Good Morning,
The Venice Biennale opens Saturday and most of today’s biggest stories are about what isn’t there. Iran withdrew, and The Conversation reads it as the geopolitics finally catching up with the global art circuit. ARTnews visited the US pavilion and found it essentially empty — an unintentional comment on the Trump administration’s call for art that “promotes American values.” And Pussy Riot, predictably, stormed the Russian pavilion (The Guardian).
Elsewhere, institutions are buckling in less photogenic ways. A French parliamentary report proposes gutting public broadcasting by 25 percent, with the entertainment broadcast budget cut 75 percent (The Guardian). San Diego County scrambled to stand up a $2.75M arts grant program just as the city moves to gut its own (San Diego Union-Tribune). And programmatic ads are quietly creeping into public radio (Inside Radio) — the kind of slow capture that doesn’t make headlines until it has.
Meanwhile Wired reports on a study that finds that AI assistance makes problem-solvers worse at problem-solving when the assistance disappears. Shocking.
In San Francisco, Lawrence Halprin’s brutalist Vaillancourt Fountain caught fire mid-demolition (SF Chronicle) — one way to settle an architecture debate.
All of our stories below.
