“The desert festival … began Sunday, following a weekend of brutal storms that battered camps, tore down art installations and caused dozens of injuries.” (Worse, they destroyed the Orgy Dome.) “By midweek, vehicles were again entering the site, though muddy conditions forced … delays of up to eight hours each day.” - San Francisco Chronicle (MSN)
"It is hard to think that the world once fondly referred to as one “of letters” does not half-deserve its dwindling readerships and shattered finances when a volume of new writing, from a writer who continues to command a vast, maybe exorbitant, level of attention, is listed at such an absurdly inflated price." - Prospect
“Opera Naples has seen a 71 percent increase in ticket sales over the past two years, and a 310 percent jump in corporate sponsorships.” - WGCU (Fort Myers, FL)
“There’s a lot underwater, but what we’re able to bring up is limited, it’s only specific material according to strict criteria. The rest will remain part of our sunken heritage.” - ARTnews
At the peak of her career, aged 50, she was effectively banned from the stages of Europe, following Russia’s full-scale illegal invasion of Ukraine. Three years on, as nightly Russian bombardments of Ukrainian cities continue, Netrebko is due to return to London to play Tosca at Covent Garden. - The Observer
There is a seismic shift happening in the media landscape, fueled by the rise of digital platforms, declining print readership and mass layoffs in cultural journalism. It also points to a larger epidemic in the consumption of this kind of writing, and how people engage with this industry wide. - The Observer
It’s because there are cis men doing the cheerleading alongside the women — and the Minnesota Vikings squad has become the primary target, despite the fact that several other teams have had men on their squads for years. (Not to mention that, until World War II, cheerleading was done mostly by men.) - Vox (MSN)
A White House official described the exchange as productive and cordial and confirmed that White House senior associate Lindsey Halligan — who was tasked with enacting Trump’s March executive order on the Smithsonian — attended. - Washington Post (Yahoo)
As organizations respond to declining revenue and higher prices, expense budgets tightened by an average of 23%. This decrease includes significant dips in both personnel and non-personnel expenses for the first time since 2021. - SMUDataArts
Nine literary festivals parted ways with investment company Baillie Gifford last summer amid controversy over its involvement with fossil fuels and companies that operate in Israel, with the events industry having faced other major changes post-pandemic such as the rise of theatre-style tours. - The Bookseller
“Broadway musicals overwhelmingly focus on historical or fictional events; it’s exceptionally rare for an actress to cultivate a long relationship with a subject that she will embody through pop ballads and box steps. Especially one who’s investing in her project.” - The New York Times
Over the past several decades, philanthropy has become much more bureaucratic: if you want a grant from one of these well-endowed foundations, you have to be willing to navigate a large bureaucracy while specifying all of the legible ways in which your activity will have provable impact. - Palladium
"Freedom is neither a fixed idea nor a story of progress toward a predetermined goal. The history of American freedom is a tale of debates and struggles. Often, battles for control of the idea illustrate the contrast between the “negative” and “positive” meanings of freedom." - The Nation
Whatever the fate of modern DEI programs in corporate America, diversity of experience, thought, and ideology is a meritorious goal for a company to pursue. Done right, it will be good for business. - The Atlantic
You may not recognize the term, but you use pragmatics all the time; we all do. John McWhorter explains what exactly they are, and he predicted that when AI programs started incorporating pragmatics properly, chatbots would start become convincing to human users. - The New York Times
“Even as the subjects reported trusting online content less after the quiz, they still ranked (Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany’s largest circulation broadsheet daily) highly and turned to it more after being confronted with a quiz that showed how difficult it can be to tell fake from real.” - Nieman Lab
He and his wife, the Bolshoi ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, were high culture’s power couple in the late Soviet era; his works were staples of the repertoire. After the USSR fell, interest in Shchedrin’s music soared in Russia and abroad, where it was championed by Mstislav Rostropovich and Lorin Maazel. - The New York Times
The Deep South’s largest daily is going digital-only and will print its last hard-copy newspaper in December 31, ending a run which began in 1868. The closure comes despite the fact that the print version, with about 40,000 subscribers, is still profitable. - AP
“The move follows last month’s congressional rescission of more than $1 billion in federal public media funding. Vermont Public CEO Vijay Singh said the station will lose $2 million from its current budget.” Fifteen employees have been laid off; two further positions were reduced from full-time to part-time. - Inside Radio
"Freedom is neither a fixed idea nor a story of progress toward a predetermined goal. The history of American freedom is a tale of debates and struggles. Often, battles for control of the idea illustrate the contrast between the “negative” and “positive” meanings of freedom." - The Nation
Whatever the fate of modern DEI programs in corporate America, diversity of experience, thought, and ideology is a meritorious goal for a company to pursue. Done right, it will be good for business. - The Atlantic
Might the relationship between humanity and artificial intelligence follow a similar logic—a hope of consciousness helping consciousness across generations? Perhaps the best thing that we’re put here for is indeed to see; but our vision is limited. - 3 Quarks Daily
Reality, as we now understand, does not tend towards existential flourishing and eternal becoming. Instead, systems collapse, things break down, and time tends irreversibly towards disorder and eventual annihilation. - Aeon
To say that “reasonable people can disagree” can encourage suspension of judgment in response to important matters of personal and social concern. - 3 Quarks Daily
ChatGPT, as ever, was upbeat, inexhaustible, and, crucially, unfazed by failure. It made suggestions. It asked its own questions. Some avenues were promising; others were dead ends. - The New Yorker
“The desert festival … began Sunday, following a weekend of brutal storms that battered camps, tore down art installations and caused dozens of injuries.” (Worse, they destroyed the Orgy Dome.) “By midweek, vehicles were again entering the site, though muddy conditions forced … delays of up to eight hours each day.” - San Francisco Chronicle (MSN)
There is a seismic shift happening in the media landscape, fueled by the rise of digital platforms, declining print readership and mass layoffs in cultural journalism. It also points to a larger epidemic in the consumption of this kind of writing, and how people engage with this industry wide. - The Observer
A White House official described the exchange as productive and cordial and confirmed that White House senior associate Lindsey Halligan — who was tasked with enacting Trump’s March executive order on the Smithsonian — attended. - Washington Post (Yahoo)
As organizations respond to declining revenue and higher prices, expense budgets tightened by an average of 23%. This decrease includes significant dips in both personnel and non-personnel expenses for the first time since 2021. - SMUDataArts
Over the past several decades, philanthropy has become much more bureaucratic: if you want a grant from one of these well-endowed foundations, you have to be willing to navigate a large bureaucracy while specifying all of the legible ways in which your activity will have provable impact. - Palladium
Ben Davis: “In the non-metaphorical world, slurry means an unresolved mix of liquid and solid. …. The word comes to mind with this very pervasive kind of content that’s gunking up my feed, where different content types are running together into one half-resolved substance. Where everything assumes the qualities of everything else.” - Artnet
“Opera Naples has seen a 71 percent increase in ticket sales over the past two years, and a 310 percent jump in corporate sponsorships.” - WGCU (Fort Myers, FL)
The busy 29-year-old maestro, soon to start music directorships at both the Chicago Symphony and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, will relinquish the post of chief conductor in the Norwegian capital at the end of the coming season. - Moto Perpetuo
Tim Greiving: “As the recipient of those quotes, I want to try and clear it up. … It’s true that he said to me, ‘I never liked film music very much.’ … In that particular conversation he was specifically talking about the complicated role of putting film music on a concert program.” - The...
"No Suno output contains anything like a ‘sample’ from a recording in the training set, so no Suno output can infringe the rights in anything in the training set, as a matter of law.” - Music Business Worldwide
Julian Wachner, who established Trinity Church Wall Street as a dynamic force in New York’s classical music scene, only to be dismissed following an investigation into sexual misconduct, admitted to Indianapolis police that he had downloaded child sex abuse material, though he pled not guilty to charges. - Indianapolis Star
“There’s a lot underwater, but what we’re able to bring up is limited, it’s only specific material according to strict criteria. The rest will remain part of our sunken heritage.” - ARTnews
Museums serving audiences of color are becoming targets of immigration agents. Amid these changes, the voices of some directors and curators seem to have dimmed both here in the U.S. and internationally, perhaps reasonably seeking to avoid unwanted attention. As much as I understand this impulse, I cannot embrace it; instead, I choose to...
For those caught up in the experiment, it has been torrid in the extreme. Since 2019, hundreds of employees have left Sotheby’s—up to a quarter of the workforce, according to some estimates—including dozens of specialists who bring in the consignments essential to the company’s bottom line. - The New Yorker
Portrait of a Lady, by Baroque artist Giuseppe Ghislandi, was part of the trove of works belonging to Amsterdam art dealer Jacques Goudstikker which Hermann Goering bought up in a forced sale. Dutch journalists noticed the painting in a real-estate-listing photo in Argentina, but it was gone when police arrived to search. - AP
Crop art — works using corn kernels, sunflower seeds, or other agricultural products as their media — has long been a feature of the Minnesota State Fair. Next month, nine works, the pick of this year’s (ahem) crop, will be on display at the museum. - The Minnesota Star Tribune
"It is hard to think that the world once fondly referred to as one “of letters” does not half-deserve its dwindling readerships and shattered finances when a volume of new writing, from a writer who continues to command a vast, maybe exorbitant, level of attention, is listed at such an absurdly inflated price."...
Nine literary festivals parted ways with investment company Baillie Gifford last summer amid controversy over its involvement with fossil fuels and companies that operate in Israel, with the events industry having faced other major changes post-pandemic such as the rise of theatre-style tours. - The Bookseller
You may not recognize the term, but you use pragmatics all the time; we all do. John McWhorter explains what exactly they are, and he predicted that when AI programs started incorporating pragmatics properly, chatbots would start become convincing to human users. - The New York Times
The Deep South’s largest daily is going digital-only and will print its last hard-copy newspaper in December 31, ending a run which began in 1868. The closure comes despite the fact that the print version, with about 40,000 subscribers, is still profitable. - AP
“CliffsNotes for students who struggle to get through Brontë, Woolf, or Shakespeare seem laughably analog in the time of ChatGPT, but CliffsNotes offer genuine analysis and even scholarship. The difference between CliffsNotes and today’s computerized counterparts encapsulates the disintegration of knowledge, particularly of reading comprehension.” - Literary Hub
Unlike his contemporary and admirer T.S. Eliot, he didn’t see history as ending “with a whimper” but rather with a long, subsiding, pleasurable sigh of recollection. For Constantine Cavafy, when life and history came close to their ending, poetry began. - The New Republic
“Even as the subjects reported trusting online content less after the quiz, they still ranked (Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany’s largest circulation broadsheet daily) highly and turned to it more after being confronted with a quiz that showed how difficult it can be to tell fake from real.” - Nieman Lab
“The move follows last month’s congressional rescission of more than $1 billion in federal public media funding. Vermont Public CEO Vijay Singh said the station will lose $2 million from its current budget.” Fifteen employees have been laid off; two further positions were reduced from full-time to part-time. - Inside Radio
The sometime-director of blockbusters hasn’t worked in Hollywood since getting fired from Bohemian Rhapsody in 2017. He moved to Israel several years ago and has reportedly completed a feature starring Jon Voight (another figure in the industry’s doghouse) set during Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon during that country's civil war. - Variety
The problem is that you aren’t downloading the movie, to own and watch forever; you’re just getting access to it on Amazon’s servers – a right that only lasts as long as Amazon also has access to the film, which depends on capricious licensing agreements that vary from title to title. - The Guardian
Algorithm movies usually exhibit easy-to-follow story beats that leave no viewer behind; under this regime, exposition is no longer a screenwriting faux pas. - The Guardian
There are 27 rural public radio stations in the state, most of them serving small communities with little other media and hundreds of miles from any city. The stations are the only source for local news and, crucially, emergency weather alerts, and federal funding comprised up to half of their budgets. - Inside Radio
It’s because there are cis men doing the cheerleading alongside the women — and the Minnesota Vikings squad has become the primary target, despite the fact that several other teams have had men on their squads for years. (Not to mention that, until World War II, cheerleading was done mostly by men.) - Vox...
Interestingly, Ferri has no prior connection to the Vienna State Opera. ... She sees this as a positive, especially in light of the two years she’s had to prepare for the role. “I have no personal agenda, and it gave me a lot of freedom to step back and observe.” - Pointe Magazine
Anthony Krutzkamp, a Kentucky native, is currently both artistic and executive director at Sacramento Ballet, where he achieved record ticket sales, formed a second company, and started the organization's first endowment. He succeeds outgoing co-artistic directors Mikelle Bruzina and Harald Uwe Kern in October. - Louisville Courier Journal
Stephen Nakagawa, a former dancer with the Washington Ballet, was hired just days after the Kennedy Center fired its entire dance programming staff. Nakagawa had written a letter to the center’s president, Richard Grenell, saying he wants to help “end the dominance of leftist ideologies in the arts.” - The New York Times
Then a seemingly random, deeply senseless knife attack nearly killed her. Now she tells the story of her recovery and return to dance in a documentary. - West Australian
“Everyone can have a bad day at the office. But for most of us, it doesn’t take place in front of millions of viewers,” argues Lyndsey Winship, who points out that objecting to Rachael Gunn being a white academic amounts to gatekeeping who’s allowed to do what kind of dance. - The Guardian
“Broadway musicals overwhelmingly focus on historical or fictional events; it’s exceptionally rare for an actress to cultivate a long relationship with a subject that she will embody through pop ballads and box steps. Especially one who’s investing in her project.” - The New York Times
About 71% of theaters there have seen audience numbers improve since the COVID shutdowns, though only 41% are back to pre-2020 levels. The major problem right now is that 30% of theatergoers in the city, and 22% in the region, use mass transit, which is undergoing savage cuts. - The Philadelphia Inquirer (MSN)
Tshidi Manye has played the mandrill shaman who sings “Circle of Life” in roughly 9,000 performances, a large majority of them on Broadway. - The New York Times
“Hip-hop, (songwriter Dave Hook) argues, has never blandly replicated itself, but always adapted to new circumstances. … By giving hip-hop a Scottish voice and, in this case, bringing it into the world of William Wallace, Hook believes he is staying true to the genre’s political roots.” - The Guardian
If it works for the few but not more widely – in particular, if it doesn’t work for global-majority artists or those breaking with popular forms – what does that mean about the fringe as a marketplace for the wider industry? - The Stage
The Citizens Theatre closed in 2018 for what was supposed to be a three-year rehabilitation. The COVID pandemic, and the ensuing inflation, both delayed the completion of the project by years and caused expenses to soar; the final cost of the renovation will likely be double the original £20 million budget. - BBC (MSN)
At the peak of her career, aged 50, she was effectively banned from the stages of Europe, following Russia’s full-scale illegal invasion of Ukraine. Three years on, as nightly Russian bombardments of Ukrainian cities continue, Netrebko is due to return to London to play Tosca at Covent Garden. - The Observer
He and his wife, the Bolshoi ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, were high culture’s power couple in the late Soviet era; his works were staples of the repertoire. After the USSR fell, interest in Shchedrin’s music soared in Russia and abroad, where it was championed by Mstislav Rostropovich and Lorin Maazel. - The New York Times
“At the height of folk revival, Hickerson began what became more than a quarter-century tenure at the Library of Congress in 1963, swiftly establishing himself as a knowledgeable guide to the sometimes-convoluted collections of recordings, documents and oral histories that were vital to performers, songwriters and historians of the genre.” - Billboard
With colleague Joan Woodbury, who died in 2023, she founded the state’s first contemporary troupe, Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, in 1964 and developed it into a prominent ensemble. Though she relinquished the helm at the turn of the millennium, she remained a part-time employee for the rest of her life. - The Salt Lake Tribune
“For more than five decades at W.W. Norton, (he) waded into the so-called slush pile ... to discover unsung authors and to help fashion sometimes amorphous antecedents into sizzling, culturally significant potboilers” such as Liar’s Poker, The Big Short, Moneyball, The Perfect Storm, and Master and Commander. - The New York Times
Havergal, with his co-directors, the designer Philip Prowse and the playwright and translator Robert David MacDonald, ran the beautiful jewel of a Victorian theatre on the south side of the Clyde in the Gorbals from 1969 to 2003, the longest tenure in post of any British director. - The Guardian
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As it looks forward to its 87th season, Pittsburgh Opera—one of America’s most artistically respected opera companies—invites recommendations/applications for the position of General Director
Stephen Nakagawa, a former dancer with the Washington Ballet, was hired just days after the Kennedy Center fired its entire dance programming staff. Nakagawa had written a letter to the center’s president, Richard Grenell, saying he wants to help “end the dominance of leftist ideologies in the arts.” - The New York Times
“Three of Pittsburgh’s most venerable troupes announced they are looking into ways they might join forces to survive. The announcement by Pittsburgh Public Theater, City Theatre and Pittsburgh CLO came in the form of an email to subscribers and other supporters.” - WESA (Pittsburgh)
This is a playbook we’ve all seen before. Rigoberto Gonzalez, whose painting about refugees crossing the border wall was deemed “objectionable,” says that “the White House list reminds him of the 'degenerate art’ exhibitions in 1930s Germany.” - NPR
Bluesky: “We think this law creates challenges that go beyond its child safety goals, and creates significant barriers that limit free speech and disproportionately harm smaller platforms.” - Wired
Mostly, they’re knuckling under. One might, if one were a student of history, think of this as totalitarian. “The chilling effect on museum programming at the heart of artistic experimentation and the historic role of art to occasionally provoke strong reactions in viewers.” - The New York Times
“Having survived 9-11, the Covid pandemic, the 2008 financial crash and the 2021 protests that led to the resignation of chairman Leon Black over his connections with Jeffrey Epstein, it’s difficult to imagine another person who could have successfully weathered so many storms.” - El País English
“The San Francisco Chronicle’s review says the production is ‘the most talked-about play in S.F. It’s also terrible.’” But that might be far, far from the point. - Washington Post (MSN)
“‘I call it Butchered,’” the British sculptor told the Guardian. ‘I’m referring to the butchering of our environment. It is at the simplest level blood on a canvas. A reference to the destruction – the bleeding – of our globe of our state, of being.’” - The Guardian (UK)
“The top official overseeing theater at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is stepping down, throwing into question the stability of one of the venue’s most important sources of box office revenue.” - The New York Times
“About 350 of the displaced artists are working again in the district. Some are actively involved in the continuing recovery process, waiting to return to the home that welcomed them. Others have decided not to return. For them, the risk of another storm outweighed anything else.” - The New York Times
“Weeks after last month’s event, the museum network’s chief executive, Steven Knapp, acknowledged to employees that it was a violation of policy, accusing the fund-raiser’s organizers of providing misleading information.” - The New York Times
His astounding social media fame has inspired a musical, Saturday Night Live skits, stand-up routines, academic inquiries into the regulation of health care algorithms and the psychosocial effects of chronic pain, and a counter-movement of outraged commentators scolding anyone who would make light of a murder. - The New York Times
