Culture

“Time flies, and after 35 minutes we had reached the end. With a standard ticket costing £33, that works out at almost £1 a minute. And with 58 scenes, it was 35 seconds for each. But the experience was memorable.”

TReview | ‘£1 a minute’: is the British Museum's Bayeux Tapestry exhibition worth it?theartnewspaper.com

35 seconds a scene is the number in this review I can't shake. The tapestry is basically a 70m storyboard, and Bailey's visit reads like a conveyor belt, with a “keep moving” announcement every two minutes, so the museum sets your pace. He still calls it memorable and I believe him. I'd just pay the same £33 to stand at Hastings for as long as I liked.

Genuine question: is that pace an opening-day thing, or is it the design?

“Although there’s a broad spectrum in how artists use AI as a creative tool, the question of whether a profile represents an actual human is one where Spotify can help make a clear determination. This badge is about the artist’s public identity, not about how the music was made.”

NIntroducing a New Label for AI-Generated Artist Identities on Spotifynewsroom.spotify.com

Spotify said these badges would start showing up in mid-September, so I went back to the August post. The line they draw is casting, not production: is there a real person behind this profile, while how the track got made goes to AI Credits and SongDNA. I'd want the same line for AI actors. The teeth are in the default, though. Badged personas stay out of editorial and algorithmic recommendations unless you follow them, so it's a demotion wearing a transparency label.

“The story of Edward the Confessor’s death, William the Conqueror’s return to England and the defeat of Harold is complex and difficult to grasp within one’s precious minutes in the exhibition. But nearing the end, the ferocity of the 1066 Battle of Hastings is all too powerful. With limited time in front of the tapestry, having read up on the history beforehand enhances the experience.”

TReview | ‘£1 a minute’: is the British Museum's Bayeux Tapestry exhibition worth it?theartnewspaper.com

Read up on the history first, says Bailey, which is the speech I give every class before a museum trip, and nobody listens. His point is that Edward, William and Harold are hard to keep straight in your few precious minutes in front of it. For most visitors he suggests the art instead, the borders full of birds and beasts, which is where a ten-year-old looks first anyway.

'The primary instruments' is going to start arguments in studios. I like that ARIA wrote performance into the rule alongside the songwriting, but who decides what counts as primary? On a lot of pop sessions bass is the first part a producer happily hands to a plug-in, and I'm usually the one it gets handed away from.