesStill Processing
  Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham present this New York Times podcast that discusses the big issues of the day – from sexual harassment to mental health to taking a knee – via the prism of popular culture, touching on Blade Runner 2049, Get Out and Rihanna’s Fenty makeup range. Continue reading...
  
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• The Year We Fell Out Of Love With Algorithms

  29-12-2017 00:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Algorithms that amplify fear and help foreign powers put a finger on the scale of democracy? These things sound dangerous! That’s a shift from just a few years ago, when “algorithm” primarily signified modernity and intelligence, thanks to the roaring success of tech companies such as Google—an enterprise founded upon an algorithm for ranking web pages.
  
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