The transformation to robot-led work is at once a threat and an opportunity to both devotees of the free market and socialism. New production technologies threaten to eliminate some jobs and make others more precarious, while delivering higher profits to owners of the means of production. But what if those same technologies could be used to usher in an era of unprecedented mass liberty?
Tag: 02.07.18
Our Reading Utopia Has Turned On Us
“Now more than ever, art and commerce seem indistinguishable. On today’s Internet, everything is, to borrow Hebdige’s term, even flatter. There’s less time, somehow, for the depth of history—yesterday’s trends float farther and farther from their points of origin, commingling as styles without pasts, images without contexts. I do most of my reading online, and a few hundred words can take hours to digest—a paragraph of text is a launch pad to other places; I find myself falling down YouTube and eBay wormholes, my attention drifting. That state of being would have sounded like heaven to my teen-age self. It doesn’t usually feel like it now, though.”
Judy Chicago At 78, And Her Long Career Making Space For Fellow Female Artists
“Her style, like The Dinner Party, is flamboyant and groovy and uncategorizable. She wore jeans, a leopard-print silk shirt under a black vest embroidered with sequins and a double strand of gold beads. Her lipstick was purple, her curly hair dyed a reddish-pink, with tinted glasses to match, giving her a dreamy, psychedelic look. But the eyes peering out from behind those glasses were sharp and commanding.”
How Judy Chicago Made ‘The Dinner Party’ Over Five Long, Strenuous Years
“Chicago acknowledged that she’d need help to realize her full vision, so she began to enlist research assistants and scores of volunteers to help with production, whether embroidering, painting ceramic plates, or scrawling the names of historical figures onto the 2,304 hand-cast porcelain tiles that would make up the floor. … Some 400 women and men would lend a hand before she completed the work in 1979.”
Have You Really Always Hated Tarantino? Does That Matter?
Yes, it probably does (same for Louis CK or writers now being accused of misogyny, abuse, and more). “Saying ‘I always hated his work’ might be a cheap hipster pose, but it also might be bitterness born of long-suppressed, impotent anger. If you’ve grown used to being shamed or condescended to for caring about an ugly thread that everyone else seemed to be overlooking, the sudden shift is gratifying, but also exhausting.”
Five Things To Know About The Mellon Foundation’s New President
Elizabeth Alexander has been closely involved in one of the most important trends now shaping arts philanthropy: a growing focus on using arts and cultural grantmaking to advance social justice. You can bet that she’ll push Mellon to step up its own funding along these lines. It also seems likely that we’ll see a more powerful axis between Ford and Mellon that extends the influence of both institutions in the arts and cultural space.
Scholars Ran Shakespeare Through Plagiarism Software And Discovered…
With the help of software typically used by professors to nab cheating students, two writers have discovered an unpublished manuscript they believe the Bard of Avon consulted to write “King Lear,” “Macbeth,” “Richard III,” “Henry V” and seven other plays.
Alex Ross Weighs In On The Just-Announced New Season Of “America’s Leading Orchestra”
Mark Swed, in the LA Times, risks hyperbole when he writes, “No orchestra has ever come close to the ambition of this centennial season.” But it’s hard to think of an immediate counterexample.
‘Newsweek’ Staffers Flee After Top Editors Were Abruptly Fired
On Monday, the magazine/website’s top two editors and one senior reporter – all three of whom were involved in a story about a criminal investigation into Newsweek‘s parent company – were dismissed without warning. Over the week, at least half a dozen writers and editors have resigned – either in protest or because they fear the publication may be imploding.
The Guys Who Stopped A Gunman On A Paris Train Asked Clint Eastwood To Make A Movie About Them. They Were Joking. He Wasn’t.
Reporter Bruce Fretts tells the origin story of The 15:17 to Paris – and why Eastwood asked the three men to play themselves.