AJ Four Ways:
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- Paramount’s Sweetheart Deal To Permit Warner Merger
Paramount’s C-suite must have been popping bottles of champagne as the press office engines of the major studio and 12 state attorney generals typed up the settlement term boilerplate language of what ended up being a stern finger-wave to Ellison’s team. – The Hollywood Reporter
- Russia Is Deliberately Waging War On Ukraine’s Book Industry
More than 40 Ukrainian publishing houses and numerous bookstores have been seriously damaged — and some simply obliterated — in targeted attacks by Russian drones and missiles since the summer began. Over 13 million books — a third of the country’s annual print run — were destroyed in two months. – AP
- British Museum Bans Picture-Taking At The Bayeux Tapestry
The museum made like the Sistine Chapel and announced a ban on photography in the exhibition, an unforgivable move to some in the Instagram age but a godsend to others. – The New York Times
- Apple Opens A New Live Music Venue In London
Located in Battersea Power Station, Apple Music Hall is a state-of-the-art venue “designed to connect artists and fans through bespoke, intimate performances unlike anywhere else,” Apple said in its announcement on Tuesday. – Variety
- How Superfans Are Reshaping The Concert Industry
Fans are paying thousands of dollars not just to see their favorite artists live, but to get closer to the performance and have a more exclusive experience. – The Guardian
- Autopsy Confirms Hayden Panettiere Overdosed On Fentanyl And Prescription Drugs
The inquest by the Greenville County, South Carolina Coroner’s Office ruled that the actress died accidentally from the toxic effects of fentanyl combined with Xanax, the muscle relaxant methocarbamol, and quetiapine, an antipsychotic. – The Hollywood Reporter
- Inside The Capture Of The Kennedy Center
Internal emails and documents obtained by The New York Times demonstrate the political capture of the institution by the whims of Mr. Trump, who at the start of his second term installed a board that made him chairman. Audiences and donors fled, and its finances cratered. – The New York Times
- Why Education Should Be More Like Gym Class
For years, the architecture of higher education quietly encouraged students to believe that the point of a class, and indeed of the entire college experience, was the credential. But if the grade is the goal, and a machine can get you the grade, the machine is not a shortcut; it’s just efficiency. – The New Yorker
- Cate Blanchett Implores Audience From A London Stage To Stop Videoing
“There are few places on this planet where we can simply be together and be present. I understand you like filming the curtain call – and it is kind of flattering in a way – but for anyone who is filming the show, please don’t, because it spoils it for the next group of people.” – Deadline
- Leaders Of Brussels Regional Government Wants Director Of New Kanal-Centre Pompidou Fired
“On Thursday, Minister-President Boris Dilliès of the center-right francophone Mouvement Réformateur (MR) party reportedly surprised members of the Brussels-Capital Region government, which he has led since February, when he announced he is seeking (founding director Yves) Goldstein’s immediate dismissal.” – ARTnews
- More Legal/Financial Drama Over “Titanique”
“Four Titanique off-Broadway investors initiated an arbitration against the lead producer of the ‘splash hit musical,’ which has said it was defrauded by its former general manager and reported losing $3 million in its final 18 months.” – Broadway Journal
- What Exactly Is In Paramount’s Settlement Agreement With The State Attorneys General?
A rundown of what Paramount chief David Ellison agreed to do to get the state officials to call off their antitrust lawsuit to block the merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. – AP
- Heavy Rain In Florence Causes Damage In Two Major Museums
During the downpour last Thursday, a leak developed under the skylight of one room at the Uffizi Gallery, while at the Palazzo Pitti, water flooded the floors of the Palatine Gallery and the Gallery of Modern Art. – Euronews
- Two Men Arrested At Louvre — Not For Stealing Art, But For Putting It Up
A pair of German nationals were taken into custody on Saturday after using adhesive tape to stick paintings of their own on the wall of the Salle des Etats, the gallery which houses the Mona Lisa. – France 24
- Musicians Of DC’s National Symphony Ratify New Contract
“With their new agreement running through September 2, 2030, the NSO musicians will be compensated for the increased amount of local travel as the orchestra is splitting its 2026/27 season across multiple venues during the Kennedy Center’s planned closure.” – The Violin Channel
- Paramount And States Settle Lawsuit, Clearing Way For Warner Bros. Merger
“The settlement announced Monday stops short of forcing Paramount Chief Executive David Ellison to make significant structural changes to the company, but includes penalties such as the forced sale of cable channels and Paramount’s stake in Miramax if it doesn’t make good on its promises.” – The Wall Street Journal (MSN)
- The Met Opera Needed a Director Yesterday
Good Morning,
The Met Opera opens its season Tuesday with a new Macbeth directed by Louisa Proske, co-founder of Heartbeat Opera, the small New York company she has run since 2014. She got the job less than a year out, after the original director withdrew; new Met productions are normally planned two or more years ahead (The New York Times).
Arts Council England’s new chair, Dawn Airey, a former Channel 5 chief, released the council’s first survey of children’s cultural life: in the past year 52% had been to a museum, 26% to a gallery, 22% to a live music event, and 32% named cost as what kept them away. Not good enough, she says. She found the ACE office “quiet, a little bit subdued” and wants it to “be loud” (The Guardian).
MrBeast, with 515 million YouTube subscribers, and James Patterson, with 425 million books sold, published a novel together. It sold 22,646 copies in its first week; Patterson’s previous co-written book, with Viola Davis, sold 57,454 (Ben Liebmann, LinkedIn). So the world’s biggest YouTube star doesn’t translate into books?
Jared Harbour, a theatre writer on Substack, obtained the capitalization documents for Second Stage’s The Fantasticks: investors’ $1 million is booked as a “non-recourse loan” to the nonprofit, and their 25.6% profit share is exactly $1 million divided by the $3.91 million budget (Jared Harbour). What, he asks, actually is the business model for non-profit theatre?
More than 100 children auditioned for José Mateo Ballet Theatre’s 38th Nutcracker in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One 7-year-old’s dream role is a rat: “it makes you laugh a lot” (Boston Globe).
All of our stories below.
- Court Rules Investigators Overstepped In Seizing Art Institute Of Chicago Drawing
In a blow to New York investigators, an appellate court has found they inappropriately cited a penal law to seize an Egon Schiele drawing from the Art Institute of Chicago. – The New York Times
- New UK Company Will Recreate Famous Concerts With Hyper-Realistic Digital Avatars In Any Space
The former chief executive of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s entertainment group has obtained a near-£15m investment for his UK music tech startup that hopes to recreate classic concerts by manifesting musicians as digital avatars. – The Guardian
- Daily Mirror Publisher Cuts Jobs As Web Traffic Plummets Because Of AI
The company said earlier this year that a slump in overall digital page views had been driven by a 46% year-on-year decline in traffic from Google as features such as Google’s AI Mode and AI Overviews negate the need for readers to click through to its websites. – The Guardian
- One Man’s Quest To Understand Theatre Economics
If these institutions were really facing an existential financial situation, “they’re acting commercial” wasn’t much of a fair, nor novel, accusation. The question soon turned to: Once commercial capital entered the nonprofit stream, whose risk did the nonprofit’s advantages reduce, and who captured the resulting value? – Jared Harbour
- MrBeast Has 500M Followers. He Wrote A Book. So Why Isn’t It Selling?
The book sold a reported 22,646 copies in its first week, landing it at #3 on The New York Times bestseller list. They are very low relative to the names involved. MrBeast has one of the largest communities with over 515 million YouTube followers. – Ben Liebmann (LinkedIn)
- Internal Documents: What OpenAI Workers Said About Pirating Books
A court filing unsealed Thursday details internal messages and testimony laying out how OpenAI employees—including executives—talked about the company’s use of pirated books to train an early ChatGPT model, as well as their technology’s potential impact on authors. – The Wall Street Journal
- Paramount And California In Negotiations To Clear Warner Merger
The parties have discussed compromises including Paramount agreeing to operate the two companies’ movie studios separately for a period rather than immediately combining them, the people said. – The Wall Street Journal
- The Fake AI Books Impersonating Real Authors
Across categories—fantasy, horror, even coloring books—writers say they’re seeing AI-generated listings crop up on their Amazon author pages. Some of these works are in entirely different genres from their usual work. – The Atlantic
- Macklemore, Sheeran, Kraft
This has been all over the papers, so I’ll only give a brief synopsis: Ed Sheeran is on a US stadium tour, and has Macklemore as an opening act. Macklemore makes statements about Israel-Palestine on stage. A forthcoming stadium gig, at Robert Kraft’s Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts, is cancelled owing to Macklemore’s remarks, and other stadium owners follow suit. Sheeran’s concert promotor, Messina Touring Group, drops Macklemore from the tour. Sheeran does not protest, saying it is the promotor’s call. Sheeran’s other opening acts and his own back-up band quit in protest.
I’ve written before that if an artist is contracted for a gig, and their views on politics, and the nature of their performance, are well-known beforehand, then the organization or person that contracted with the artist has a duty to stand by them even if and when some people raise complaints.
Macklemore is a known commodity.
Very known: he has been accused of antisemitism (as the headline from twelve years ago puts it) – I’ll let readers be the judge. Macklemore has released songs about Gaza. Here is his official video for his song Hind’s Hall. In his concerts with Sheeran he said on stage he was committed to “Free Palestine”, which seems to have been the trigger for the cancellations, but he had said it pretty emphatically before.
In any case, everybody involved in this tour knew what they were getting with Macklemore.
Sheeran could have done more, and it surprises me that someone with that much experience on the big stage has been so deer-in-the-headlights in response. Obviously he was not entirely at the mercy of the tour promoter – he has significant bargaining clout when a contractual difficulty arises. Sheeran used his concert in Philadelphia to explain his position.
There’s no defending Robert Kraft. If you hire out your stadium to pop music concerts with various artists, there are going to be songs and acts and speech that are not necessarily to your taste, and to be shocked that Macklemore would say “Free Palestine” on stage, shocked to the point of demanding his removal from the tour, is a bit much.
There are lots of takes, of course. Jason Okundaye at The Guardian and Roxane Gay at the New York Times both think Sheeran is naive in thinking music and concerts can possibly be divorced from politics, though I see more assertion than reasoning. Gay writes about Sheeran:
He promised good music and a good time, no politics, even though after three hours, his fans would stream out of the stadium and return to their lives where they did not get to opt out of all of the problems politics creates — the immense emotional toll of so many civilians dying senseless deaths, not to mention high gas prices because of the war in Iran, inflation and stagnant wages.
How dare he promise a good time and some escapism – have you even seen the price of gas lately? I’ve been to many concerts where the musicians made no statements about politics at all – even in the 1970s when gas prices were very high – it really can be done. And it seems the case that when writers say you can’t divorce politics from art, or even (very) light entertainment, they mean politics that is on their side. Political cheerleading.
After all, “politics” at a pop concert means expressing bumper-sticker length slogans. Most musicians, like most people, do not have a great depth of knowledge of politics or history. Some musicians, like some people, do. But in a stadium-sized concert it will all reduce to the same thing: yay this, boo that. And to say “you can’t take politics out of music” is to say “I want to hear cheers for what I already believe.” It’s not what we could call any sort of discourse.
I think the most intelligent argument comes from Ludovic Hunter-Tilney at the Financial Times: If Sheeran wants shows that aren’t political, he shouldn’t have asked a political musician to open for him. That choice was the primary cause of this debacle. But once he made that regrettable call, he needed to stand by it.
Cross-posted at https://michaelrushton.substack.com/
- Inside The Kennedy Center’s Real Finances
Now there’s a fuller picture of the finances Trump inherited—and of what happened during his first months in charge. A previously unseen federal tax filing captures an institution in transition. – The Atlantic
- New Arts Council England Chairwoman Wants ACE To Get Louder
Airey recalled that on her first visit as chair to ACE’s London office, “it felt quiet, a little bit subdued. I didn’t expect that.” She said she wanted ACE to get its “swagger” back. – The Guardian
- This 1972 Canadian Godspell Truly Had All The Good Gifts
The Toronto production was “a Rosetta stone of funny people that featured then unknowns such as Martin Short, Gilda Radner, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Dave Thomas, Victor Garber and Paul Shaffer.” – The New York Times
- Thousands Of Young Dancers Are Auditioning For The Nutcracker All Over The Country, Right Now
The kids have Ideas, too, like their dream roles: “I kind of want to be a rat. … I think a rat just is fun because it makes you laugh a lot.” – Boston Globe
- After A Massive Storm, Archaeologists Rush To Save Artifacts In Alaska
“Since the dig began, they’ve watched the Bering Sea creep closer and closer to the site. Shorelines in this part of Alaska are now more vulnerable to erosion due, in part, to decreasing sea ice and permafrost thaw.” – NPR
- When You Get Offered A Met Opera, But At The Last Minute, Do You Take The Job?
Louisa Proske: “It was insane and thrilling. … It was like, ‘the director has to assemble a team, and we kind of need the design yesterday.’” – The New York Times
- In A Surprise To Exactly No One, Meta’s New AI Is Better At Surveillance Than Help
“Muse’s default avatar is a beige-colored cross between an Ewok and a Labubu, with its arms outstretched, presumably to scoop up all my data.” – Wired
- Epic Spanish Film Inspired By Garcia Lorca Story Wins The People’s Choice Award In Toronto
“The award, voted on by audiences, can be a bellwether of the best picture Oscar, as in 2018 and 2020, when Green Book and Nomadland went on to win at the Academy Awards.” – The New York Times
- Sally Rooney (And Irish Law) Versus A Data Center
“Rooney—the author and Mayo native whose novels have become a cultural phenomenon over the past decade—lodged an objection to the proposed data center back in January, writing to Mayo County Council that permission for the facility would increase carbon emissions and create a risk of blackouts.” – LitHub