“The real problem is much bigger than Rotten Tomatoes—it’s that so much of Hollywood is now fixated on capturing the widest audience possible with every film. Blockbuster action movies, superhero franchises, jolty horror pictures, and animated family films that can draw large crowds are the order of the day. Even mother!, which was light on actual scares but heavy on mood and allegory, was marketed as a horror movie in an attempt to pull viewers; theatergoers who felt misled by the advertising may have contributed to the F CinemaScore rating.”
Tag: 10.17.17
The Ways We Abuse Art Are Terrible. There Are Plenty Of Culprits To Blame
Why make art when buyers treat works as an alternative currency, hiding them away like bullion bars in storage facilities? Can anything be done about questionable corporations and oppressive regimes using contemporary art to generate a spot of positive PR for themselves? And what links can be made between fuzzy surveillance images and abstract art?
Chicago Launches A Citywide Dance Festival
“This weekend, Chicago dance artists and venues are opening their doors and inviting the public to stages all over the city to witness excerpts, works-in-progress and studio processes from our rich community of independent artists and small to midsize dance companies. Called Elevate Chicago Dance, the Chicago Dancemakers Forum (CDF) is the presenter of the multiday, multivenue, mostly free festival aimed at highlighting Chicago dance and increasing the visibility of established dance artists across a range of genres and disciplines.”
Will We Ever Get To The Point Where We Interact With Machines As We Do With Humans?
“Today, the technical ability to produce a robot that truly looks and moves and speaks like a human remains well beyond our reach. Even further beyond our grasp is the capacity to imbue such a machine with humanness—that ineffable presence the Japanese call sonzai-kan. Because to re-create human presence we need to know more about ourselves than we do—about the accumulation of cues and micromovements that trigger our empathy, put us at ease, and earn our trust. Someday we may crack the problem of creating artificial general intelligence—a machine brain that can intuitively perform any human intellectual task—but why would we choose to interact with it?”
Modern Movie Cowboys Are Redefining Mythology Of The Old West
“A last gasp of the old west duly became the first movie western. But from there, the task quickly became mythmaking. The western turned inexorably towards the past – or a version of it. Soon came the movies that defined the genre, tales of heroes in stetsons and dastardly “injuns” somewhere between propaganda and mass hypnosis. The west had to be won, most westerns said, to save innocence from savagery. There were exceptions, and some of those were fantastic films – but the racism stuck. Eventually, there was a reckoning – an apology even.”
Netflix Won’t Say How Many People Watch Its Shows. So Nielsen Figured Out How To Count Them
“Nielsen announced the initiative on Wednesday morning, but it has been collecting Netflix viewership data over the last two months in a kind of test run. The company said it was able to determine how many viewers were streaming Netflix content through audio recognition software in the 44,000 Nielsen-rated homes across the United States.”
Google Says Its AI Machines Are Now Better At Design Than Its Human Engineers
Google has announced that AutoML has beaten the human AI engineers at their own game by building machine-learning software that’s more efficient and powerful than the best human-designed systems.
Vann Molyvann, Cambodia’s Great Modern Architect, Dead At 90
“In the 1960s he transformed Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, from a colonial backwater into one of the most beautiful and innovative of south-east Asian cities. Drawing inspiration from the ancient bas-reliefs and designs of the Angkor Wat temple complex, Vann’s style, which came to be known as New Khmer architecture, blended Khmer tradition with the modernist principles he had mastered during studies in Paris.”
‘He Mistrusted The Cosy, The Mimsy In Ballet’ – Clement Crisp Salutes Kenneth Macmillan
25 years ago this month, the choreographer suffered a fatal heart attack backstage at the Royal Opera House during a performance of his ballet Mayerling. Crisp, who was there, remembers the fateful evening and pays tribute to MacMillan’s “fascination with the psyche rather than the fouetté … [his] interest in movement’s capacity to convey psychological complexity.”
The Strange Capital That Starchitects Built For A Dictator
As part of “Secret Stans”, a series about the cities of the little-known former Soviet republics of Central Asia, Oliver Wainwright visits Astana, Kazakhstan, where president-for-life Nursultan Nazarbayev brought in the likes of Norman Foster and Santiago Calatrava to create a futuristic capital city from scratch.