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- What I saw From Inside The Kennedy Center Meltdown
Palermo also said Trump’s Truth Social post about handing control back to Congress sounded like an attempt to distance himself from an institution. He adds that he believes the Trump administration has driven the center into bankruptcy. – NPR
- Austin Opera seeks Director of Artistic Administration
Reporting to the General Director & CEO, the Director of Artistic Administration oversees Austin Opera’s artistic staff and works closely with the executive leadership (General Director & CEO, Music Director, and Chief Advancement Officer) and the artistic and production teams to plan and execute season programming at the Butler Performance Center and Long Center. Ensuring the seamless operations of multiple, concurrent artistic programming streams, the Director of Artistic Administration is a key partner in fulfilling the company’s strategic goals to provide outstanding arts experiences that reflect the Austin community.
Please go to https://austinopera.org/about/join-austin-opera/ to see a full job description.
- The Problem With Responses To AI Creations
At its core, this is a debate about values. A short story implies a human artistic act with intentional imaginative labour—the exact practice whose future is now at risk if the literary world doesn’t take a stand. – The Walrus
- Will People Embrace The First AI Art Museum?
Dataland — a museum built with artificial intelligence — arrives as debates explode across socio-political lines about the impact of the advancing technology on our culture, cognition, communication, economy, environment and careers, including in the arts. – Los Angeles Times
- Tired Of Streaming, People Are Turning To Physical Media
“Ten years ago, the average age of people walking in here were, 40, 50, 60. Now [its] 20 and 22, we are even getting teenagers.” – ABC
- States Say They Will Sue To Block Paramount/Warner Deal
If Paramount doesn’t lock this down by October, it’s on the hook to pay shareholders a near-$6.9 million daily fee. – Gizmodo
- Paramount Launches A Games Studio
Paramount Games Studio launches as Paramount Skydance is awaiting regulatory approval on its pending acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. WBD has its own in-house video game studio, which produces titles based on Harry Potter, “Game of Thrones,” the DC Universe and more WBD IP. – Variety
- Sotheby’s Tried To Quietly Sell A Pollock For $50M. It Didn’t Go Well
According to one source familiar with the effort, Sotheby’s could not find enough bidders to get the auction off the ground. The auction was ultimately called off, though it remains unclear whether the painting was returned to Glimcher, sold privately, or remains with Sotheby’s. – ARTnews
- Audiobook Sales Up 9 Percent In 2025, To $2.4B
General fiction accounted for the largest share of audiobook revenue at 27%, with science fiction/fantasy, romance, and mysteries/thrillers/suspense rounding out the top genres. The fastest-growing genres in 2025 were humor, general fiction, and children’s, including YA. – Publishers Weekly
- The Artists Producing ‘Anti-Slop’ In Response To Generative AI
“That spirit of rejection seems to be coalescing into its own design aesthetic – a move towards the conspicuously handmade, the janky, even the primitive.” – The Guardian (UK)
- Trying To Remember Which Memes Were Important Back In The Day?
The British Film Institute has your back. – The New York Times
- Petit Cabinet #7: ‘Just Two More Times to Sleep’<a href="https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/2026/06/petit-cabinet-7-just-two-more-times-to-sleep.html" title="Petit Cabinet #7: ‘Just Two More Times to
- Minneapolis Gets A Massive Land Art Mural
Franco-Swiss artist Saype “said he decided to pick Minneapolis for the project during the federal immigration enforcement surge after seeing neighbors helping each other.” – Minnesota Public Radio
- Why Is Philly’s Gem Of A Bridge So Badly Neglected?
“The University Avenue Bridge was designed and built as a prime specimen of the City Beautiful aesthetic. … Today, the bridge that connects West Philadelphia and Grays Ferry is a monument to decrepitude.” – Philadelphia Inquirer
- What’s Gone Deeply Wrong With Social Media
“Something seems to have broken down in the functionality of the internet, between Facebook’s erratic algorithm and Google search results now headed by fabricated, AI-generated content and sponsored ads.” – El País English
- When Los Angeles Turns The Cameras On Itself
“There’s something really ugly and beautiful about Los Angeles, I think, and that’s what these films capture – the idea that anything could happen here, that people could become overnight famous in LA for something they did really well or something really horrible.” – NPR
- The New School In Manhattan Lays Off Nearly 90 People
It’s a body blow to the institution’s humanities sectors. “All 19 impacted faculty members were in the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts and the New School for Social Research.” – Hyperallergic
- Vinyl Is Back, But It’s Also Polluting The Planet
“Modern vinyl records are crafted with PVC resin, which makes up more than 75% of an average disk The synthetic polymer itself is made of chlorine and fossil fuel-derived feed stock.” Um, yikes? – Los Angeles Times (Yahoo)
- Eight Great Moments From The Tonys Stage
Bernadette Peters, Neil Patrick Harris, P!nk, Bowen Yang, André DeShields, and Leslie Odom Jr. added extra glam to a star-studded night – one that also featured strong performances from the casts of Schmigadoon! and Ragtime. – Boston Globe
- What Steven Spielberg Has Taught Critic Wesley Morris
“Thank you for daring and caring and trying to show us the light, to keep the lights on, as the artistic system you worshiped and symbolized and helped redefine renounces itself.” – The New York Times
- Do We Really Care If Memoirs Are Truthful?
“The facts may not totally line up, but the emotions are all present and accounted for.” – Washington Post (MSN)
- At The Tonys, Schmigadoon Wins Best New Musical; Liberation Wins Best New Play
Schmigadoon! winning might give it an economic boost, though Liberation has closed. Other big winners are Ragtime and Death of a Salesman. – The New York Times
- Writers, Directors, Critics, And Superfans Choose Their Favorite Spielberg Films
“He came of age in the American new wave era but in spirit belonged neither to that nor fully to Hollywood’s golden age studio system that preceded it.” – The Guardian (UK)
- The Strangest Skills 38 Tony Nominees For Their Roles
“Broadway actors need to shine in all sorts of ways. Some are obvious (mastering an accent). Some are surprises (mastering a horse).” – The New York Times
- Sure, Write What You Know, But Write What Scares You
“When you sense a story, or glimpse a scene, or feel a character coming to life, you stop, step back, consider what in that might scare you most. … Let that dread jolt you loose. Then—and this is key for me—find a way to make it worse.” – LitHub
- The Tony Awards, Updated Live
In case you can’t tune in … – Playbill
- A New Documentary Shows Just How Much Movie-Makers Can’t Handle The Reality Of Michael Jackson
Capitalizing on his name is one things, as the fictional Michael heads to a billion-dollar take at the box office, but Netflix is also, rather disgustingly, cashing in. – HuffPost
- The 1980s Centered A Neon-Colored End Of The World, And Now It’s All Coming To A Theatre Near You
Revisiting the 1980s, a decade whose “reality pulsed with cultural Balkanization, financial erosion, systemic disinvestment, and televised neurosis, the American theatre conjures a cultural imagination crowded with the outsiders, monsters, con artists, hungry things, and chosen kindred of the analog twilight.” – American Theatre
- An Appreciation For Kanya King, Who Changed And ‘Revolutionized’ Black British Culture
The founder of the Mobo Awards was “engaging, self-effacing, funny, modest. Someone with so much to brag about but who was so humble. Her superpower, it turns out, was kindness and warmth.” – The Guardian (UK)
- The Four Musicals That Are Counting On Broadway Shows Finally Turning A Corner
“There’s a big reason it takes years for a fresh musical to land on Broadway. Cracking any story is a painstaking process. The same goes for crafting a songbook. Getting the two to coalesce? It’s a delicate alchemy.” – Washington Post (Yahoo)
- Who’s Going To Win At The Tonys Tonight?
Can Jellicle Ball beat out the universally loved Ragtime? Will Lesley Manville’s British chops beat out Susannah Flood’s incredible performance in Liberation? Find out soon! – Vulture
- Gut Punch
(Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock in the original Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, 1949).
In a guest essay in the New York Times, former Washington Post theater critic Naveen Kumar writes that “Broadway is Serving Up Liberal Comfort Food.”
His piece concludes:
Not everyone goes to the theater hoping to be confronted with big questions, the kind that compel audiences to turn inward and disrupt their worldviews. But offering easy answers to those who do is its own form of injustice, shortchanging the medium’s potential. Why pat people on the back when what they really need — and what live performance is uniquely poised to deliver — is a punch to the gut?
What went wrong? His argument that in a response to theatre audiences claiming to be turned off by being “preached at” by the plays they attended on Broadway (and I can’t blame them), there has been a turn to the safe, the comforting, the pat on the back.
Five years ago, a lot of new theater was in a less indulgent mood. As the industry awoke in 2021 from pandemic shutdowns, many playwrights and producers were eager to champion the values of the social justice movement set off by the killing of George Floyd the previous spring. Works, often written by nonwhite artists, challenged audiences to face up to their latent biases — no matter how well intentioned they might have assumed they were as theater-loving liberals.
In New York there came a wave of shows that pushed boundaries and prodded progressive audiences. “Slave Play,” Jeremy O. Harris’s incendiary dark comedy about race and desire, which opened on Broadway in the fall of 2019, returned for an encore engagement. “A Strange Loop,” Michael R. Jackson’s hall-of-mirrors musical about a fat Black queer playwright grappling with his own subjectivity, won the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony for best musical. A slew of plays, including new works like Antoinette Nwandu’s “Pass Over,” an urban parable partly inspired by “Waiting for Godot,” and Tina Satter’s “Is This a Room,” about the interrogation of an N.S.A. whistle-blower, as well as revivals by Suzan-Lori Parks, Ntozake Shange and Alice Childress, crowded Broadway stages.
Those theater-loving liberals, thinking they are well intentioned, needed some prodding.
But now?
The Tony Awards race is dominated by plays that are more affirming than confrontational, offering the sort of benign provocation unlikely to keep people awake at night or wonder why they paid good money to feel unsettled. …
This spring, we have Nathan Lane in “Death of a Salesman,” Arthur Miller’s reliable elegy to the downtrodden working class.
Which is quite a dismissal of a play that is rightly seen as an American classic.
I think Mr. Kumar gives the game away in his discussion of Giant, by Mark Rosenblatt. Here is the entire discussion of this play:
Then there’s John Lithgow (competing against Mr. Lane for best actor), with his sour and prickly turn as Roald Dahl in Mark Rosenblatt’s “Giant,” a fiery topical debate lightly outfitted as a drama. The play, which premiered in London in 2024, finds Dahl mired in public controversy over a review he wrote about Catherine Leroy and Tony Clifton’s book “God Cried,” which documents Israel’s 1982 siege of Lebanon. As the play begins, Dahl’s essay has been denounced as antisemitic, and his editor and an emissary from his publisher, both Jewish, arrive to seek a public comment that will calm the waters before the release of his next book, “The Witches.”
The play, which quickly recouped its Broadway investment, raises two major questions, to my mind. One is why we continue to insist on making art about terrible men. The other is this: Does “Giant” succeed in dramatizing the interplay between antisemitism and criticism of Israel, or does it flatten that debate because Dahl is so obviously a grotesque bigot? Mr. Lithgow’s performance is a kinetic marvel, but there’s no question that his Dahl is a snarling and even gleeful hater of Jews.
The cynical view would be that “Giant” seeks to validate the anxiety, including among some supporters of Israel, that those who oppose its state actions must also be antisemitic. The less cynical view would be that all of this makes “Giant,” at the very least, a less interesting play for simply offering up an obvious villain.
So, a play about an author of very popular (though, to my mind, very uneven in quality) children’s books is shown to be a terrible person (there had already been a lot of published accounts to this effect), and that in itself is not prodding enough. Instead, the problem is that Dahl is shown to be anti-Israel but not in the right way, such that somebody who supports Israel, and is a bit dense, might think this play is validating. A better option, I guess, would be a play about someone who opposes the actions of the Israeli state but is more palatable, maybe who has a River-to-the-Sea poster but does not take it literally, and who has a Jewish friend, or some such?
In other words, Mr. Kumar wants plays that pat him on the back, for his proper views on political and social issues, and that give gut punches to those superficial theater-going liberals who secretly harbor views that are not quite radical enough. He wants plays with his politics; it’s those audiences, you know the type, that need to be “challenged.” His “worldview” doesn’t need changing.
Are pats on the back and gut punches the only options? What about plays that are just about being human, where at the end of the play you would have no idea whether a character was a Trump or anti-Trump voter, or anything about their views on defunding the police, or the two-state solution? Plays about falling in love, falling out of love, unrequited love? About dealing with the consequences of a terrible decision? About friendship, and betrayal? About a particularly dramatic historical event, where the cast do not wear hats with a G if they are a goodie and with a B if they are a baddie? Where a group cast does not seem like it was chosen for a Pew Research Center focus group? Where the play is just laugh out loud funny? That have not obviously been wrought with granting agencies and foundations foremost in mind?
Better than a knuckle sandwich.
Cross-posted at https://michaelrushton.substack.com/
- Anthony Stewart Head, Star Of Buffy The Vampire Slayer And Ted Lasso, Has Died At 72
“One of his most formative experiences, he said, was seeing Tim Curry in the musical The Rocky Horror Show while in drama school as a teenager. He told The Guardian that it ‘ignited something in my core.’” – The New York Times
- The Story Of Hong Kong’s Popular Music Can Tell The Tale Of The City’s History
Cantopop is “predominantly Hong Kong music that blends Chinese and western pop sensibilities.” – The Guardian (UK)
- A New Edith Wharton Story Highlights The Human Inability To Deal With War
“The story, on two typed and undated manuscripts that appeared to be different drafts, centers on a dinner party hosted at the same table where, earlier in the war, an army surgeon had performed amputations.” – The New York Times
