Why do the rich and powerful pay for this to happen? Do they not know that they are sponsoring people who are critical of the very structures and processes that enable their own wealth and power? Why help artists, writers, filmmakers gain new audiences? Why give them prizes? –Scroll (India)
Tag: 11.20.20
What Scientists Learned From Analyzing 24,000 Chess Matches
Over the last century or so, chess players, the study shows, have been getting better as well as younger. This parallels the so-called Flynn effect in intelligence, or a notable rise in raw cognitive scores. “Performance increased steadily over the course of the twentieth century,” the researchers write, “but the data also reveal a steepening of the performance increase during the 1990s.” – Nautilus
A Grand Unifying Theory Of Culture?… (Meh)
“In the same way that Darwin’s theory explains how life follows pathways of adaptation via natural selection, cultural evolution proposes that human cultures develop and transmit deep understandings and values across generations. There are many pathways of cultural evolution, Henrich contends, and no single human culture. To better understand the world and Europe’s influence on it, we need to recognise that European culture is, in Henrich’s key acronym, “weird”: western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic.” – The Guardian
Houston Grand Opera Managing Director To Depart; Company To Reorganize Leadership
Currently HGO is overseen by artistic and musical director Patrick Summers and Perryn Leech as managing director, with both reporting to the board of directors. The company’s new leadership structure will result in a new general director who will serve as a single point of leadership, to whom Summers will report as HGO’s artistic and musical director. – Opera News
My Grandpa Was Part Of The Nazi Language Police
Martin Puchner, Harvard comp lit professor and editor of The Norton Anthology of World Literature, writes about Rotwelsch — an amalgam of colloquial German, Yiddish, and Romani spoken for centuries by itinerant people in Central Europe and incomprehensible to outsiders — and about how he discovered that his grandfather, a historian named Karl Puchner, had worked with the Nazi regime to suppress Rotwelsch and keep the German language pure. – Literary Hub
Is This The Dream Sheet Music App We’ve Been Waiting For?
“Artificial intelligence experts working with musicologists at a Berlin startup have spent years gathering hundreds of thousands of published scores and creating digital editions of each of them. The Enote app will give musicians the chance to interact with sheet music by instantly transposing it, switching between movements or measures, turning pages, changing the size of scores, and printing them on the go.” – The Guardian
Fred Hills, Legendary Editor At McGraw Hill And Simon & Schuster, Dead At 85
“During his four decades in publishing, Mr. Hills brought to market both commercial hits and literary prizewinners and edited more than 50 New York Times best sellers. His stable of authors encompassed an eclectic assortment from multiple genres — Heinrich Böll and Jane Fonda, Justin Kaplan and William Saroyan, Raymond Carver and James MacGregor Burns, Sumner Redstone and Joan Kennedy, Phil Donahue and David Halberstam.” – The New York Times
Why I Steal From Museums: Mwazulu Diyabanza Makes His Case
“These artefacts belong to me, because I am African and Congolese. But also because I am a descendant of Ntumba Mvemba, one of the royal families that founded the Kingdom of Kongo in 1390. … People have to understand that if someone stole their heritage they would react as I am now. Many of my ancestors died protecting these items: they were beheaded. … Their pain is inside me.” – The Guardian
The Remarkable Life Of The Notorious Art Thief
The privilege and social rank that Bridget Rose Dugdale repudiated gave her the trained intellect and discerning eye that made her the most notorious (and nearly the only) female art thief in history. – Washington Post
Relax and enjoy the show
Though we would all rather have the option of being able to gather together to see performances and exhibitions, there are real benefits of the relaxed atmosphere of watching from home, the power of which should not be underestimated. Here are a few tangible ways that our current mode of arts participation makes for a satisfying arts experience. – Hannah Grannemann