Italian law strongly protects its heritage. The definition of cultural heritage itself under Italian law is broad: any works which “are of artistic, historical, archaeological and ethno-anthropological interest”. - The Conversation
"I cannot expect to have a good death if my life did not accomplish certain specific things. And these things are not material." - Los Angeles Review of Books
“The global health contingency caused by COVID-19 forced the institutions of the different levels of government to prioritize the allocation of resources for the health care of the population.” - Artnet
For many museum visitors, the “Medici” cited in the title of the Metropolitan Museum’s current show (subtitled: “Portraits & Politics, 1512-1570”) will evoke the names of artists from the golden age of Renaissance painting...
Kirkus Reviews, which previews books for booksellers, critics, and others in the know, has just previewed my forthcoming Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music.
To perceive the outside world, our brain combines signals entering our brains through our eyes with what we expect the world to look like based on our past experiences. This means that our perception of the outside world is strongly influenced by what we believe. - Nautilus
When online surveyor YouGov conducted a survey asking over 8,000 US adults, “Do you believe that the Earth is round or flat?,” only 84 percent of respondents felt certain that the Earth is round. - LitHub
As the Blitz and other collective crises have taught us, resilience is not a given and has to be managed with an understanding of peoples’ fears and wishes, including their need for connectedness. - Psyche
Even our most mundane habitual routines actually display a great deal of intelligence. Indeed, they are often intelligently context-sensitive and flexible in such a way as can support and structure our goals and projects. - Psyche
Just over a week after Liverpool's waterfront was stripped of World Heritage status, the chief of the relevant UNESCO committee warns that the same could happen to other British monuments — and not only Stonehenge — if the government doesn't do more to prevent "ill-advised development." - The Guardian
The results of the survey are a snapshot of the art community’s struggle for financial stability even before COVID-19 shut down galleries and museums across the city. - Los Angeles Magazine
"Countries across Europe are extending the use of so called vaccine passports or health passes to allow for entry into bars, cultural sites or sporting events, but some countries are employing them more than others. Here's what you need to know." - The Local
Despite last year’s dip, there’s reason to think that the cultural sector is coming back strong. Even amid global uncertainty about travel, cities doubled down on investment in cultural attractions. - Artnet
Granted, the program was only just gearing up when the pandemic closed arts venues, but officials' hopes that 18-year-olds would use their few-strings-attached €300 to sample high culture are being punctured by reality. - The New York Times
"Australia's arts and cultural sector needs a reconstruction program of substantial, coordinated and sustained public investment if it is to survive, let alone 'snap back', after the COVID shutdown that has shredded the plans and budgets of arts organisations and artists." - The Guardian
Charles Packer's The Crown of Thorns premiered in Sydney in 1863 and was considered a masterpiece, sung every year at Eastertime by Australian choral societies — until everyone dropped it after 1936. Then, a few years ago, a collector found a score in a secondhand bookshop. - ABC (Australia)
The new HBO film Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage offers a chilling demonstration of how greed, cultural rot, and the vagaries of crowd behavior can make a concert into a generation-defining thing for all the wrong reasons. - The Atlantic
"From world-famous musicians to anonymous internet commentators, discrimination toward Asian musicians contains an ugly, common tenor: In this music, they will not replace us." - Van
As for the rest of Spotify’s Q2 2021, the company reported 365 million monthly active users—a growth of 22% YOY. Total revenue was €2.33 billion, or about $2.75 billion. That’s an increase of 23% YOY. - Fast Company
Yorùbá speech, that is. The West African language is tonal, using three different pitches, and dùndún drummers can adjust the tension on their drum heads to change pitch, stroke by stroke, to match Yorùbá syllables and words. - Smithsonian Magazine
With the appointment of Artistic Director Yuval Sharon and Associate Artistic Director Christine Goerke, MOT’s Director of Marketing and Communications is crucial in expressing the company's commitment to re-define the experience of opera in Detroit.
New Music USA is seeking a creative, energetic, and strategic Director of Development who will lead the renewal and growth of contributed revenue from individuals and institutions in an exciting phase of our organization’s development.
Serving in a co-leadership role with the President & CEO, the next Artistic Director will lead the artistic vision and focus of the Cincinnati Ballet and the Otto M. Budig Academy...
An equal co-leader with Artistic Director John Langs, the Managing Director will create the artistic, financial, and institutional course that will best promote and serve ACT’s mission and values as set forth by the board.
Providing strategic leadership and financial oversight, the Managing Director will be responsible for all aspects of the organization’s operations, with a particular focus on fundraising
Italian law strongly protects its heritage. The definition of cultural heritage itself under Italian law is broad: any works which “are of artistic, historical, archaeological and ethno-anthropological interest”. - The Conversation
“The global health contingency caused by COVID-19 forced the institutions of the different levels of government to prioritize the allocation of resources for the health care of the population.” - Artnet
In 2019, alums and students at George Washington High School protested what they saw as racist imagery in a set of Victor Arnautoff frescoes there, and the school board voted to cover them up. Now a judge says that decision violated state law. - San Francisco Chronicle
On Thursday, a 14-year-old visiting the attraction with his family jumped to his death; his was the third suicide there in less than a year. Said developer Stephen Ross, "We thought we did everything that would really prevent this." - The Daily Beast
The Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum developed a way to provide guides when COVID kept them from coming in: visitors can stop at strategically placed monitors and talk with offsite docents in real time. Folks on both sides of the screen seem to love it. - Slate
Archaeologists found the 6th century BC rock carving of King Nabonidus, along with 26 lines of cuneiform, in the north of the country. - Smithsonian Magazine
Will a larger, more activist union make things fairer? Or will business remain more or less as usual? "We asked several industry sources and union folks to give us their best guesses and hopes about how this momentous change will play out." - American Theatre
Actors' Equity is requiring vaccinations. COVID safety officers are being added to production teams, and a leading epidemiologist has been hired to train them. Peter Marks looks into how the new measures are being put into practice. - The Washington Post
"His fall from grace in the mid-1950s was sudden and unexpected. From the mid-1930s he'd been the darling of the West End." Then along came the British theatre's Angry Young Men, followed by critic Kenneth Tynan, whose savaging torpedoed Rattigan's plays for a generation. - The Stage
"I hope that the theatre generally, will be open to the idea that when you limit yourself to doing only primarily white theatre for primarily white audiences, there is well over half the city you are excluding.” - American Theatre
First, Stephen Sondheim couldn’t come up with songs because he didn't think James Lapine's script needed any. So began a cascade of calamities, right up to the Broadway opening, until the show shocked everyone involved by getting 10 Tony nominations and a Pulitzer Prize. - The New York Times
Arthur Jacobus's 12-year tenure has seen the company rebrand itself as an organization committed to creativity and innovation, followed by a reversal of that initiative with the forced departure of artistic director John McFall at the end of the 2015–16 season and the hiring of Gennadi Nedvigin. - ArtsATL
Principals from ABT (Calvin Royal III and Misty Copeland), NY City Ballet (Tiler Peck), the Martha Graham company, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane, Ballet Hispánico, Passion Fruit Dance Company, and Kaatsbaan (Stella Abrera), plus Savion Glover himself, consider the present and near future. - Harper's Bazaar
"These days, dance brings me a deep pain and pronounced lack of joy that I never fathomed it could. The excitement with which I cheer on my friends as they return to in-person performances is mixed with a bitter and, dare I say, resentful sadness." - Dance Magazine
Alas, the practice goes at least back to the days of jazz dance at the start of the 20th century, when the first legal battles over choreography were fought. - The Conversation
"Success isn’t how many awards you win, or how many five-star reviews you get. Success is built on how quickly you bounce back, how you take the lessons. Everything in between is just wounded ego.” - The Guardian
The 39-year-old's decision to end his 20-year career with the company next May comes three years after the scandal roiled City Ballet and two weeks after colleague Georgina Pazcoguin revealed in a book that he would regularly tweak her nipples as a greeting. - The New York Times
"I cannot expect to have a good death if my life did not accomplish certain specific things. And these things are not material." - Los Angeles Review of Books
"This was a question I also grappled with: could my creative prostitution involve high art, be the literary equivalent of Belle de Jour (1967), stylish and sexy, or would I have to roil in whorish filth, using cheap metaphors and knocked-off cliches?" - Aeon
The manuscript was unfinished but well underway when Emily died at age 30. The legend has been that Charlotte, envious and conservative, threw it in the fireplace. Scholar Emily Zarevich considers whether this could be true and what might have been in the lost work. - JSTOR Daily
Translations exist only in their own time. While literature is out of time, translations are always, in the hapless plod of linear time, out of joint. - The Walrus
When Jeff Lowenfels began writing for the Anchorage Daily News in 1976, he had not expected that one day one of his readers would grow okra there. (The pod is native to Africa.) - The New York Times Magazine
The 3,500-year-old artifact, covered with cuneiform writing from the "dream" section of The Epic of Gilgamesh, is part of the enormous collection of objects acquired by Hobby Lobby founder Steve Green that turn out to have been illegally looted. - Artnet
If video games are play, they’re an expression of our highest capacities as humans—our love of freedom, of imagination, and creative whim. But when they are work then our affection for them is an extraordinary concession to modern conditions of unfreedom. - Dissent
A star of her scale taking on a studio of an even bigger scale, potentially burning whatever bridges remain, is an unusual gambit but it’s a fight that’s been steadily brewing since the pandemic sped up the streaming wars last year. - The Guardian
Arthur, starring everyone's favorite cartoon aardvark, debuted on PBS in 1996 and will air its final season in 2022. In fact, one of the show's writers said that production wrapped two years ago. - The New York Times
The network's founders hoped to supplant Fox News, but viewership is down by half since January. Why? Says one expert, "Newsmax is just not good. … Most of their lineup is … people who couldn't make it at Fox News. They just don't have any talent." - Vox
Scarlett Johansson is suing Disney over the simultaneous digital rollout of “Black Widow,” saying it breaches her contract with the company to release the film in theaters first. - Washington Post
In four short years, Netflix has done more to reshape the way that movies are made, distributed and consumed than perhaps any other single company in the history of the film business. - Variety
"It is widely assumed that Boulanger consciously renounced composition after her sister died in order to champion Lili's music and focus on teaching. But the biographical reality is more complicated." - The New York Times
Mr. Popeil’s mastery of television marketing, dating to the 1950s but spanning several decades, made him nearly as recognizable onscreen as the TV and movie stars of his era. - The New York Times
The compound at Austin Friars, known to readers of Hilary Mantel's trilogy, was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666. But a historian has used what's survived of Cromwell's own archives, along with later drawings and surveys, to work out a clearer idea of what it looked like. -...
His 42nd Street Ballroom, which has mesmerized passersby for decades at New York's Port Authority Bus Terminal, is but one of the 300 "audio-kinetic ball machines" that he created for museums, children's hospitals, transportation hubs, and the like. - The New York Times
"You only have to look a bit closer at Damon's career, at the notion of Matt Damon, Movie Star we have in our heads, to see that nice might be an ingenious sleight-of-hand, an illusion of sorts. Because that darkness is there." - The New York Times Magazine
"Such was the ire that the magazine transition published a Testimony Against Gertrude Stein. Matisse raged at his wife being described as having a mouth like a horse while Braque railed against her insistence on Cubism being a wholly Spanish affair." (Worse, she called Hemingway "yellow.") - BBC
