Peter Schjeldahl: “The renovation is a big deal for the global art world, and certainly for New York. It runs up against problems old and new. Generously enlarged quarters will only marginally relieve a chronic crush of visitors, the museum victimized by its own charisma. Enhanced representations of art by women, African-Americans, Africans, Latin-Americans, and Asians can feel tentative, pitched between self-evident justice and noblesse oblige. But such efforts are important and must continue. We will have a diverse cosmopolitan culture or none worth bothering about.” – The New Yorker
Tag: 10.14.19
Boris Johnson’s Government Proposes £250 Million In Culture Infrastructure Support
The bulk of the new fund is being directed towards “major infrastructure and maintenance work at local and regional museums” and capital and technology upgrades at public libraries. – Arts Professional
Streaming Wars: Challenging The Binge-TV Model
“Having had roughly six years to figure out how to best attract TV viewers trained to feast on content, none of the streaming services set to debut between now and next spring will be exclusively adopting the binge model, and veterans like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu have tried different release strategies themselves.” – Los Angeles Times
Books that made me
Clive James recently filled out the Guardian’s “Books That Made Me” questionnaire. I was so struck by his answers — as well as the questions themselves — that I decided to play along. – Terry Teachout
Why Theatre In Los Angeles Is Missing Its Potential
Charles McNulty: “What is the distinctive stamp of L.A. theater? In posing this question to myself, I find my answer to be dismayingly similar to what I would have said when I moved to Los Angeles from New York 14 years ago to be The Times’ theater critic. The theater has remained decentralized, widely variable in quality and ambition, and sorely in need of institutional leadership able to meet the self-regard of a city that, long out of New York’s shadow, has come to recognize itself as a global metropolis.” – Los Angeles Times
“Fortnite” Season Ten Ends In Destruction: Video Games (And Storytelling) Will Never Be The Same Again
In the game’s final moments on Sunday evening, a giant explosion took place, sucking the world into a black vortex, leaving players stunned and confused. Brilliantly, Epic took the explosion out of the “fiction” of the game, so that the menu pages and user interface were also pulled into the black hole. – The Guardian
A Crash Course In Hitler Satire
Taika Waititi’s new movie Jojo Rabbit is far from the first movie to satirize the genocidal leader. But many people object to the movie on pure concept. “Is it right to make comedy of a man who did such transcendently horrible things?” – Slate
A.I. Software Is Learning To Write Prose — Could It Get Good Enough To Write A ‘New Yorker’ Piece?
John Seabrook does a deep dive into how artificial intelligence programs learn the rules of English grammar and syntax and teach themselves how to predict what you, at the keyboard, might write next — and even, eventually, to write the way you do. Then he and a computer scientist feed a program the entire New Yorker nonfiction archive as a dataset to learn from, and they ask it to try, based on the opening, to complete a real New Yorker article. – The New Yorker