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Theaster Gates, the artist whose installations sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars, has bought Pickard China, the last U.S. maker of high-end porcelain: a 12-person factory in Antioch, Illinois, producing a quarter of what it did in the 1970s (NPR). Meanwhile a historian in Edinburgh has found that Till the Bells Ring, a 46-minute talkie written in Scots, premiered in October 1926, a year before The Jazz Singer, widely thought of as the first talkie; two of its reels sit unscreened in the BFI archive (The Guardian).
Canadian poet Anne Carson won the Nobel Prize in Literature for work that, “in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms” (AP).
The Kennedy Center is closed to the public as “dangerously dilapidated,” yet about 100 National Symphony musicians keep rehearsing in its concert hall, entering by routes management calls safe (The New York Times). Leon Botstein, who led Bard College for 50 years, resigned every remaining post after congressional investigators surfaced an email he sent Jeffrey Epstein (The Guardian). And the U.S. share of major-studio TV spending has fallen from 94% to 64% in 25 years, according to a union-commissioned study (Los Angeles Times).
All of the stories we collected below.