AJ Four Ways:
Text Only (by date) | headlines only
- Ireland’s Artist Basic Income May Not Account For Artists With Disabilities
“Ó Ceallacháin says many artists with disabilities feel as though they need to “]exist between ‘professional enough’ to be a ‘real’ artist for the Department of Culture and ‘disabled enough’ to receive support from the Department of Social Protection.” – Irish Times
- The Next Director Of The Tate Has To Confront An Unwieldy ‘Beast’ Of An Institution
“Visitor numbers have indeed recovered after falling from their peak in 2019, but finances were hit hard during the pandemic. Those financial headwinds have led to multiple rounds of redundancies, restructures and several ‘culture war’ battles.” – The Guardian (UK)
- A Cultural Critic Admits They Were Very Wrong About A 2010s Flashpoint
“There was something very intentional to Girls, something that spoke to me. I could’ve connected with it. Instead, I rejected it dramatically. I wasn’t the only one.” – Slate
- The Writers Guild Gives Its New Contract A Green Light
The contract, which is oddly long but helps shore up health care, earned the approval of more than 90 percent of the members who voted. – The Hollywood Reporter
- In Lawsuit Over Unlicensed Robert Indiana Art, Indiana’s Former Business Partner Is Awarded One Hundred Million Dollars
“The wide-ranging battle over control of the Indiana legacy — which included accusations of forgery, unpaid royalties, elder abuse and copyright infringement — clouded the market for the artist’s work.” – The New York Times
- It’s Been A Century Since The Term ‘Scientifiction’ Was Coined
That was for Amazing Stories, a magazine that published Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and other stories driven both by ideas and some possibly limited characters (who could, however, fill science books with their thoughts). – NPR
- Every Single Fictional Pop Star Feels So Phony
Not to go all Holden Caulfield, but honesty, the fakery – it burns. Yes, including Mother Mary. – Variety
- As Indie Bookstore Day Gives Stores A Boost, They Talk About Battling Amazon
“There are about 70% more bookstores now than there were six years ago in the United States. After 20 years of declining numbers, they’re coming roaring back.” – Fast Company
- You Might Have Associated Michael Tilson Thomas With San Francisco, But He Was Actually The Embodiment Of Los Angelesa
Mark Swed: “MTT made music matter by making hope matter. He was, moreover, one of us. He achieved greatness though an epic amplification of a uniquely L.A. positivity in which grumpy became wistful.” – Los Angeles Times (Yahoo)
- The Deep, Inescapable Unease Of The New Michael Jackson Biopic
And ‘unease’ is too kind a way to put it: “Everything left unsaid still lingers between the lines, sandwiched between the formidable melodies of his greatest hits, like toxic ooze leaking out from the middle of two slices of Wonderbread.” – Salon
- But Opera Will Die If We Can’t Wrest It Back From Big Tech
“There is something in the embodied expression of a trained singer, on stage, in a room with other human beings, that no synthetic content can touch. But in an age when AI generates infinite aesthetic stuff at effectively zero cost, ‘irreplaceable’ needs to be made explicit.” – Opera America
- The Death Of Opera Has Been Greatly Exaggerated
“Opera has had to adapt to survive, and the truth is it has done so successfully.” – New York Sun
- The Deep, Strange Comfort Of A Rewatch
“Familiar things require less from us; they deliver the emotional payoff we expect. But repetition is also a way of revisiting earlier versions of ourselves.” – The Atlantic
- News Publishers Are Trying To Prevent AI Scraping, But They’re Killing A Valuable History Service
Talk about the baby and the bathwater: “History needs stewards. The people of the Internet Archive do an outstanding job of preserving irreplaceable work and making it available to journalists and researchers.” – Nieman Lab
- Think Shakespeare Isn’t For You?
Well, says the first Director’s Resident of Washington, D.C.’s huge Folger Shakespeare Library, you might need to look a little deeper. – NPR
- AJ Chronicles: Perils of Philanthropy — The Metropolitan Opera
We collected 118 stories on ArtsJournal this week. Here’s what I learned. The detail that stuck out in the Metropolitan Opera’s announcement last fall that it had made a $200 million deal with the Saudi government to take the company to perform in the Kingdom for three weeks every winter was not the eye-popping rental […]
The post AJ Chronicles: Perils of Philanthropy — The Metropolitan Opera appeared first on diacritical.
- Institutional stresses and a Fight over Venice
This Week’s Highlights:
The question of which artists get heard collided hard with the institutions that decide this week. The Venice Biennale jury said it won’t consider nations whose leaders face ICC charges for top prizes — putting Russia and Israel out of contention (ARTnews). The EU then cut Biennale funding over Russia’s inclusion at all (AP). Hundreds of musicians demanded a Eurovision boycott over Israel’s participation (Times of Israel). Algeria sentenced its Goncourt-winning novelist to three years in prison for writing about the country’s civil war (AP). Cultural legitimacy is now a foreign-policy instrument.
Beneath that, our arts institutional core is being stressed. Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater is closing after 42 years (TheaterMania). London’s Bridge Theatre is exploring a sale (The Stage). The Saudis pulled out of their $200 million Met Opera deal (The New York Times). Berlin Modern’s opening slipped to 2030 (ARTnews). Meanwhile LACMA’s reinvented Geffen Galleries opened to mixed but searching reviews (Los Angeles Times), and V&A East gave the museum-as-laboratory another try (Artnet).
Michael Tilson Thomas died at 81 (Washington Post) — the kind of regional-anchor conductor and broadcast educator the field rarely produces now.
All this week’s stories below, organized by topic.
- Awaiting an Uncrackable Code<a href="https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/2026/04/awaiting-an-uncrackable-code.html" title="Awaiting an Uncrackable Code” rel=”nofollow”><img width="150" height="150" src="https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Collage-%C2%A9-by-Norman-O.-Mustill-420-150×150.jpg" class="webfeedsFeaturedVisual wp-post-image" alt="" link_thumbnail="1" decoding="async" srcset="https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Collage-©-by-Norman-O.-Mustill-420-150×150.jpg 150w, https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Collage-©-by-Norman-O.-Mustill-420-420×420.jpg 420w, https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Collage-©-by-Norman-O.-Mustill-420-100×100.jpg 100w, https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Collage-©-by-Norman-O.-Mustill-420-200×200.jpg 200w" sizes="(max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px" data-attachment-id="73841" data-permalink="https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/screenshot-359" data-orig-file="https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Collage-©-by-Norman-O.-Mustill-420.jpg" data-orig-size="420,558" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta='{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"Screenshot","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"Screenshot","orientation":"1"}' data-image-title="Collage © by Norman O. Mustill" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="
Screenshot
” data-large-file=”https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Collage-©-by-Norman-O.-Mustill-420.jpg”>If poetry make nothing happen, as W.H. Auden once wrote, it sometimes uncannily anticipates what will. - Jeremy Rothman talks about championing composers beyond the standard cannon
Jeremy Rothman, Chief Artistic Officer of The Philadelphia Orchestra and Ensemble Arts, shares their 125-year history championing composers beyond the standard canon.
- LACMA’s New Building: What’s the purpose of art in a Museum?
LACMA proposes a new model for museums. For a long time now, context has been an essential deliverable when you go to a museum. It’s how meaning gets constructed. Just what was so remarkable about the way Constable painted light, and how did it have an effect on the painters who came after?
The white cube gallery was modernism’s insistence that art speak for itself. But it was invented for audiences who already spoke the vocabulary. It assumed the context was already in the viewer’s head. The Geffen revives this for audiences who may not carry that context. Whether that is a brilliant adaptation, a beautiful concession, or just plain incoherence, is the open question of the building.
The post LACMA’s New Building: What’s the purpose of art in a Museum? appeared first on diacritical.
- no the english language is not like literally goin to pot as we watch lol
While these common gripes point to eccentric speech patterns, they don’t point to grammatical annihilation. English has weathered far worse. … English has lost almost all of the more complex linguistic trappings it was born with to become the language we know and — at least, sometimes — love today.” – The Conversation
- I Am Anti-AI. How Do We Get It Out Of Schools?
At times, I find myself speaking with my kids about A.I. in the same terms that we might discuss a creepy neighbor who lives down the block: avoid eye contact, cross the street when you walk past his house, and, when in doubt, call on a trusted adult. – The New Yorker
- Inside The First-Ever, Very Strictly Confidential, Choreographers’ Summit In New York
To allow for genuinely open, honest exchange, the rules at the Creators in Dance Summit, which hosted 75 choreographers across numerous genres, were simple but strict: “You cannot name individuals or institutions, and you can use what you received at the summit, but you cannot name who said it.” – Dance Magazine
- The Ideas Challenging This Year’s Turner Prize Finalists
This year’s prize arrives at a moment when sculpture, funding structures and art education are becoming unusually entangled. – The Conversation
- Blame It On The Culture
Someone observes a behavioral difference between groups or countries. They can’t immediately identify the mechanism. So, they invoke “culture” as an explanation or, even worse, “the culture.” The word lands with a satisfying thud that sounds like an explanation but isn’t one. It is the terminus of inquiry, not the beginning. – Laissez Faire
- After Implosion Of The Adelaide Book Festival, A New Director
Both Newcastle and Adelaide made the decision to invite Abdel-Fattah but only one imploded over it. So what went differently for Rosemarie Milsom? – The Guardian
- A Binational $1.3 Million Program To Fund Individual Creatives In San Diego And Tijuana
“At its core, Artists Count consists of a $1.3 million fund, available to active artists in both San Diego and Tijuana. In addition, a companion study will focus on communities with the least access to resources, examining ‘the realities, challenges, and economic impact of working artists’ on both sides of the border.” – SanDiegoRed
- Does Reading Help?
Books do not create a higher form of conversation but instead allow for a unique ‘fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude’. Great writers do not reveal to us the admirable depth of their minds: they guide us in cultivating the ability to make sense of words, and things. – Aeon
- Cutting The Baby In Half? Venice Biennale Jury Says It Won’t Consider Russia Or Israel For Top Prize
The Venice Biennale‘s jury said on Thursday that it would not consider nations whose leaders have been charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court—a move that effectively tosses Israel and Russia out of the running for the top honors at the world’s greatest art exhibition. – ARTnews
- Remembering MTT
Thomas was also an example of an artistic leader serving as a guiding star for an entire geographic area – emphasizing the importance of audiences being, as it were, cultural locavores. – San Francisco Chronicle (Yahoo)
- Berlin’s Controversial Culture Chief Resigns After Less Than A Year
“Sarah Wedl-Wilson has stood down over a funding scandal involving the irregular distribution of €2.6 million in public money for programmes to fight antisemitism. As culture senator for the Berlin regional government, Wedl-Wilson had already sacked a state secretary in her department, Oliver Friederici, over the affair this week.” – The Guardian
- The Complicated Calculations Behind FOMO
By recognising the social orientation of the experience, we can take a step towards understanding the nature of FOMO and what it can do for us. Emotions that feel bad often serve important purposes. Anger can help us realise when things are unjust, regret can motivate us to make amends. – Psyche
- How Long Should Movies Have To Wait In Theatres Before They Go To Streaming?
Maybe the middle ground was 45 days. Because at CinemaCon 2026, every single studio, not just Universal, reiterated its commitment to windows of at least that length. – TheWrap (Yahoo!)
- Send In The Pool Guy: Trump Wants To Replace The Capitol Mall Reflecting Pool
He complained that the 2,030-foor by 167-foot pool, which was built in 1922 between the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument, “never looked great” because the stone on the bottom of the pool was “not really meant to be a stone that’s underwater for that much of a period of time.” – The Independent
- Nicholas Hytner’s London Theatre Company Is Looking To Sell Its Home, The Bridge Theatre
“The Stage understands the Bridge Theatre, which opened in October 2017 and was founded by former National Theatre director Nicholas Hytner and executive director Nick Starr, could be sold as part of a process that began with an investment opportunity being launched.” – The Stage
