“The concept is simple: after curators argue for their proposed acquisitions, collectors, who have ponied up money to participate in the event, vote on what to buy with the pooled funds. Since it began in 1986 the event has raised a total of $16 million for the purchase of 157 works, now valued by the museum at $75 million.”
Tag: 05.10.09
The Research Says: Happy Music Makes People Happy
“Results showed that happy music ‘significantly enhanced the perceived happiness of a face.’ Further studies of the volunteers’ brain waves revealed that the effect of the music was almost instantaneous. It took just 50 milliseconds for changes to take place – too fast to be under our conscious control.”
US Military: We’ll Prove Human Brain Is Just “Parts And Energy”
The idea behind Darpa’s latest venture, called “Physical Intelligence” (PI) is to prove, mathematically, that the human mind is nothing more than parts and energy. In other words, all brain activities — reasoning, emoting, processing sights and smells — derive from physical mechanisms at work, acting according to the principles of “thermodynamics in open systems.”
The Answer Machine (The Search Engine We’ve Been Waiting For?)
“The product of four years of development, Wolfram Alpha is an engine for answers. Its ambition is to delve into “all the knowledge in the world,” Wolfram says, to find and calculate information. Though Alpha’s interface evokes Google ― whose co-founder Sergey Brin once spent a summer interning for Wolfram ― it’s more like the anti-Google.”
The Emerging New Lincoln Center
Though there’s much to be done and some major design decisions still to be dealt with, “all around the campus are signs that the overhaul of Lincoln Center, the country’s largest performing arts center, is in the home stretch.”
The Broken Promise Of 9/11’s Ground Zero Designs
“But even for those of us who had given up on the idea that anything good would ever emerge from ground zero, the unveiling of an elaborate new model of the revised design on Saturday at the Queen SofÃa Spanish Institute was heart wrenching.”
Frank Gehry On Life Before Fame
“Architects in New York . . . were kind of attracted to me as long as I was subordinate to them. As soon as I came out with work that got attention, there was kind of a backlash from them. . . . They think I’m an ‘aw shucks’ guy and then I turn out to be every bit as ambitious as they are.”
The Lessons From 50 Years Of Lincoln Center
“If a sprawling performing-arts complex like Lincoln Center were proposed today, it would never be built. Some of the impediments would be practical: the daunting costs, the lack of political consensus, the shift in attitudes toward large-scale urban development projects that displace entire neighborhoods. But the larger question is whether such a complex should be built in the first place.”
Dance – For Art And Profit
“Since 1981 Momix, one of just a handful of for-profit dance companies, has sought out commercial work — from presentations at corporate gatherings for Fiat, BMW and MAC cosmetics to a television advertisement for Hanes underwear — to bolster its bottom line.”
The First Cree Opera
“Pimooteewin is the first opera written in Cree. Tomson Highway, one of Canada’s best-known native writers, took the traditional tale of Weesageechak (the trickster spirit) and turned it into the libretto for an opera set to the music of Montreal-based composer Melissa Hui.”