It’s not just men, often of a certain generation, who seem unsettled by this newfound determination to speak out – demonstrating cultural leadership while doing so. I’ve heard some women in theatre talking about MeToo as a “bandwagon”. These are often women who have scaled the ladder of success and found their own ways to deal with predatory male sexual behaviour. The argument is that to make a fuss about an unwanted hand on a knee or a breast casts women in the role of victims, when of course it is a women’s job not to make a fuss and to deal with these advances from men. Because boys will be boys. But that does nothing to change the culture in which such behaviours thrive.
Tag: 04.09.18
Museums Try Out Virtual Reality As An Artistic Medium
“As VR technology has gotten better and cheaper, more artists and curators are experimenting with it as a new medium for expression.” Reporter Andrea Shea checks out two new virtual-reality works at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary of Art (MASS MoCA) in North Adams.
India’s Most Popular Tourist Destination After The Taj Mahal Is This Outsider-Art Sculpture Garden
“For almost two decades, self-taught artist Nek Chand worked in secret. In the cover of night, he’d sneak away to a clearing deep in a forest owned by the government on the outskirts of the Indian city of Chandigarh. It was there that he built his very own shangri-la: a garden filled with glittering sculptures of gods, goddesses, and other mystical beings.” Here’s the decades-long story of Chand’s Rock Garden.
Pleasure Junkies – Scientists Argue Over Our Responses To Art (and Porn)
Julia F. Christensen, a neuroscientist at the The Warburg Institute at the University of London who studies people’s responses to dance choreography, argued that many of us have been turned into “mindless pleasure junkies, handing over our free will for the next dopamine shoot” provided by social media, pornography and sugar. She offered up an unconventional solution: art, which she says engages us in ways these other pleasures do not and can “help overwrite the detrimental effects of dysfunctional urges and craving.”
Ode To The Magic Of Libraries
The census of American libraries spans a wonderful diversity of institutions, from modest municipal book rooms and mobile libraries to the grand collections of such hallowed places as the Morgan, the Folger, the Huntington, and the Smithsonian. Surveys of library users reveal a passionate attachment to these institutions, one that is voiced in very human terms. The word love is an emotion often expressed toward libraries, and not just for National Library Week. Libraries are places in which people are born—as authors, readers, scholars, and activists. (Think Eudora Welty, Zadie Smith, John Updike, and Ian Rankin.)
Echo Chambers Versus Trust Bubbles
“There are two very different phenomena at play here, each of which subvert the flow of information in very distinct ways. Let’s call them echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Both are social structures that systematically exclude sources of information. Both exaggerate their members’ confidence in their beliefs. But they work in entirely different ways, and they require very different modes of intervention. An epistemic bubble is when you don’t hear people from the other side. An echo chamber is what happens when you don’t trust people from the other side.”
It’s Time For Ballet To Embrace Feminism, Writes New York City Ballet Star
Ashley Bouder: “It’s as if the image of a man leading a woman into the wings is a metaphor for how the dance world is run. A male director leading the careers of dancers. A male choreographer laying down the pathway of steps to perform. Of course, there are women who have broken through this mold. But there it is in the phrase: ‘broken through.’ A simple place at the table would be sufficient. Instead, it’s like women are crashing the dinner party. … Too many times I’ve felt the proverbial pat on the head and heard a ‘Good for you, sweetie’ comment. A few times, I’ve actually gotten a real pat on the head.”
‘Design Thinking’ Is Narrow-Minded And Limiting
Natasha Jen of Pentagram: “Design thinking embodies our obsession with prescription. … We crave prescriptions and mythology in general – as a profession and as a society. … Prescriptions create a kind of prison, in terms of how we can think about things and how we work. But a very linear methodology-based way of working completely removes other possibilities.”
‘Design Thinking’, For All Its Problems, Has Serious Value
Khoi Vinh of Adobe: “Design thinking has a lot of downsides. It can be very superficial. It can be very misleading and the outcomes that it produces can be disappointing. It can lead to bad design. But it offers a useful lesson on how designers think about democratization of our craft.”
In Twitter Fight With Critic, Mark-Anthony Turnage Says He Will Compose No More Operas
“Don’t worry Hugh. There will be no further operas by me that you will ever have to sit through again. I’m done with the genre. Going to leave it my more talented contemporaries and younger colleagues.”