“Flappy Bird is not difficult to challenge you, nor even to teach the institution of videogames a thing or two. Rather, Flappy Bird is difficult because that’s how it is. It is a game that is indifferent, like an iron gate rusted shut, like the ice that shuts down a city.”
Tag: 02.03.14
Grand Jury Recommends Possible Shutdown of Planned Pennsylvania Museum
“In Northampton County, Pennsylvania, a grand jury has declared in a 38-page report deemed ‘scathing’ that, due to negligence, the state should review and potentially dissolve the nonprofit group behind the National Museum of Industrial History. The museum has not yet opened despite spending $8 million in operating costs over the past decade.”
Spanish Priest Claims to Have Found Major Murillo Painting
The parish father for three small villages near Granada says that the 17th-century canvas depicting the bound Christ is the first of painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s several treatments of the image, titled Ecce Homo. Experts are divided on the claim’s accuracy.
The Ontological Proof for the Impossibility of Satan
“The Ontological Argument is an infamously devilish a priori argument for God’s existence.” In a bit of theological jiujitsu, a pair of philosophers has used those exact premises to argue that the Devil must, of necessity, not exist – and “the Christian’s world just got a whole lot smaller.”
Moby: Why I Left New York (It’s Not Creative)
“I was so accustomed to the city’s absurd cult of money that it took me years to notice I didn’t have any artist friends left in Manhattan, and the artists and musicians I knew were slowly moving farther and farther east, with many parts of Brooklyn even becoming too pricey for aspiring or working artists.”
Is Fair Use Broken In The Visual Arts?
“Members of the visual arts communities of practice encounter copyright permissions issues in connection with virtually every aspect of fulfilling their professional responsibilities, ranging from an artist’s creation of work that references popular culture to an art historian’s focus on a contemporary artist, to a teacher’s compilation of curriculum materials, to a museum exhibition and catalogue, to scholarly and art publishing.”
Riccardo Muti On The Ways Of The World
Muti looks more and more these days for ways to connect past and present. He wonders if the current merging and melding of cultures and nationalities will produce a kind of music that “will be relevant to listeners today” while “exploring the many layers of the past, the many kinds of melody, harmony, chanting, rhythms of all of these societies throughout history.”
Musical About Anti-Gay Violence in Uganda Wins Richard Rodgers Award
The prize will underwrite a production of Witness Uganda, by Matt Gould and Griffin Matthews, at the American Repertory Theater with Diane Paulus as director.
Unpublished Novella by Charlie Chaplin Will Be Released
The 1948 work, called Footlights and thought to be the source of Chaplin’s 1952 film Limelight, was reconstructed from numerous manuscripts in his archives.
Brazilian TV Airs First Primetime Gay Male Kiss
This was a huge deal. “‘Kiss him, Felix,’ urged thousands of viewers of Globo TV’s popular soap Amor à Vida … The campaign for it was partly led by a politician, and it took place online using Facebook and Twitter.”