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Missy Mazzoli’s new opera about the opioid crisis is a tragicomedy, with singing sheep, built on the premise that new opera gets boring when composers forget the job includes entertaining somebody (The Guardian).
London’s National Gallery made the same decision more literally, convening a 50-person citizens’ assembly to help shape its future — and drew conservative fire for asking at all (Artnet). The objection isn’t to the answers. It’s to the premise that the public has standing to give them.
What an audience knows changes what it hears. In a new Cambridge study, readers rated AI-generated stories highest — as long as they believed a human wrote them (The Bookseller).
A new wave of teen drama runs on slow indie pacing and longing instead of engagement metrics (The Guardian), and Malo Chapuy paints 21st-century collapse using early-Renaissance panel technique (ARTnews) — old tools, chosen on purpose.
Meanwhile Washington’s National Gallery quietly studied whether an IndyCar race on the Mall will rattle its paintings, and won’t say what it found (Washington Post).
All of our stories below.