“It turns out that self-control, and all the benefits from it, may not be related to inhibiting impulses at all. And once we cast aside the idea of willpower, we can better understand what actually works to accomplish goals, and hit those New Year’s resolutions.”
Tag: 01.15.18
If Criticism Is Just A Killjoy, Is It Worth Caring About?
“The delusion isn’t that criticism is important; it is important, the more so as discourse increasingly takes the form of people screaming at each other on the internet. The delusion is that critics can ever transcend the subjectivity that makes good criticism so interesting in the first place. And if a certain negativity, even a certain schadenfreude, attaches to that subjectivity, well, would you rather have a pretended objectivity that observes all the proprieties and never risks giving offense?”
The Protest Song Is Back! Pop Music Is More Political Than At Any Time Since The ’60s
And you can guess why. Dorian Lynskey, author of 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, talks with Spencer Kornhaber about the current revival of political pop and its pitfalls.
Museum Show Full Of Fake Kandinsky And Malevich Paintings, Argue Experts
The Museum of Fine Arts in the Belgian city of Ghent is hosting an exhibition of 20th-century Russian avant-garde works – attributed to Popova, Rodchenko, Goncharova, Malevich, Kandinsky, and others – from the private foundation of a Russian businessman and collector. A group of scholars and professionals argue in an open letter that these works “have no exhibition history, have never before been reproduced in serious scholarly publications, and have no traceable sales records.”
You’re In The Theatre? Put Down The Damn Social Media!
“It’s hard to control a cough or a cranky kid’s wails. Tough to tame the artistic ambitions of bats or squirrels. And sometimes, I guess the rain gods want in on the festivities too. But most philosophers and legal scholars would agree that even the most strung-out phone addicts possess free will. Force majeure has nothing to do with Facebook.”
Virtual Reality Comes To Art (But Who Owns – Controls – What?)
Legal questions about ownership of virtual public spaces were thrown into sharp relief in October when Snapchat partnered with Koons to allow users to project his balloon sculptures in specific sites around the world using augmented reality (AR). In protest against an “augmented reality corporate invasion”, the artist Sebastian Errazuriz “graffiti-bombed” one of the works and placed it in the same geotagged location in Central Park as the Snapchat version.
Music Isn’t Just A Thing We Process With Our Brains
“When I’m pinned to the back of my seat by the mind-warping rhythms of a drummer, or the harmonic ingenuity of an improvising guitarist, I often have the feeling that my body ‘gets’ things in a way my brain can’t. I find myself physically responding to nuances in the musical texture that have been and gone before I have time to formulate thoughts about them. I can speculate to some extent about what I’ve heard after the fact – that snare hit was perhaps a shade early; that cadence resolved just a fraction too late – but in the moment, I can’t quite articulate what it is that I’m reacting to. My grasp on what I’m hearing doesn’t seem cognitive. It seems visceral.”
Is Waterstone’s Books For Sale? (It’s Not A Good Time)
“It’s not a good time to be trying to sell a UK High Street retailer in light of higher [business] rates, Brexit, and some tough leases. That worries me. It’s important that it’s bought by a good owner, but who? It could even be Amazon, which would be disastrous and one would hope for Competition Authority intervention in that case, although they sometimes look the other way.”
Art World Expresses Concern Over The Future Of Ailing Documenta
The signatories of the letter expressed concern that recent decisions made by Documenta’s supervisory board “have considerably damaged one of Germany’s internationally active and influential cultural institutions, and thus also the image of Germany abroad.” They said the city is debating changes that will lead to the “restructuring of Documenta in the direction of a pure commercialisation and marketing of the Documenta brand.”
What, Me Worry? Reading Robots Are Smart But Not Wise
“Advances in word recognition and comprehension can only make AI better at handling those kinds of requests. Machines that can better understand our questions will give us better answers. That could mean a doctor getting more accurate and actionable information with which to base a diagnosis, or a teacher more clearly representing a concept to a student.”