AJ Four Ways: Text Only (by date) | headlines only
DANCE
IDEAS
- Thieves Cart Off 330-Pound Book Cover By Salvador Dalí
The large bronze plate, inlaid with precious stones and seashells, was taken from the Centre d’art contemporain in Issoire in south-central France. The piece is the cover of the Livre de l’Apocalypse, a joint project of 14 painters and writers including Dalí, Cocteau, and Cioran, calligraphed and illuminated on parchment. – The Telegraph (UK) (Yahoo!)
- London’s V&A Museum Plans Staff Buyouts
The Victoria and Albert Museum is “planning to launch a voluntary exit scheme … open to staff across the museum. … (The plan) does not reveal how many employees will apply or be accepted. No savings target, opening date, closing date, departmental allocation, or exit terms have been published.” – Art in Context
- Eva Marie Saint, Star Of “On The Waterfront” And “North By Northwest,” Has Died At 102
“A multifaceted actress, Ms. Saint combined the luminous dazzle of a fashion model with the subtle and textured depths of a seasoned dramatic performer. She drew the admiration of some of the biggest directors of the 1950s and 1960s, including Alfred Hitchcock, Elia Kazan, John Frankenheimer and Otto Preminger.” – The Washington Post (MSN)
- Film Composer And Five-Time Oscar Nominee George Fenton Is Dead At 76
“Often in repeated partnerships with directors such as Stephen Frears, Ken Loach, Nora Ephron, Richard Attenborough, Nicholas Hytner and Neil Jordan, Fenton amassed a large and remarkable body of work that stretched across more than 100 feature films, plus documentary, theatre, TV news and more.” – The Guardian
- “The Menace of Mechanical Music” – and of Digitization and Screens
John Philip SousaFollowing up on my chat with Aaron Cohen for “Arts Fuse,” I offer some further thoughts
ISSUES
- Thieves Cart Off 330-Pound Book Cover By Salvador Dalí
The large bronze plate, inlaid with precious stones and seashells, was taken from the Centre d’art contemporain in Issoire in south-central France. The piece is the cover of the Livre de l’Apocalypse, a joint project of 14 painters and writers including Dalí, Cocteau, and Cioran, calligraphed and illuminated on parchment. – The Telegraph (UK) (Yahoo!)
- London’s V&A Museum Plans Staff Buyouts
The Victoria and Albert Museum is “planning to launch a voluntary exit scheme … open to staff across the museum. … (The plan) does not reveal how many employees will apply or be accepted. No savings target, opening date, closing date, departmental allocation, or exit terms have been published.” – Art in Context
- Bilbao Fine Arts Gets A High Profile Expansion
The striking, €45m project in which Foster + Partners has worked with the eminent Basque architect Luis María Uriarte, has been described as a “floating pavilion” and will double the current exhibition space in the museum, to around 6,000 sq. m, and will also remodel 8,000 sq. m of existing galleries. – The Art Newspaper
- Cleaning Up Our Conservation Harms
Conservators face a particular challenge: how to ensure that preserving the past does not compromise the future. – The Art Newspaper
- Explain This Trend: Building New Stately English Mansions That Look Like They’ve Been There Forever
Featuring elegant proportions, hand-carved cornicing, expansive stone doorsteps and porches, and with a flourish of columns, this house and others like it have all been built in recent years – but without a backstory of beheaded queens or servant entourages. Welcome to the world of houses built to look like they’ve always been there. – BBC (MSN)
MEDIA
- What The Kennedy Center Was And Why It Closed
“I was a vice president at that arts center in Washington, and I can tell you that maintenance is almost certainly not why it closed its doors last month.” – Los Angeles Times (Yahoo)
- City Of New York Doubles Its Grants To Individual Artists
“Rising from $5,000 to up to $10,000, the increase … represents the first change in this funding stream in some 20 years. The funding comes from the Department of Cultural Affairs and is distributed to each borough’s arts councils, which act as regrant partners and dole out grants to individual artists annually.” – ARTnews
- Plans Revealed For $250 Million Arts District In Historically Black Neighborhood In Chicago
The Bronzeville Legacy Collective says it has already raised $75 million toward its goal: a campus with museums dedicated to the gospel music, blues legend Muddy Waters, and Emmett Till; a center for Black dance; a theater with a resident company; a recreational trail; and an arts and culture center. – WBEZ (Chicago)
- If You Can’t Hold It, You Don’t Own It
Physical media are really making a comeback in the era of streaming services removing series and movies at (seemingly) random, book censorship, and AI music. – The Guardian (UK)
- Authoritarian Politics Are Threatening Culture Worldwide
In addition to established understandings of intrinsic esthetic and historic values of heritage, new emphasis on development reconceptualizes heritage as a resource that can generate economic development, tourism, employment and social cohesion. – The Conversation
MUSIC
- Audible Introduces Interactive Features To Its Audiobooks
“On Thursday, the Amazon-owned company introduced three new features that will allow listeners to explore a book’s characters, engage in interactive stories, and view additional imagery and bonus information about landmarks or places mentioned in the book.” Unfortunately, for now this all is available with only one title. – TechCrunch
- Is The Reason The Voynich Manuscript Is So Confounding Because The Pages Are Out Of Order?
“In … peer-reviewed journal Digital Medievalist, (two researchers) argue that the manuscript’s folded sheets may have originally been piled on top of each other as ‘singulions’ – like a stack of Christmas cards – but were mis-bound in a more typical ‘nested’ arrangement at some point in the mid-to-late 15th century.” – The Guardian
- Will We Still Need Punctuation When Machines Are Writing?
What are those commas doing there, anyway? By modern usage, they should mark off a non-restrictive clause, but they don’t. Nor are they marking items in a series or natural pauses in speech. – The New Yorker
- The NFL Is Trying To Woo New Fans With Its Own Romance Writing
That is … not going well (though romance readers are still gaga for M/M, W/W, and M/W hockey tales from more traditional channels). Fans “see the stories as cheap pandering that fails to engage with female and LGBTQ hockey fans’ concerns about homophobia and toxic masculinity in the sport.” – Wired
- What, Exactly, Is Literary Substack?
As Substack has become a more respectable platform and mainstream academics have begun to join in some numbers, they have encountered a strange simulacrum of fields they thought they knew intimately. Cultural and symbolic capital seem to work differently here. – Paroxysms
PEOPLE
- Thieves Cart Off 330-Pound Book Cover By Salvador Dalí
The large bronze plate, inlaid with precious stones and seashells, was taken from the Centre d’art contemporain in Issoire in south-central France. The piece is the cover of the Livre de l’Apocalypse, a joint project of 14 painters and writers including Dalí, Cocteau, and Cioran, calligraphed and illuminated on parchment. – The Telegraph (UK) (Yahoo!)
- London’s V&A Museum Plans Staff Buyouts
The Victoria and Albert Museum is “planning to launch a voluntary exit scheme … open to staff across the museum. … (The plan) does not reveal how many employees will apply or be accepted. No savings target, opening date, closing date, departmental allocation, or exit terms have been published.” – Art in Context
- Eva Marie Saint, Star Of “On The Waterfront” And “North By Northwest,” Has Died At 102
“A multifaceted actress, Ms. Saint combined the luminous dazzle of a fashion model with the subtle and textured depths of a seasoned dramatic performer. She drew the admiration of some of the biggest directors of the 1950s and 1960s, including Alfred Hitchcock, Elia Kazan, John Frankenheimer and Otto Preminger.” – The Washington Post (MSN)
- Film Composer And Five-Time Oscar Nominee George Fenton Is Dead At 76
“Often in repeated partnerships with directors such as Stephen Frears, Ken Loach, Nora Ephron, Richard Attenborough, Nicholas Hytner and Neil Jordan, Fenton amassed a large and remarkable body of work that stretched across more than 100 feature films, plus documentary, theatre, TV news and more.” – The Guardian
- “The Menace of Mechanical Music” – and of Digitization and ScreensJohn Philip Sousa
Following up on my chat with Aaron Cohen for “Arts Fuse,” I offer some further thoughts
PEOPLE
- Thieves Cart Off 330-Pound Book Cover By Salvador Dalí
The large bronze plate, inlaid with precious stones and seashells, was taken from the Centre d’art contemporain in Issoire in south-central France. The piece is the cover of the Livre de l’Apocalypse, a joint project of 14 painters and writers including Dalí, Cocteau, and Cioran, calligraphed and illuminated on parchment. – The Telegraph (UK) (Yahoo!)
- London’s V&A Museum Plans Staff Buyouts
The Victoria and Albert Museum is “planning to launch a voluntary exit scheme … open to staff across the museum. … (The plan) does not reveal how many employees will apply or be accepted. No savings target, opening date, closing date, departmental allocation, or exit terms have been published.” – Art in Context
- Eva Marie Saint, Star Of “On The Waterfront” And “North By Northwest,” Has Died At 102
“A multifaceted actress, Ms. Saint combined the luminous dazzle of a fashion model with the subtle and textured depths of a seasoned dramatic performer. She drew the admiration of some of the biggest directors of the 1950s and 1960s, including Alfred Hitchcock, Elia Kazan, John Frankenheimer and Otto Preminger.” – The Washington Post (MSN)
- Film Composer And Five-Time Oscar Nominee George Fenton Is Dead At 76
“Often in repeated partnerships with directors such as Stephen Frears, Ken Loach, Nora Ephron, Richard Attenborough, Nicholas Hytner and Neil Jordan, Fenton amassed a large and remarkable body of work that stretched across more than 100 feature films, plus documentary, theatre, TV news and more.” – The Guardian
- “The Menace of Mechanical Music” – and of Digitization and ScreensJohn Philip Sousa
Following up on my chat with Aaron Cohen for “Arts Fuse,” I offer some further thoughts
THEATRE
VISUAL
- Our Billionaire Problem
Where billionaires in the past operated in the physical world, ushered in societal change as a byproduct of their innovation, and used their sizable largesses to try uplifting lives, today’s billionaires stretch the limits of technological reality (and law) with sheer glee, with a meagre spirit of altruism. – The Walrus
- The World Of Science Is Being Overwhelmed By New Studies
In 2025, academics worldwide published about 7 million scholarly articles – that’s more than 19,000 each day. On the surface, that might seem like a number to celebrate, but it also poses a problem. As the volume of research balloons, it can be hard to discern what these millions of papers actually tell us. – Aeon
- The Dazzling Physical Afterlife Of The Ancient Pharaohs
Of all the priorities that governed ancient-Egyptian life, perhaps the hardest for us to fathom is the expenditure on the afterlife, not merely as a place of immaterial spiritual reward, but as a world of material goods. – The Atlantic
- The People Who Resist New Technology
Call them legacy users, or upgrade holdouts. They’ve clung to iPhones with home buttons, Bush-era computers, and headphones older than some tech CEOs, even when doing so impedes their ability to complete everyday tasks like emailing or navigation. – The Atlantic
- Why More Adults Are Playing With Kids Toys
“People just stay very playful for a longer period of time. And it’s cross-brand. You know, it might be Teddy bears. It might be Lego bricks. It might be Transformers. It might be Barbie dolls.” – The New Yorker