Arts news

• We’ve Always Been Worried About Distraction (So What’s The Crisis?)

  20-01-2025 22:00 via newyorker.com
  
  Haven’t critics freaked out about the brain-scrambling power of everything from pianofortes to brightly colored posters? Isn’t there, in fact, a long section in Plato’s Phaedrus in which Socrates argues that writing will wreck people’s memories? – The New Yorker
  
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• CEO Of Music AI Company: Making Music The Traditional Way Sucks

  20-01-2025 21:44 via musicradar.com
  
  “It’s not really enjoyable to make music now. It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. And I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.” – Music Radar
  
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• Warning: Hollywood Screen Music Production Is Endangered

  20-01-2025 21:27 via artsjournal.com
  Los Angeles is facing a loss of artists, producers and executives ranging from sound to visual effects. Musicians, and the players behind them, are a vital aspect in that. – The Hollywood Reporter
  
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• Is Netflix Deliberately Dumbing Down TV For The Internet Generation?

  20-01-2025 20:15 via theguardian.com
  
  Is it inherently bad to cater to people who may prefer their viewing on the more casual side? Is it snobbery to believe that TV must demand all of our attention all of the time? – The Guardian
  
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• Classical Music’s Identity Crisis: Political Music Under Biden

  20-01-2025 19:59 via van-magazine.com
  
  Classical music has long been wandering in the desert of its own identity crisis, and 2016 was an unexpected checkpoint. Overnight, it seemed that artists had sprung into creative overdrive, making works to comment on the moment – Van
  
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• Data’s In: What And How We Read Last Year

  20-01-2025 19:44 via washingtonpost.com
  About 63 percent of us read at least one book last year, an improvement from the 54 percent we saw in 2023.Other sources don’t point to a seismic shift in reading habits, so this may be a refined estimate rather than a trend. – Washington Post
  
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• Study: LLM AI’s Aren’t Very Good At History Yet

  20-01-2025 19:01 via techcrunch.com
  
  “The main takeaway from this study is that LLMs, while impressive, still lack the depth of understanding required for advanced history. They’re great for basic facts, but when it comes to more nuanced, PhD-level historical inquiry, they’re not yet up to the task.” – TechCrunch
  
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• Is The TikTok Battle A Chance To Reimagine How The Internet Works?

  20-01-2025 18:44 via newyorker.com
  
  Broadly, Project Liberty is part of the movement toward a decentralized social Internet, where no single network controls users’ data and users can instead move their online identities and communities from one network to another without having to start from scratch. – The New Yorker
  
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• The Director Claims His Movie About The Munich Olympics Isn’t Political

  20-01-2025 18:30 via cbc.ca
  
  But not everyone agrees. “Workers at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema collected just over 1,000 signatures in an ongoing petition requesting the theatre chain pull the film. … The petition cites the film as being complicit in “manufacturing consent” for actions taken against Palestinian people.” – CBC
  
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• Naomi Watts Was Once Told That She’d Be Finished Acting Once She Turned 40

  20-01-2025 18:00 via nytimes.com
  
  “Now 56, she is fresh off a Golden Globe nomination for her performance as Babe Paley in Feud: Capote vs. the Swans. In March, she’ll star in the movie The Friend,” and she also has a new book coming out. – The New York Times
  
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• ‘Jean-Paul Sartre hid at her house!’ The forgotten brilliance of Hélène de Beauvoir, sister of Simone

  20-01-2025 17:13
  
  She was a painter ‘ahead of her time’, counting Picasso as a fan. But Hélène de Beauvoir was always overshadowed by her famous sister. Now, with a show opening in Britain, the artist is finally receiving her dueSimone de Beauvoir, the French feminist icon, novelist and philosopher who bestrode the 20th century, had a younger sister called Hélène. She was not famous like Simone but she was every bit as radical and prolific, as both a feminist and a painter.
  
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• Lynne Taylor-Corbett, Who Choreographed Footloose And Brought Dance To A Wide Audience, Has Died At 78

  20-01-2025 17:00 via nytimes.com
  
  The choreographer of exuberant musicals said, “My goal as a dancer and choreographer is to be understood. … Dance should not be a cerebral experience that the dancers have and the audiences watch. I want dancers to communicate something and have the audience receive the same thing.” – The New York Times
  
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• Andrew Lloyd Webber Will Teach These Soccer Fans To Sing Opera

  20-01-2025 16:30 via bbc.com
  
  No, this is not The Onion: “A group of Bradford City fans will go from singing on the terraces to performing as a choir for a BBC programme called ‘Bantam of the Opera.’”- BBC
  
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• The Thriving Publishing Renaissance In Africa

  20-01-2025 16:00 via nytimes.com
  
  The continent doesn’t need the West to “discover” writers. Instead, “a radical shift is underway, transforming the region’s literary landscape from within and opening up possibilities unimaginable to previous generations of writers.” – The New York Times
  
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• Without Reality TV, We’d Never Have Arrived At Today’s Inauguration

  20-01-2025 15:45 via yahoo.com
  
  “The idea that [Fear Factor’s] blandly macho host would become one of the most influential figures in American life would have seemed as ridiculous as, well, Donald Trump getting elected president. Twice.” – Los Angeles Times (Yahoo)
  
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• How Did Popcorn Become Such A Movie Staple?

  20-01-2025 15:30 via npr.org
  
  You can praise (or blame) a saleswoman in Kansas City who “built a concession empire in the middle of the Great Depression.” – and changed popcorn’s status from banned in cinemas to practically synonymous. – NPR
  
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• Moving pictures: comics and animation exhibition showcases stories of migration

  20-01-2025 06:00
  
  Graphic novelists, cartoonists and animators use testimonies of migrants to depict tales of survival and escape across the world in show at Soas University of LondonAn award-winning graphic novelist who migrated to the UK from Tripoli, a Pulitzer prize finalist from the Philippines and a director who sought refuge in the UK from Iran are among the animators showcased in an exhibition at Soas University of London, which explores migration through animation and comics.The Stories of Migration exhi
  
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