Yes, the filmmaker behind The Lobster, The Favourite, Poor Things and Bugonia has made ads for Squarespace (the website-building platform) and Grubhub to air during Super Bowl LX. The Grubhub spot is untitled, but the Squarespace commercial is titled Unavailable, and, of course, it stars Emma Stone. - The Hollywood Reporter
The vanishingly rare presentations of stage work, whether dance, opera or theatre, are invariably acquisitions from cultural organisations that provided most of the funding and all of the production expertise. - The Conversation
Not just any opera, mind you: the story is one to which he has a long connection: the Pushkin/Tchaikovsky Eugene Onegin. The person who invited Fiennes is his longtime friend Semyon Bychkov, and the production is at the company where Bychkov was just appointed music director, the Paris Opera. - Prospect
Intelligence and consciousness are different things. Intelligence is mainly about doing: solving a crossword puzzle, assembling some furniture, navigating a tricky family situation, walking to the shop — all involve intelligent behavior of some kind. - Noema
A massive new study comparing more than 100,000 people with today’s most advanced AI systems delivers a surprising result: generative AI can now beat the average human on certain creativity tests. - Science Daily
Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, published in 1851. Let’s consider it. Is there another book at once so good and so bad, so thrilling and so boring, so authentic to the currents of the soul and so hideously contrived, so stunningly patrolled by dreamlike visions and so crushed by its own intellectual baggage? - The Atlantic
The Switzerland-based ballet competition, known for launching the careers of many star dancers, takes place next week. Here executive and artistic director Kathryn Bradney explains to a reporter how the 90-odd contestants are selected, how the weeklong event is structured, and how the important part comes the day afterward. - Pointe Magazine
In 2025, Yannick Nézet-Séguin tops our list of busiest conductors, with an amazing 120 listed engagements – and looking back over the last decade of data, Nézet-Séguin has been a consistent presence among the busiest. - BachTrack
“I’m going to be putting tariffs on movies from outside of the country,” the president told The California Post in an interview shared Monday. “If they’re made in Canada, if they’re made in all these places, because Los Angeles has lost the movie industry.” - Yahoo
The First Amendment ignores the harms that speech inflicts. It is dangerous, in other words, not for the threat it poses to power, but for the harms it inflicts on the vulnerable. - The Nation
When CBS Sunday Morning visited, its crew found young dance students silently meditating. Two former students say, however, that they were allowed limited contact with family, berated by teachers, physically pushed to the point of injury, and forbidden to seek medical attention. - CBS News
Cultural outsiders experience being an outsider as synonymous with being deficient. Eager to ‘fit in’, and to avoid feeling inferior, they seek validation from outside to feel good about themselves, focus on achievement, and rigidly conform to societal expectations. - Psyche
The dissident artist, who in 2011 had his passport confiscated and spent 81 days in prison, left when his documents were returned in 2015 and has lived in Europe since. Last month he took the risk of re-detention to visit — and things went smoothly. What had he missed most while away? Speaking Chinese. - CNN
“Defendants in Crookshanks v. Elizabeth (Colo.) School District, who had appealed to the 10th Circuit after a federal judge ordered the district to restore 19 censored books, motioned to dismiss their own appeal on January 20. A three-judge panel had been scheduled to hear oral argument on January 23.” - Publishers Weekly
While the reductions aren’t as severe as in Berlin (€130 million) or France (€150 million), the Austrian capital has withdrawn €5 million from several theaters, including the award-winning Theater an der Wien, €250,000 from the Vienna Philharmonic’s Summer Night Concert, and €1.3 million from the Wien Museum. - The New York Times
The dinner theater/circus arts hybrid's founder says that attendance never really recovered from COVID, but that, this past fall, there began a fatal decline in sales which he attributed to an uncertain economy and fear of ICE. - WBEZ (Chicago)
“Free First Thursday, which waives the general admission fee for all Bay Area residents from 4-8 p.m. on the first Thursday of each month, has been temporarily halted starting in February. … No return date has been set, but SFMOMA plans to announce a new program series in the summer.” - San Francisco Chronicle (Yahoo!)
Last Saturday, as museum staff were preparing the building for the winter storm, a sprinkler malfunction caused water to pour from a ceiling near the gift shop. The building was evacuated and closed for this week, but full repairs will require one additional week. - ARTnews
“Six months after the funding cuts, few public TV or radio stations have closed their doors. Many have scraped together a patchwork of funding from concerned donors, philanthropies or government grants. Others, facing insurmountable budget issues, have resorted to mergers with bigger stations to stay online.” - The New York Times
“The Outsiders, … which opened in April 2024 and won the Tony Award for best new musical two months later, has recouped its $22 million capitalization costs. … The milestone, though occasionally achieved by plays and musical revivals, is an increasingly rare one for new musicals.” - The New York Times
Intelligence and consciousness are different things. Intelligence is mainly about doing: solving a crossword puzzle, assembling some furniture, navigating a tricky family situation, walking to the shop — all involve intelligent behavior of some kind. - Noema
A massive new study comparing more than 100,000 people with today’s most advanced AI systems delivers a surprising result: generative AI can now beat the average human on certain creativity tests. - Science Daily
The First Amendment ignores the harms that speech inflicts. It is dangerous, in other words, not for the threat it poses to power, but for the harms it inflicts on the vulnerable. - The Nation
Cultural outsiders experience being an outsider as synonymous with being deficient. Eager to ‘fit in’, and to avoid feeling inferior, they seek validation from outside to feel good about themselves, focus on achievement, and rigidly conform to societal expectations. - Psyche
Entertainment is about diversion and pleasure. Fun. It occupies our attention, distracts us from boredom, and amuses. But many things in life can do that: food, games, conversation, idle distractions. If we define art solely as entertainment, we risk conflating it with any activity that gives pleasure, and end up with nothing distinctive about art. - 3Quarks Daily
While the reductions aren’t as severe as in Berlin (€130 million) or France (€150 million), the Austrian capital has withdrawn €5 million from several theaters, including the award-winning Theater an der Wien, €250,000 from the Vienna Philharmonic’s Summer Night Concert, and €1.3 million from the Wien Museum. - The New York Times
He posted on Truth Social, referring to cascading cancellations and plummeting ticket sales, “People don’t realize that The Trump Kennedy Center suffered massive deficits for many years and, like everything else, I merely came in to save it and, if possible, make it far better than ever before!” - The Daily Beast
Trump officials have ordered national parks to remove dozens of signs and displays related to climate change, environmental protection and settlers’ mistreatment of Native Americans in a renewed push to implement President Donald Trump’s executive order on “restoring truth and sanity to American history.” - Washington Post
In 2023, the United States accounts for roughly two-thirds of all cultural exports ($18.1 billion, or 67%) and imports ($22.2 billion, or 62%). Canada had a $4.2 billion trade deficit with the USA in 2023. - Statistical Insights on the Arts
A £1.5 billion investment is welcome news for a sector buffeted by years of austerity and inflation (not to mention the long tail of pandemic shutdowns). But the devil is in the detail, as ever, and the wider context: definitions of “infrastructure” beyond the landmarks, and its relationship to cultural workers. - The Conversation
“For the authoritarian, culture is the enemy,” he added. “The uncultured and ignorant and tyrannical don’t like it. And they take steps against it, which we see every day.” - The Guardian
Not just any opera, mind you: the story is one to which he has a long connection: the Pushkin/Tchaikovsky Eugene Onegin. The person who invited Fiennes is his longtime friend Semyon Bychkov, and the production is at the company where Bychkov was just appointed music director, the Paris Opera. - Prospect
In 2025, Yannick Nézet-Séguin tops our list of busiest conductors, with an amazing 120 listed engagements – and looking back over the last decade of data, Nézet-Séguin has been a consistent presence among the busiest. - BachTrack
“(My) Symphony No. 15 is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, and the values of the Kennedy Center today are in direct conflict with the message of the Symphony,” wrote the 89-year-old composer. “Therefore, I feel an obligation to withdraw this Symphony premiere from the Kennedy Center under its current leadership.” - The Washington Post...
The Cliburn International Amateur Piano Competition, founded in 1999, was held eight times, most recently in 2022. News of its retirement comes just a few days after the announcement of the inaugural Cliburn International Competition for Conductors, to be held in June 2028 in Houston. - The Violin Channel
The renowned countertenor/impresario, who took the helm of the admired-but-struggling company in 2024, has added two years to his contract, which now ends after the 2028-29 season. The company has also extended the contract of music director Corrado Rovaris through May 2029. - The Philadelphia Inquirer (MSN)
“Free First Thursday, which waives the general admission fee for all Bay Area residents from 4-8 p.m. on the first Thursday of each month, has been temporarily halted starting in February. … No return date has been set, but SFMOMA plans to announce a new program series in the summer.” - San Francisco Chronicle...
Last Saturday, as museum staff were preparing the building for the winter storm, a sprinkler malfunction caused water to pour from a ceiling near the gift shop. The building was evacuated and closed for this week, but full repairs will require one additional week. - ARTnews
Over 50% of the AAM survey’s respondents reported fewer visitors than in 2019 and 29% reported “declines tied to weakened travel and tourism and/or economic uncertainty”. This, of course, varies hugely from state to state. - The Art Newspaper
Before dawn last Wednesday, two men broke into the Silver Museum in the Dutch city of Doesburg and stole every piece there except a few ceramic items on temporary display. - ARTnews
Workers on Thursday removed the exhibit, which included biographical details about the nine people enslaved by the Washingtons at the presidential mansion. Just their names — Austin, Paris, Hercules, Christopher Sheels, Richmond, Giles, Oney Judge, Moll and Joe — remain engraved into a cement wall. - Bucks County Beacon
Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, published in 1851. Let’s consider it. Is there another book at once so good and so bad, so thrilling and so boring, so authentic to the currents of the soul and so hideously contrived, so stunningly patrolled by dreamlike visions and so crushed by its own intellectual baggage? - The...
“Defendants in Crookshanks v. Elizabeth (Colo.) School District, who had appealed to the 10th Circuit after a federal judge ordered the district to restore 19 censored books, motioned to dismiss their own appeal on January 20. A three-judge panel had been scheduled to hear oral argument on January 23.” - Publishers Weekly
Within about a year, according to the filings, the company had spent tens of millions of dollars to acquire and slice the spines off millions of books, before scanning their pages to feed more knowledge into the AI models behind products such as its popular chatbot Claude. - Washington Post
Says Nick Papps, founding editor-in-chief of the Murdoch tabloid California Post, “We'll have the wit of the New York Post headlines, which is really important to it. … We want to be disruptors. We want to challenge status quos. We want to shake things up.” - TheWrap (MSN)
“Across America, publishers, libraries, and literary organizations are building a formidable litigation slate to ensure the availability of books in public and school libraries.” - Publishers Weekly
Lydia Kiesling reflects on how book coverage devolved into bloated, AI-adjacent list culture, tracing her own path through The Millions and the broader media collapse. - The Baffler
Yes, the filmmaker behind The Lobster, The Favourite, Poor Things and Bugonia has made ads for Squarespace (the website-building platform) and Grubhub to air during Super Bowl LX. The Grubhub spot is untitled, but the Squarespace commercial is titled Unavailable, and, of course, it stars Emma Stone. - The Hollywood Reporter
The vanishingly rare presentations of stage work, whether dance, opera or theatre, are invariably acquisitions from cultural organisations that provided most of the funding and all of the production expertise. - The Conversation
“I’m going to be putting tariffs on movies from outside of the country,” the president told The California Post in an interview shared Monday. “If they’re made in Canada, if they’re made in all these places, because Los Angeles has lost the movie industry.” - Yahoo
“Six months after the funding cuts, few public TV or radio stations have closed their doors. Many have scraped together a patchwork of funding from concerned donors, philanthropies or government grants. Others, facing insurmountable budget issues, have resorted to mergers with bigger stations to stay online.” - The New York Times
I can’t imagine saying to my son that TV kills brain cells, but I do think it — or fear it. Our language might have shifted (today we talk about rotting), but the notion endures that watching too much TV and other visual content is detrimental for kids or at least has a whiff of...
One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s counterculture comedy, received 14 nominations for Britain’s equivalent of the Oscars, while Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s vampire thriller garnered 13. Marty Supreme and Hamnet each got 11 nods, while a sleeper, the Tourette’s comedy I Swear, landed five. - The Guardian
The Switzerland-based ballet competition, known for launching the careers of many star dancers, takes place next week. Here executive and artistic director Kathryn Bradney explains to a reporter how the 90-odd contestants are selected, how the weeklong event is structured, and how the important part comes the day afterward. - Pointe Magazine
When CBS Sunday Morning visited, its crew found young dance students silently meditating. Two former students say, however, that they were allowed limited contact with family, berated by teachers, physically pushed to the point of injury, and forbidden to seek medical attention. - CBS News
It’s part of an effort by the Royal Winnipeg, Canada’s oldest professional ballet company, to foster meaningful reconciliation with the country’s Indigenous people — echoing a broader national goal that has been pursued for decades. - The New York Times
“We spoke to DJs, dance experts, real estate agents who make dancing home-tour videos, aspiring professional dancers and club owners to get their take. Spoiler: Dancing is far from dead. But has it downsized? Migrated? Is it complicated? Yes, yes and yes.” - The Washington Post (MSN)
There’s a new executive director, a search for an artistic director, and of course, it’s trying to keep a 71-year-old arts institution going. - Sacramento Bee (Yahoo)
“CalMatters and The Markup tested four commercially-available AI video-generation models — OpenAI’s Sora, Google’s Veo, MiniMax’s Hailou, and Kuaishou’s Kling — and so far, dancers don’t have much to worry about.” - CalMatters
The dinner theater/circus arts hybrid's founder says that attendance never really recovered from COVID, but that, this past fall, there began a fatal decline in sales which he attributed to an uncertain economy and fear of ICE. - WBEZ (Chicago)
“The Outsiders, … which opened in April 2024 and won the Tony Award for best new musical two months later, has recouped its $22 million capitalization costs. … The milestone, though occasionally achieved by plays and musical revivals, is an increasingly rare one for new musicals.” - The New York Times
"Stoppard wasn’t telling a story of Nazis and gas chambers; he was exploring the psychological danger of hiding one’s Jewish identity. A month after seeing the play, I decided to fly to London in search of some of my own hidden pieces.” - The Atlantic
“Apprentices can study one of five tracks: directing and artistic programs, lighting design, production management, scenic paint or stage management. The apprenticeships are about 10 months long.” - Seattle Times
Simon Stephens' mixed-reality experiment at The Shed asks the existential question: if actors perform in cyberspace and no one applauds, is it still theater? Four digitally-captured performers test mortality's latest theatrical frontier. - American Theatre
“(State agency) Empire State Development … currently isn’t accepting applications for the New York City Musical and Theatrical Production Tax Credit. … The proposed state budget announced today ‘increases the aggregate amount available under the program by $150 million for productions with initial performances on or after December 1, 2025.’” - Broadway Journal
The dissident artist, who in 2011 had his passport confiscated and spent 81 days in prison, left when his documents were returned in 2015 and has lived in Europe since. Last month he took the risk of re-detention to visit — and things went smoothly. What had he missed most while away? Speaking Chinese....
The claim that Emilia Bassano Lanier was Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady” is now familiar; even the argument that she — a published poet under her own name — was the real writer of Shakespeare’s works has been made before. Historian Irene Coslet is now arguing that Bassano Lanier was both Jewish and Black. - The...
Maria Manetti Shrem’s influence is everywhere - as is her name, alongside that of her late husband. A short list: The new UC Davis fashion institute, “the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco Opera, SFFilm, KQED.” - San Francisco Chronicle (Yahoo)
"Famously loyal to her artists, Ms. Goodman aimed to place their work in museum collections rather than in private mansions. Her priorities could amount to a thorn in the side of collectors.” - The New York Times
Elle Fanning has had quite the year. Her “ability to hop between a thorny Norwegian drama and a high-concept alien movie is exactly the kind of exciting malleability that audiences forced to wade through modern cinema’s sea of sameness deserve.” - Salon
González, one of the foremost painters of the late 20th century, painted subjects included "the violence that permeated life in Colombia; the European ‘high culture’ that filtered its way across the Atlantic in cheap reproductions; and the in-your-face commercial aesthetic of pervasive urban advertising.” - The New York Times
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“(My) Symphony No. 15 is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, and the values of the Kennedy Center today are in direct conflict with the message of the Symphony,” wrote the 89-year-old composer. “Therefore, I feel an obligation to withdraw this Symphony premiere from the Kennedy Center under its current leadership.” - The Washington Post...
The 3,000-seat Keller Auditorium is seismically challenged. Should the city rebuild it, support the new Portland State University Broadway-show-size theatre, or make a third choice? A new study says the city’s population can’t support both. - Oregon ArtsWatch
Graham Granger: “I saw the AI piece and it was just—as an artist myself, it was insulting to see something of such little effort alongside all these beautiful pieces in the gallery.” - The Nation
“Apprentices can study one of five tracks: directing and artistic programs, lighting design, production management, scenic paint or stage management. The apprenticeships are about 10 months long.” - Seattle Times
“Each is a story about standing up to something that seems too big to confront: an authoritarian government, an abusive system, dehumanizing societal norms. Together, they show the power of nonfiction filmmaking, both amateur and professional, in those acts of resistance.” - The New York Times
The company is laying off 22 of its 284 administrative staffers, reducing pay for 35 of its top executives (including general director Peter Gelb and music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin), and dropping one production from next season’s schedule. - The Guardian
This isn’t great for U.S. audiences either - or the producers and promoters trying to bring international artists. “It’s an unbelievable mess, … and no one can provide an answer.”- The New York Times
One huge tell: If you listen to a few of “Rose’s” tracks, “you'll hear a telltale hiss. … That's a common trait of music generated on apps like Suno and Udio - partly because of the way they start with white noise and gradually refine it until it resembles music.” - BBC
But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. “AI music is here to stay, and rather than fighting it, we should understand its benefits as a tool for artists—either to amplify existing production processes or to introduce new ways of designing music.” - Fast Company
“Learning about the end of California College of the Arts was a sad day. And it’s in moments like these that we should rekindle the debate over what kind of city we want to be going forward. Simply put, San Francisco without artists is a dystopia.” - San Francisco Chronicle (MSN)
