That a lot of visitors make a beeline through art museum galleries has long been a bugaboo for curators and directors—“studies of museum visitors have shown that people look at artworks very quickly, spending maybe five seconds or less per painting,” Brent Benjamin, director of the Saint Louis Art Museum told Observer. But despite this desire on the part of arts professionals, slowing visitors down in front of individual objects has not been the primary goal at most institutions of late—though they certainly want to get people in, and get them to stay.
Tag: 07.29.18
Publishing Revolution? More Brainy Books Are Finding Sales Success
We are turning away from glitzy but disposable stories of fame and excess and towards more serious, thoughtful, quiet books that help us understand our place in the world. Analysts at the Bookseller parsed data from Nielsen BookScan, and saw over the past five years a dramatic rise in the sales of “long-tail” nonfiction titles, often works on politics, economics, history or medicine that attempted to synthesise or challenge received thinking on the subject.
Translation Matters
History is littered with more consequential mistranslations — erroneous, intentional or simply misunderstood. For a job that often involves endless hours poring over books or laptop screens, translation can prove surprisingly hazardous.
ACT UP Protests Whitney’s David Wojnarowicz Show (It’s 1990 Again)
“On Friday evening, the New York chapter of AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, more commonly known by its acronym, ACT UP, staged a protest-cum-performance at the Whitney Museum, alleging that the Manhattan institution’s current career retrospective of the late artist and writer David Wojnarowicz fails to connect his legacy of rageful AIDS activism to the ongoing battle against the epidemic.”
Here’s The Latest Art Being Created By Artificial Intelligence
Professor Ahmed Elgammal, of the Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., has spent five years teaching his artificial intelligence program to create original artwork. Elgammal fed the software 80,000 pieces of art from the last 500 years. After pressing the Enter key, the software creates new, original works.
Twitter Is Making Us All Comedians
As a child, when I heard jokes and watched sitcoms, I considered comedy to be a wonderful, ineffable mystery — like sex, or the Trinity. But the joke formats and memes of social media are training wheels, template-izing comedy for beginners. It’s impossible to look through the microscope at the comedy petri dish all day and not start to pick up on its rhythms and mechanics. For better or for worse, we’re all becoming comedy writers now, in a writer’s room the size of a planet.
Oh, So This Is How Netflix Makes Its Decisions (Or Some Of Them, Or So We Think)
The streaming platform uses “taste communities” – “broadly defined groups of subscribers who gravitate toward the same shows … Viewers in the same taste community may live on different continents, but they enjoy the same kinds of TV shows and movies” – to figure out how to drive new programming.
Watching Musical Theatre From The Orchestra Pit Can Be Illuminating
Take the touring company of An American in Paris: “In between big song-and-dance numbers like ‘Fidgety Feet,’ ‘But Not for Me’ and ‘I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise,’ the musicians checked their phones, perused a paperback or prepped their instruments until their next cue to play. As the show moved toward its finale, I appreciated that if I was going to spend the evening perched in proximity to a piano, I couldn’t ask for anything more than for the pianist to be playing Gershwin.”
‘Brainy’ Books Are All The Rage In Nonfiction Suddenly, And Here’s Why
Basically, blame our ‘interesting’ times: “We’re living in a world that suddenly seems less certain than it did even two years ago, and the natural reaction is for people to try and find out as much about it as possible. … People have a hunger both for information and facts, and for nuanced exploration of issues, of a sort that books are in a prime position to provide.”
Accused Concertmaster Resigns From Professor Post At Cleveland Institute Of Music
William Preucil, who was suspended by the Cleveland Orchestra (where he was concertmaster) after an investigative story about sexual assault in the classical music world came out in the Washington Post, has resigned as Distinguished Professor of Violin at CIM. “In a letter to the school’s students, faculty, and trustees on Saturday, [CIM President Paul W.] Hogle announced that Preucil had tendered his resignation effective immediately.”