“If art and culture are to matter to more people, they must provide them with value. Much audience development work, however, seeks to provide people not with value but with values, because the ideological basis of audience development is the democratisation of culture.”
Tag: 04.11.16
How Did The Ancients Make Bronze Casts Of Marble Statues? This Animation Will Show You
“Lost-wax casting, a sculpting technique dating to the Chalcolithic period, is an elaborate process. Its many steps include spruing, slurrying, burnout, and metal chasing – terms lost on your average sculpture 101 student. Why go to all the trouble? The process allows for the creation of exact, hollow (and therefore lightweight) metal copies of existing marble sculptures, which weigh a ton and are otherwise difficult to reproduce.”
Is This The World’s Oddest YouTube Star?
“Two years after ‘Eye to Eye’ baffled the country by giving birth to a huge cult following, the Pakistani singer Taher Shah returned this weekend with a second music video, ‘Angel,’ that has gone viral. … For most of the new video, Shah walks around a golf course wearing a tiara and a purple gown (bathrobe?), showing off his chest hair.”
Our Biggest Blind Spot With Artificial Intelligence? Assuming It’ll Be Like The Human Kind
“The entire discourse around A.I. implicitly presupposes the superiority of E.I.” – evolved intelligence, i.e., the human and animal kind. “Much of the dystopian hysteria around A.I. reflects the fear that it will act as humans act (which is to say violently, selfishly, emotionally, and at times irrationally) – only it will have more capacity. In essence, much of what we fear is a much more competent E.I.”
The Case For Not Repairing Palmyra
“How can these terrible losses be put right? That seems to be the question archaeologists are asking. It seems to be what the world expects. Yet it may be the wrong approach. Restoration is a delicate art, and the responsible preservation of antiquities has to mean accepting the finality of loss where rebuilding might be deceitful.”
Unknown John Cage Piece Turns Up In The Middle Of Another Composer’s Score
All Sides of the Small Stone, for Erik Satie and (Secretly Given to Jim Tenney as a Koan) lay undiscovered for 38 years; Cage evidently slipped it into the pages of a work by his former student.
A Writer Caught Between Two Languages She Can’t Hear And One She Can’t Write
Sara Nović: “Then there is my deafness, another kink in the mother tongue. Because of it, English, Croatian, or any spoken language can never truly be mine. … In American Sign Language, I am at home. Or at least, I’m at ease there – I see my reflection, and I can understand others without having to guess. … What does it mean to be a writer whose language negates the possibility of the written word?”
Calatrava To Design New ‘World’s Tallest Building’ In Dubai
The new structure doesn’t have an official planned height yet, but the developer says it will be “a notch taller” than the nearby Burj Khalifa, currently the world’s tallest skyscraper. Both Calatrava and the developer say that the building will be as iconic for Dubai as the Eiffel Tower is for Paris.
It’s Happening: Barbra Streisand Will Be Playing Mama Rose On Screen
“STX Entertainment is in advanced negotiations to make Gypsy with the Grammy and Oscar winner taking the lead role, and Oscar winner Barry Levinson (Rain Man) directing.”
‘Civilization Stylishly Blowing Itself To Pieces’ – Alex Ross On Stéphane Mallarmé
“Upon his death, in 1898, he left behind a body of work so inscrutable that it still causes literature students to fall to their knees in despair” – not least because it’s written in sonnets and alexandrines. “It is, however, precisely this tension between traditional form and radical content that keeps reactivating the shock of his writing.”