Media

Seriously Funny aims to contextualize recently acquired French lithographs within the larger comedic graphic tradition in Europe and America by installing them alongside prints, drawings, paintings, and sculpture from the 16th to the 21st century. With its jocularity often mistaken for triviality, caricature has long been misunderstood as inferior to artworks created in the classical Grand Manner, the large and imposing academic easel paintings that artists were trained to emulate. more »

“We’ve created an exhibition from our collection; incorporated a traveling show; and commissioned a contemporary artist to respond to images and events from our community.” The result is a strikingly nuanced exhibition trio with programming which offers ideas for specific local social action, opportunities for an in-depth look the artistic styles represented, and multiple vehicles through which residents can share their stories and recollections. “Our community has been eager to engage in these healing conversations about our challenging past,” says Sam Sweet, Executive Director and CEO, “The Delaware Art Museum is thrilled that this exhibitions-in the works since 2016-have been the catalyst for meaningful dialogue and civic action as Delaware remembers Wilmington 1968.” more »

Some Retraction Watch Items: A star may not be quite as bright, but an astronomer deserves a gold star for retracting his findings within 24 hours of posting them and thanking those that helped him find the error. A study “asked whether the top scientific journals, Nature and Science, represented men and women equally as authors, subjects, and objects in photographs. Overwhelmingly, women were underrepresented in these magazines, an effect that was apparent even in advertisements and stock photographs.” “A scientific paper can mislead,” says Andrew Gelman. “People can read a paper, or see later popularizations of the work, and think that ‘science shows’ something that science didn’t show.” more »

"A 2017 study in the Journal of Economic Perspectives examined the consumption of false news in the US during the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election. In a survey of 1,208 U.S. adults, 15 percent said they remembered seeing false news stories, and 8 percent acknowledged seeing one of these stories and believing it. The study’s authors — Hunt Allcott, an associate economics professor at New York University, and Matthew Gentzkow, an economics professor at Stanford University — estimated that US adults, on average, 'read and remembered on the order of one or perhaps several fake news articles during the election period.'" more »