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- Filmmaker Mike Leigh Says His New Film Is His Last
The 83-year-old director — one of the few to have won the top prize at both Cannes (Secrets and Lies) and Venice (Vera Drake) — has the autoimmune disorder myositis and says he’s physically unable to make another movie after Tender Loving Care, to be released this fall. – IndieWire
- Interlochen Center Issues Report On History Of Sexual Misconduct By Faculty
“The 97-page report spells out some 70 instances of sexual misconduct by multiple former faculty and staff spanning seven decades. … None of the 47 people accused in the report is currently employed by Interlochen. And owing to the amount of time that has passed, about a third of those accused are now dead.” – Interlochen Public Radio
- Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, One Of Frank Gehry’s Last Buildings, Finally Has An Opening Date
“After a slew of delays and controversies, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi has finally narrowed down its big debut to a single day: December 11. The winter inauguration keeps the museum (just about) on track to open in 2026, as previously promised, but arrives two decades after the mammoth museum project was first announced in 2006.” – Artnet
- Institutions reinventing themselves
Good Morning,
Several stories today about institutions discovering they don’t actually need a center. Alabama’s WLRH dropped NPR programming and its audience grew (AL.com); public media more broadly is finding that losing federal money surfaced a donor base it had assumed was tapped out (Current). Neither result makes the cuts a good idea, but still. Makes you think…
Rethinking the model shows up in Australia too, where four regional performing arts centers have pooled resources to originate the big work the capital-city companies used to (Limelight). In Buffalo, the AKG has split its director job in two (BTPM) — an admission that the singular-visionary model maybe should be rethought.
A terrific essay asks why “ancient history” still means Greece and Rome (Aeon).
And today’s saddest stories: the Kennedy Center is empty enough that the volunteer tour guide is now the story (NYT). And Betye Saar, who spent 70 years making art from what the culture threw away, has died four days short of 100 (Yahoo).
Lighter: Emily Wilson has seen Nolan’s Odyssey and would like a word (London Review of Books).
- A Chagall Etching Is Liberated After Languishing For 20 Years In Customs
The etching, L’Acrobate au violon (1924), and another work were confiscated from a shipment of art being taken from France to Switzerland in 2005 after French agents determined that the items weren’t authorized to leave the country. The pieces were rediscovered after two decades, and the Chagall is now on display in Besançon. – Artnet
- The Ancient World Beyond Greece, Rome and Egypt
The de facto equation of ‘ancient history’ with ancient Mediterranean history, at least in most of the Anglosphere, has endured for many generations. But we are on the cusp of a dramatic shift in perspective that is producing a much bigger, broader and more exciting view of ‘the ancient world’. – Aeon
- Meet The Costumer Who Paints New York City Ballet’s Pointe Shoes
“To be a shoe colorist for New York City Ballet, as Tim Foster has been for 15 years, is to occupy a small yet important niche. Most pointe shoes and ballet slippers are manufactured in a pale pink. But the company’s repertoire requires a rainbow of hues.” – The New York Times
- They’re Still Making New Discoveries At Pompeii
- Performing Arts Centers In Australia’s “Second Cities” Form A Network
Four of Australia’s leading regional performing arts organisations have joined forces to establish a new national pathway for developing and presenting large-scale Australian theatre, backed by funding from Creative Australia. – Limelight
- The Artist Helping Trump Remake How Washington DC Looks
Unlike other culture czars for the administration who have quickly come and gone, Mr. Taylor has an artistic background that makes him a distinct and persistent champion of the president’s vision. – The New York Times
- The Amazon’s Two Historic Opera Houses Get UNESCO World Heritage Status
The two venues — Teatro Amazonas in Manaus, the port in the central Amazon basin, and Theatro da Paz (sic) in Belem, the port at the mouth of the river — date from the late 19th-century rubber boom, which made those cities wealthy enough (for a while) to bring in major artists from Europe. – DPA (Yahoo!)
- Huntsville Public Radio Dropped NPR Programming — Here’s What Happened
Its listenership has grown since the change. WLRH is ranked as the No. 4 most listened-to station on its most recent Nielsen report, according to Brukner. It usually ranks around No. 10. – Alabama.com
- Maybe Losing Federal Funding Ended Up Being An Opportunity For Public Media?
After the federal funding loss, the industry saw that it hadn’t plateaued but instead “found a whole new level of support,” Chinn said. Stations saw record giving, with some even raising enough to cover the loss of federal funding. – Current
- Why Did Paramount Agree To Delay Its Warner Deal?
With a $7 million-per-day ticking fee that kicks in starting Oct. 1 — which would cost Paramount $650 million a quarter — why would Paramount agree to such a delay? The key lies in the nine words preceding the June 1 target date: “until five days after the outcome in a trial.” – The Wrap (MSN)
- Sure, We’ve Canceled A Bunch Of Previews, But Our “Game Of Thrones” Play Is Just Fine, Says RSC
“Ticketholders for five preview performances of the play, Game of Thrones: The Mad King, were more than a little dismayed last week when the shows, scheduled for July 20-24, were canceled. … A show on Saturday, July 25, was also called off just hours before the curtain was set to rise.” – The New York Times
- What If More Intelligence Doesn’t Make Us Better?
If we think of intelligence as the ability to extract information from data, then even an infinitely advanced model endowed with infinite compute will be limited by the fact that there’s a limited amount of information that can be extracted from the data. – Noahpinion
- Meet The Messi Of Ballet
In Argentina, they call her the Messi of ballet – although when it comes to who has the finest footwork, they should really be calling him the Núñez of football. – The Guardian
- Authors Have Mixed Feeling About Anthropic “Win”
One possible way for authors to get a fairer shake in the age of AI could be through the licensing of their work to AI companies. – NPR
- The Return Of “Tamizdat”: Why So Many New Russian Books Are Being Published Abroad
“Freedom Letters … (is) one of a growing number of cultural organizations that have joined forces with bookstores, wholesalers and book-fair organizers to build a literary resistance among the Russian diaspora. Together, they publish, sell and distribute books that can’t get through Russia’s restrictive new censorship laws.” – Bloomberg
- After Decades Of Anonymity, One Of The Guerilla Girls Unmasks Herself
“The founding member of Guerrilla Girls known by the pseudonym Liubov Popova has revealed her true identity: she is 83-year-old US-based painter and sculptor, Joyce Kozloff, a major figure in the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s.” – Ocula
- At The Empty Kennedy Center, A Volunteer Tour Guide Soldiers On
“In a dogged demonstration of love and loyalty for an institution that has elevated life for her and millions of visitors, (Sandy Weisswasser) still arrives every Monday for her tour day, knowing she may soon find the doors locked.” – The New York Times
- BuzzFeed To Lay Off More Than One-Third Of Its Staff
“In the first major restructuring move of Byron Allen‘s ownership tenure, … some 180 staffers (are) to be given pink slips companywide. … BuzzFeed, across all its units, had approximately 510 employees prior to the cuts. The company said it expects to see $29 million to $32 million in annualized savings.” – The Hollywood Reporter
- Buffalo AKG Museum (Formerly Albright-Knox) Splits Its Director Job In Two
“Cathleen Chaffee, who currently serves as … Chief Curator, is the museum’s incoming artistic director, while Jillian Jones, AKG’s deputy director, will become executive director. Under a new co-leadership structure, Chaffee will oversee the museum’s exhibitions and public-facing programs. Jones will guide overall strategy, operations and finances.” – Buffalo Toronto Public Media
- Artist Betye Saar Has Died, Four Days Before Her 100th Birthday
“(She) transformed collections of bigoted bric-a-brac — Sambo dolls, ceramic mammies and crude renderings of pickaninnies — into potent works of assemblage that mined the searing history of race in the United States,” most famously in her 1972 piece The Liberation of Aunt Jemima. – Los Angeles Times (Yahoo!)
- “Odyssey” Translator Emily Wilson Rips Christopher Nolan’s Movie To Shreds
“It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.” – London Review of Books
- American Classical Music at 250 — Take Three: The Orchestra Gap: Europe vs. the US
The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra going through the motions of Wagner’s “Liebestod” – “diminished motivation: as if the music
- Pop Music’s Biggest Transformations Are No Longer About The Music
On social media, fans don’t just follow an era – they help bring it to life. Through videos, memes, fashion, conversations and creative interpretations, they shape the meanings that come to define a project and extend an album beyond the music itself. – The Conversation
- Literary Crisis? I Think Not
I don’t want to totally wave away the issues these pieces are gesturing towards, but I’d argue the fear that we’re sliding into a post-literate society rests on a category error that feels endemic at this point. – Becoming Literary
- With So Much Abundance, Why Are We Bored?
For anyone with an Internet connection and a little discretionary income, the contemporary moment offers a superabundance of seductive distractions. Why then the pervasive mood of emptiness? Why are so many at once overstimulated and bored? – The Guardian
- Kennicott: Trump’s Smithsonian Complaints Are Laughable
Visitors who pass these signs on the way into the museum may find them concerning; when they pass them on the way out, they will probably find them laughably at odds with what they have just experienced. – Washington Post
- Vancouver Music Organizations Propose Four New Concert Halls
A coalition of 32 performing arts organizations has unveiled an ambitious vision to create four new and/or substantially renovated performance venues in Downtown Vancouver, with four possible location options identified. – Daily Hive
- How Museums Are Using Data To Shape The Experience
Perhaps the biggest opportunity created by detailed data is the ability to provide personalized recommendations. Supplementing traditional curation with analytical methods, more recently including machine learning and artificial intelligence, has become more common. – Ars Technica
- Students Are No Longer Reading Full Books
Before we ask our students to read difficult material, those of us who teach in college owe it to all of them to explain that reading books in their entirety matters. If we won’t, or can’t, then higher education will have a bleak future. – The Conversation
- AI Companies Are Buying Up Old Books And Destroying Them As They Scan
Once focused on helping libraries, distributors, and book shops find and sell books, ISBNdb now helps AI companies bulk-buy anywhere between 1,000 to one million books per order, according to 404. – Futurism
- The Failures To Save The Glasgow School Of Art Building
A 12-year saga of destruction, rebuilding and yet more destruction, all underscored by an unedifying seam of political and institutional wrangling, reached an apologetic conclusion of sorts, with the recent announcement that Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s exquisite art nouveau creation is unlikely to be rebuilt in its original form because of stratospheric cost. – The Guardian