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- Barn At Oscar Hammerstein II’s Pennsylvania Farmstead Collapses In Storm
Highland Farm, just outside Doylestown in Bucks County, was where Hammerstein wrote the words for many of the musicals he created with Richard Rodgers. It is now the site of the Oscar Hammerstein Museum and Theatre Education Center, which plans to rebuild the barn as an exhibition space and education center. – PhillyVoice
- Since It Gave Up Government Funding, Finances At London’s Wigmore Hall Are Stronger Than Ever
The city’s most respected chamber music venue has seen a 25% increase year-on-year in ticket sales since it left the funding portfolio of Arts Council England, artistic director John Gilhooly said. – The Stage
- “The World’s Greatest Orchestra” — Take Two: Today’s Metropolitan Opera
- Sonny Rollins, And The End Of Easy Answers
Good Morning,
Sonny Rollins is gone at 95 — one of the last giants of the bebop era, the colossus who kept reinventing his own sound long after he’d earned the right to coast (AP).
Reinvention is the day’s other thread, this time at the institutional level. Anthony Roth Costanzo took over Opera Philadelphia at a time when the company was three weeks from missing payroll, bet the company on $11 pay-what-you-wish tickets, and is now sitting on a cash surplus (The New York Times). Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater, meanwhile, is quietly ending its three-artistic-director experiment and handing the company back to a single leader (The Philadelphia Inquirer). And the Art Newspaper punctures a cherished assumption: dropping admission fees, it turns out, might not actually bring more people through the door of American museums(The Art Newspaper).
The LA Phil finally hired a music director — Daniel Harding, conductor and part-time Air France pilot, takes the podium in 2027 (Los Angeles Times). And in Paris, the artist know as JR has turned the Pont Neuf into a 120-meter stone grotto (Artnet).
All of our stories below. See you tomorrow.
Doug
- How The Cherokee Bible Reveals Differences Between European And Native American Worldviews
One can learn quite a bit by noticing which English words and phrases had no Cherokee equivalent — and in how translators chose to render those words and phrases in Cherokee. – The Conversation
- Why Has The World Stopped Making Babies?
Some blame technology, particularly smartphones and social media. Others blame a kind of 21st-century weltschmerz—a sadness about the state of the world and our uncertain future in it. – The Atlantic
- How The Big Art Auction Houses Engineered Their Roaring Comeback
“The houses leaned into spectacle — including a promotional video featuring Nicole Kidman dancing around a bronze Brancusi head — and prearranged deals … that reduced their risk. The result was a season with a few flashy records — and … a broader return to deliberate bidding, quality material and logical prices.” – The New York Times
- CBS Paramount Drops Copyright Claim Against Colbert After Parody Show
CBS and parent company Paramount have backed away from efforts to limit reposting of Stephen Colbert’s mock appearance as host of a Michigan public access show called “Only In Monroe.” Colbert posted the hour-long parody a day after being ousted from his nearly 11-year-long run at “The Late Show.” – NPR
- Colleges Are Hemorrhaging Student Enrollment. One Oregon College Hits The Wall
According to the plan released, “We are maintaining an infrastructure built for 30,000 students while currently serving 20,000.” Other options “have been exhausted” and “incrementalism” has failed, it says. – InsideHigherEd
- Paris’ Pont Neuf Becomes A Stone Grotto
French artist JR has taken over Paris’s Pont Neuf—the oldest bridge over the Seine, and the city’s first built from stone, not wood. JR’s hotly awaited hometown installation La Caverne du Pont Neuf (2026) measures 120 meters long, 20 meters wide, and, in some spots, 18 meters tall. – Artnet
- What’s Missing From Dance Funding In The U.S.? Here’s What One Of The Leading Dance Funders Says.
Ashley Ferro-Murray of the Doris Duke Foundation: I’m interested in … funding resilient models for the future as well as legacy models that … value the labor of the artist. One way the Doris Duke Foundation is doing this is by combining our grant-making capacity with other resources like marketing and communications. – Dance Magazine
- 4,500-year-old Structure Recreated Close To Stonehenge
Reaching more than 20 feet in height, the hall was built over the course of nine months by a team of more than 100 volunteers who relied on the tools and techniques of their Neolithic ancestors. – Artnet
- What Impact Does Free Admission Make On Museums?
“What we have seen, across the country, is that institutions that have eliminated admissions have generally not seen an increase in visitation in any meaningful way,” says Daniel Weiss. – The Art Newspaper
- Gandhi And His Notion Of Micro- And Macro-Morality
Gandhi demonstrated that micro-morality is essential, but not good enough. We have to be morally good people used to looking inside and judging what we do before we do it, but also people who look seriously at the flawed systems that surround us and think about what we can do to oppose them. – 3 Quarks Daily
- James Will Be Leading A Different Kind Of Murdoch Media Empire
“One New York staffer said that, in contrast to other billionaires who have purchased media properties in recent years, James Murdoch has ‘actually been in the media business for a long time. It’s not like he’s just coming in new to it as like a fun trophy or novelty.’” – The Washington Post (MSN)
- Maybe We’re Thinking About Ecosystems The Wrong Way
Why do we keep thinking ecosystems have functions they could fail to perform? – Aeon
- AI Music, Anthems And Video Is Fueling Alberta’s Separatist Movement
The 20 inauthentic channels analyzed have had nearly 40 million views. Videos use AI-generated deepfakes, often of Premier Danielle Smith and Prime Minister Mark Carney, and include “frequent and obvious lies.” Channels include “AI avatars and paid American voice actors.” – The Conversation
- Booktok Sells Tons Of Books. Its Reviews, Though…
While TikTok’s stunted critical language sells legions more books—even good ones—than the literary critics who dismiss the platform, as a doubtfully salable fiction writer I’m less interested in how a book goes viral than in what this costs the reader. – The Point
- Wilma Theater In Philadelphia Ends Its Three-Artistic-Director Experiment
“The new and sole artistic director is Lindsay Smiling, who has been one of the company’s three co-artistic directors for the past three years; … the other two, Yury Urnov and Morgan Green, are moving on to other roles and pursuits.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer (MSN)
- L.A. Phil’s Next Music Director: Daniel Harding
The 50-year-old British conductor and part-time Air France pilot is currently chief conductor at Rome’s Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and has held similar positions at the Orchestre de Paris, Swedish Radio Symphony, and Mahler Chamber Orchestra. He begins his initial six-year term in 2027. – Los Angeles Times (Yahoo!)
- How Much Has Anthony Roth Costanzo Turned Opera Philadelphia Around? This Much.
When he became general director in 2024, he had to raise $4 million in 12 weeks just to keep the company from closing; that entire season was, as he put it, “three weeks away from stopping payroll.” Now, notwithstanding the $11-or-pay-what-you-wish tickets, Opera Philadelphia has a cash surplus. – The New York Times
- Jazz Saxophone Great Sonny Rollins Has Died At 95
“From his days as a teen phenom to his more measured solo work and experimentation with free jazz, Rollins was revered for his improvisational skill. He was among the last living greats of the bebop era and — with John Coltrane and Charlie Parker — one of the most influential saxophonists of his time.” – AP
- Gallerist Brett Sikkema’s Husband Convicted Of Ordering His Murder
“In a grisly case that shocked the art world, a Cuban-American man was found guilty of his role in a murder-for-hire plot that resulted in the stabbing death of his estranged husband, prominent New York art dealer Brent Sikkema, during a holiday in Brazil.” – The Wall Street Journal (MSN)
- Russia Bombs Many Of Kyiv’s Major Cultural And Historical Sites
The National Art Museum, National Philharmonic of Ukraine, Kyiv Opera Theater, National Chornobyl Museum, Valeriy Lobanovskyi Dynamo Stadium and Hinaus Gallery were among sites hit in what the Minister of Culture called the “largest series of damages” to cultural institutions in Kyiv since Russia’s war in all of Ukraine began in 2022. – CBC
- Brian Large, 87, Masterful TV And Film Producer Of Opera And Classical Music
He directed well over 100 films and telecasts of operas and concerts for the BBC, the Royal Opera House in London, the Met, and most prominent companies in Europe and the U.S. Among his most famous telecasts were the Boulez/Chéreau Ring cycle from Bayreuth and the original Three Tenors stadium concert. – OperaWire
- Reckoning with Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Policy
On the weekend John Ganz had an interesting discussion of our rich tech-elites and aesthetic taste, of which they have little, and who would hope to destroy what for now remains that is human and beautiful. This leads him to consider Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790) and Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979), where the latter book’s title is clearly meant to evoke the former. I won’t try to summarize Ganz – I recommend you read him yourself (not just this one piece) – but I will take this opportunity to try to wrestle with my own thoughts on Bourdieu, from the perspective of working for many years in the cultural policy field.
Let me take the excerpt from Distinction that Ganz uses:
The denial of lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile—in a word, natural—enjoyment, which constitutes the sacred sphere of culture, implies an affirmation of the superiority of those who can be satisfied with the sublimated, refined, disinterested, gratuitous, distinguished pleasures forever closed to the profane. That is why art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil a social function of legitimating social differences.
In Distinction Bourdieu makes two claims, one about society and one about aesthetics, and I think it is important to separate the two, since it is possible for a reasonable person to believe that either one of the claims is true but not the other. This is but a blog post, so I know my treatment here is a bit sketchy.
Bourdieu’s sociological claim is that people can use their cultural taste, whether genuine or simply an affectation, as a signal of how they ought to be classed, and can use this “cultural capital” to their advantage in making social and economic connections. If they acquire this cultural capital from their parents and their social standing, then cultural taste works to preserve the transmission between generations of class status. In the translation of Bourdieu I have he says cultural capital can be “exchanged” for social and economic capital, but I wouldn’t put it that way; it’s not actually exchanged or traded – once you have it you don’t need to part with it – it is simply useful in obtaining other sorts of capital.
Is this claim true? Maybe, though I think it might have been much more the case in prior generations (Bourdieu was writing about France in the 1960s). Demonstrating elite taste in art is neither necessary nor sufficient for getting on in our world, though I would grant that having a least basic manners, dress sense, and the ability to hold intelligent conversation still matter. But art? Enjoy any movies, music, or reading you like and no one in your economic world is going to care very much.
I’m not sure Bourdieu’s sociological claim is falsifiable – what evidence would prove him wrong? If I say that our elites mostly listen to bad music and watch junk movies, could a counter-claim be that “well, yes, but they are snobby about that too?” I’m really not sure what to do with this.
Bourdieu’s aesthetic claim is that cultural judgments are nothing more than expressions of personal taste (used for social reasons), and have no truth-standing beyond that. Kant makes the distinction between matters of purely personal preference – “I prefer a pinot noir to a malbec” – where I don’t expect everyone to feel the same, nor feel that everyone should prefer pinot noir to malbec, to judgments regarding art, where the claim “Chopin’s Nocturnes, especially as recorded by Ivan Moravec, are beautiful” is meant to convey something greater than my personal enjoyment of them, and that other people ought to find them beautiful too, and when they do we can enjoy the work communally. But Bourdieu (in common with the logical positivists) holds that it’s all personal preference, nothing more.
Of course taste is subjective, that’s why even people very knowledgeable about a sub-genre of art can still disagree about the relative values of different works. But Kant (and Hume before him) think that there are principles we ought to be able to agree on, regarding what works are beautiful, well-crafted, intelligent, respectful of their audience, subtle, expressive, and original, and which are ordinary, slipshod, banal, condescending, obvious, mechanical (these days, literally so), and formulaic. (I’m not saying I have the masterful eyes and ears that enable me to discern all these things, far from it, but I can still recognize the existence of such standards, and to try to better understand them).
I come to cultural policy through economics, and there is something of a rule in the social science (economics or sociology) of the arts that you don’t make aesthetic claims in your research. As a social scientist you might personally believe that there are legitimate distinctions we can make about the value of art and artists, but in the paper you are submitting to the International Journal of Cultural Policy or the Journal of Cultural Economics or Poetics you keep it to yourself. This is a good norm: it allows the reader to assess the social science claims on their own terms, without the empirical findings being muddied by the researchers’ views on the subjectivity of cultural taste, and of their own tastes. But that norm doesn’t mean Bourdieu and other skeptics are correct.
As I said above, one can believe one of Bourdieu’s major claims without believing the other. One the one hand, I could say, yes, people sometimes try to acquire, or at least feign, an enjoyment of the high arts and make pronouncements on cultural value to improve their social standing, but that doesn’t mean there is no such thing as legitimate judgment in the arts; my claim that Moravec’s recordings are something beautiful (I might say) comes from experience of listening to piano recordings, of reading others who are more knowledgeable than I am about the genre, of carefully listening for the subtleties in his approach, and so on.
On the other hand I could say that the arts and judgments of beauty simply don’t matter any more, if they ever did, in social and economic standing. But while Bourdieu was wrong about that, he is right that all this elevated talk we get in art and cultural criticism is literally nonsense, and just amounts to someone saying “I like the colour blue, pinot noir, and Chopin”.
What does this mean for cultural policy? In my book, The Moral Foundations of Public Funding for the Arts, I wrote this in the concluding chapter:
One can insist on a neutral state regarding the good, but it is not how the Arts Council (and all the subsequent arts councils) were founded, and the rationale for public spending on the arts quickly withers without the guiding assumption that there is something intrinsically good in appreciating beauty and the arts (these not being the only intrinsic goods) and that people are better off with encouragement and subsidy that connects them to the arts. Further, the point of arts funding is to promote the intrinsic value of aesthetic appreciation, which means that there must be judgments in the funding body as to what artists and presenters rise to the level of artistic excellence where such appreciation is warranted. It is not simply a matter of “more art”, but art that enhances people’s well-being beyond the cultural goods that are easily and cheaply obtained in commercial markets.
If you are going to have some sort of arts council that gives money to artists and arts organizations, they have to make some sort of judgment about what is worth funding and what is not.
If someone wants to make the claim that all judgments of cultural taste are nothing more than the expression of the likes and dislikes of the speaker, then the rationale for giving any funds to any particular artist or presenter dries up. Why fund this instead of that? Why publicly fund any art at all? Let citizens figure out themselves how to spend their income. Saying, “well, we can still have an arts council, we just need to tweak how it makes its grants” does not get you anywhere. Handing out money through a lottery doesn’t get around the problem of asking how public arts funding is justified in the first place.
If you also follow Bourdieu that consumption of elite-approved art just serves to reinforce social distinctions, that the only purpose of opera is to let the Sir Humphrey’s of the world feel superior, and use the intermission for political networking, then the case for funding the arts gets even worse – high art becomes a public bad, and instead of being subsidized ought to be assessed a special tax, like we do for cigarettes.
You can still study the political economy of the arts through Bourdieu’s lens, how elites have captured the arts and directed public money to uses that preserve their privilege. But your days as a “public funding for the arts advocate” are over.
(from the Los Angeles Times)
John Ganz concludes his post (rightfully) somberly:
Now, a clever reader might object at this point, “Well, what about a hipster type who doesn’t want people to know about their special tastes? Aren’t they just hoarding social capital?” Yes and no, perhaps. No one gets it like I get it could be someone essentially saying, “Other people who engage with this will see it as agreeable at best, or as a piece of cultural capital to show off their taste, but I perceive the beautiful in this thing, and I want to preserve that experience.” So paradoxically, an apparent snob might be invested in the universality and permanence of an aesthetic experience, while a popularizer might be using it a) to make a buck, or b) to pose with it and have a moment of fashionability before they discard the thing in the trash heap along with all the other fads, thereby destroying the sensus communis, the universal and timeless moment of beauty. I think people who work in museums and art education probably struggle with this: how to make aesthetic experience accessible enough to the public, but also communicate its importance and rarity. I think the best art criticism also does this: it’s welcoming without dumbing down.
To bring this full circle, we can already see how the communication revolution is actually quite corrosive to a sense of community. I think part of what’s so dispiriting about the almost cancerous growth of AI and technology is what it seems to be doing to aesthetics: it’s pulping it, turning it into slop, into another material to keep the engines running. And it’s sad and angering that there are many people, who I think are insensitive to the experience of the beautiful and the sublime, who seem to be celebrating this destruction. There’s a real sense in which it is really the destruction of humanity or a distinctly human way of experiencing the world.
Cross-posted at https://michaelrushton.substack.com/
- Theatre Should Be Celebrating Celebrities, Not Bemoaning Them
With our economy stagnant, this situation is not going to improve any time soon, and we need glamour and celebrity to boost sales, particularly in the subsidised sector. – The Telegraph (Yahoo)
- Behind Book Bans In The Digital Age
I think the library feels like a place where you can do something concrete. You can go to an actual library; you can pull books off the shelves. And I think maybe that’s behind this strange resurgence of book banning. – The Walrus
- Political Drama Wins Cannes Palm d’Or
Cristian Mungiu’s Norway-set drama about political polarization, Fjord, has won the Palme d’Or, handing the Cannes Film Festival’s top honour for the second time to Mungiu, the Romanian director of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. – CBC
- Miles Davis At 100: Still Influencing Music
Davis repeatedly dismantled the sound he had helped invent – embracing the electric age in 1968, much as Bob Dylan had in folk. – The Guardian
- The Silencing Of Washington’s Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra
The cascading cancellations were devastating for the orchestra and its 61 professional musicians. Their annual salary is paid by performance and the lack of work has been demoralizing. The whole ensemble last played together in the Kennedy Center with the American Ballet Theater in February. – The New York Times
- Dance As Competitive Sport Gets A League Of Its Own
What is the International Dance League? The N.B.A. of dance. The W.W.E. of dance. Formula 1 racing meets the TV show “America’s Best Dance Crew.” These are some of the analogies that came up in conversations with the league’s founders and participants. – The New York Times
- The Enrollment Cliff Is Here For American Colleges
Last year, at least sixteen nonprofit colleges and universities announced that they would close and seven more announced that they would merge with or be acquired by other schools. – The New Yorker
- Ansel Adams Trust Slams Gallery Over AI Image
The artwork, which still appears on Danziger’s website, does not contain a title but is headlined A.I. GENERATED, From the prompt: Make a realistic color version of Ansel Adams’ iconic “Moonrise Over Hernandez”. – ARTnews
- 46 Museum Shows And Biennales To See This Summer
Spectacle in all its many forms is the big theme of the summer season, when big, glitzy projects will take over museums across the globe. – ARTnews
