Billed as Oxford’s largest and most programmatically ambitious academic project, the Schwarzman Centre yokes together seven humanities faculties, along with a 500-seat concert hall, a 250-seat theatre, a black-box immersive performance space, a white-box exhibition gallery, a dance studio, a cinema and a museum to house the Bate Collection of historic musical instruments. - The Guardian
The Council of the European Union announced on April 23 that it is formally sanctioning Mikhail Piotrovsky, the long-time director of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. The reasons given are that Piotrovsky is “a close associate of Vladimir Putin.” - ARTnews
The company’s operating loss for 2025 was AU$4.7 million, down from AU$6 million in 2024. Losses are due to the costs of a temporary venue change; the company’s usual home, the Ian Potter State Theatre in the Melbourne Arts Precinct, closed for renovations in March of 2024 and will reopen this October. - AAP
In the past decade, the defining trend among curators has been to shine a light on artists who were previously “overlooked.” Various groups who were once misunderstood, neglected or ignored have been excavated and exhibited — artists of color, older women artists, women of Abstract Expressionism and so on (though “overlooked” is a deprecating term). -...
What of misinformation that has taken hold, and how can it be debunked? If the misinformation is not going to be widely shared, the best thing to do can simply be to ignore it. Otherwise, however, it is best to get in first, provided our own presentation is clear and sticky. - 3 Quarks Daily
“(Their) show, titled ‘Official. Unofficial. Belarus.,’ (explores) how art is ‘made, censored, and experienced under authoritarian power and constant surveillance.’ … It’s a provocative and timely subject, made more so by the fact that the Belarus Free Theatre has been in exile since 2020, following widespread protests against President Alexander Lukashenko.” - ARTnews
“Every day, patrons are being sold what they believe are valid tickets, when, in reality, they are only paying for a chance that someone may be able to secure a seat,” said John Mangum, Lyric’s general director, who was also joined by leaders of The Auditorium and Harris Theater. - WBEZ
Organizations that design their entire experience for reflection, response, and real conversation are doing something quietly radical. Not just presenting art, but shaping the conditions that allow it to actually change us. - Seattle Times
“(The Guardian) has found a lane in the U.S. news market as a progressive alternative to institutional American media, … backed by a voluntary contribution model that has attracted 700,000 supporters, 500,000 of them recurring. Reader revenue has grown 35% a year for the past two years, with a still-growing 150-person newsroom.” - The Rebooting
“That is the technical legal term for this: batshit crazy. … Legally there is no basis for removing a broadcast license because you don’t like the program. And if there is some kind of DEI claim here, I really don’t know what that would be.” - Vulture (MSN)
“The whistleblower claims that the museum improperly moved funds between various accounts in order to meet severe cash crunches. The whistleblower alleged that a former director was forced out based on trumped-up staff complaints, and that the museum failed to even interview two qualified candidates to replace him before promoting an internal candidate.” - ARTnews
“In 1944 during the German army’s retreat, the 1719 ‘Lauterbach’ Stradivari violin was looted from the Warsaw Museum in Poland. … The violin’s value is estimated at €10 million. … Now, more than 80 years later, notice has been taken of an instrument which may be the looted violin.” - The Strad
“(Mayor Michelle Wu’s) approximately 27% cut leaves the city’s budget for arts and culture with a total of $3,365,057 for fiscal year 2027. While still above pre-pandemic levels, even when adjusted for inflation, this is one of the largest cuts to any city department’s budget.” - Boston Art Review
The move comes almost three months after news broke of a six-figure loan the museum made to Sirén for buying a house; the loan reportedly was never repaid. Under Sirén’s leadership, AKG greatly increased its collection, underwent a $230 million renovation and expansion, and achieved record attendance numbers. - ARTnews
Clarissa Hard argues that, with no hard evidence of serious sexual misconduct ever revealed, the gifted young choreographer should not have been made a total pariah and driven to take his own life. - The Critic (UK)
As expected, Brendan Carr and the FCC on Tuesday unleashed license-renewal hell on The Walt Disney Co. However, with another Jimmy Kimmel brouhaha erupting with Donald Trump and MAGAland, the Josh D’Amaro-led Disney is playing it cool and playing along, at least for now. - Deadline
“’We’ve not identified a way to make (the tax) not annoying,’ said Council President Jamie Dunphy, the architect of the new policy. ‘But we’ve found ways to make it less annoying.’” The proposed change: fewer people paying more money. - Oregon Public Broadcasting
Reviews are now even more crucial than they used to be while ratings have dipped in importance in a world of cannibalized viewing, Jeff Pope told a Broadcasting Press Guild lunch this afternoon in London. - Deadline
“The internet is getting worse, fast. The services we rely on, they’re all turning into piles of shit. Worse, the digital is merging with the physical, which means that the same forces that are wrecking our platforms are also wrecking our homes and our cars, the places where we work and shop. - Literary Review of Canada
The underlying intelligence of a large language model isn’t a function of its architecture, its parameter count, or the volume of compute thrown at its training. It is not even about the training data. It is a function of the social complexity of the civilization whose language it digested. - The Ideas Newsletter
The paper shows the divergence between the self-serving narratives AI companies promote in the media and how they collapse under rigorous examination. - 404 Media
Many generative AI programs geared toward creative fields have encountered a common problem: rapid initial adoption, followed by declining sustained engagement. - The Conversation
These different notions of truth shape everyday discourse as well as philosophical debate. They might help explain why some arguments feel pointless, why political debates circle endlessly, and why certain disagreements never quite meet on common ground. - Psyche
Once you start looking, you realize that short video clips—not tweets, or posts, or static photos—have become the atomic unit of online content. Short-form video, of course, isn’t new, but the prevalence of the clips is. - The Atlantic
Billed as Oxford’s largest and most programmatically ambitious academic project, the Schwarzman Centre yokes together seven humanities faculties, along with a 500-seat concert hall, a 250-seat theatre, a black-box immersive performance space, a white-box exhibition gallery, a dance studio, a cinema and a museum to house the Bate Collection of historic musical instruments. -...
What of misinformation that has taken hold, and how can it be debunked? If the misinformation is not going to be widely shared, the best thing to do can simply be to ignore it. Otherwise, however, it is best to get in first, provided our own presentation is clear and sticky. - 3 Quarks Daily
“Every day, patrons are being sold what they believe are valid tickets, when, in reality, they are only paying for a chance that someone may be able to secure a seat,” said John Mangum, Lyric’s general director, who was also joined by leaders of The Auditorium and Harris Theater. - WBEZ
Organizations that design their entire experience for reflection, response, and real conversation are doing something quietly radical. Not just presenting art, but shaping the conditions that allow it to actually change us. - Seattle Times
“(Mayor Michelle Wu’s) approximately 27% cut leaves the city’s budget for arts and culture with a total of $3,365,057 for fiscal year 2027. While still above pre-pandemic levels, even when adjusted for inflation, this is one of the largest cuts to any city department’s budget.” - Boston Art Review
“In 1944 during the German army’s retreat, the 1719 ‘Lauterbach’ Stradivari violin was looted from the Warsaw Museum in Poland. … The violin’s value is estimated at €10 million. … Now, more than 80 years later, notice has been taken of an instrument which may be the looted violin.” - The Strad
There's a slight change to the all-tickets-for-$11-or-name-your-price scheme for next year: subscribers get first crack at tickets. And what is this "timely" Gershwin show? It's Let 'Em Eat Cake, about a fictional US President who loses his re-election bid and tries to overturn the result. - WHYY (Philadelphia)
The new two-year agreement, effective Sept. 1, includes a 2.5% salary increase each year as well as what are described as “temporary changes to hiring practices” in order to reduce expenses by $2 million. - Pioneer Press (Minneapolis-St. Paul)
Boston Baroque was founded back in 1973 by harpsichordist/conductor Martin Pearlman, who stepped down as artistic director last year. His successor, as of this coming season, is Marc Minkowski, who has amassed an estimable discography with Les Musiciens du Louvre, the Baroque orchestra he founded in France in 1982. - Moto Perpetuo
A play lives in language. An opera lives in duration. One moment in an opera can expand for five minutes. Maybe you give the composer a full sentence. They might take one word and heighten it, expand it even more. Maybe the whole sentence disappears into music. - The Paris Review
After months of protests from musicians and others over the slender qualifications of conductor Beatrice Venezi, the board of La Fenice confirmed her appointment and it looked like she was all set. Then she trash-talked the opera house and its audience to an Argentine newspaper. - The Guardian
The Council of the European Union announced on April 23 that it is formally sanctioning Mikhail Piotrovsky, the long-time director of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. The reasons given are that Piotrovsky is “a close associate of Vladimir Putin.” - ARTnews
“The whistleblower claims that the museum improperly moved funds between various accounts in order to meet severe cash crunches. The whistleblower alleged that a former director was forced out based on trumped-up staff complaints, and that the museum failed to even interview two qualified candidates to replace him before promoting an internal candidate.” -...
The move comes almost three months after news broke of a six-figure loan the museum made to Sirén for buying a house; the loan reportedly was never repaid. Under Sirén’s leadership, AKG greatly increased its collection, underwent a $230 million renovation and expansion, and achieved record attendance numbers. - ARTnews
Erwin Bankowski, 50, and Karolina Bankowska, 26, admitted in federal court in Brooklyn to wire fraud conspiracy and misrepresenting Native American–produced goods. The pair, a father and daughter, now face up to 20 years in prison, along with at least $1.9 million in restitution. - ARTnews
Known as the Zimbabwe Bird, it has long been a symbol of national identity, but behind it lies a complex tale of displacement, colonial plunder and restitution. - BBC (MSN)
Architecture is a Fox’s discipline. It sits between capital, politics, infrastructure, climate, design, engineering, art, psychology, and economics. Its task is to hold these domains together, manage complexity, and, at its best, make spaces and places in which we can live better together. - Time
“(The Guardian) has found a lane in the U.S. news market as a progressive alternative to institutional American media, … backed by a voluntary contribution model that has attracted 700,000 supporters, 500,000 of them recurring. Reader revenue has grown 35% a year for the past two years, with a still-growing 150-person newsroom.” - The...
“Scholars from Trinity College Dublin uncovered the manuscript that contains Caedmon’s Hymn at the National Central Library of Rome. Bede, the medieval theologian revered as the father of English history, recorded the nine-line poem in the eighth century.” - The Guardian
“We’ve had success in blue states that want to protect from book banning at the local level, but these efforts have moved to purple or even red states, to the point of Alaska now moving this forward." - Publishers Weekly
The 6th-century Codex H included a Greek-language copy of the New Testament's letters of St. Paul. Sometime in the Middle Ages, though, the monks of Mt. Athos broke the book up and re-used the parchment. Fragments have since been identified, but the original text on them was considered irretrievable — until now. - Artnet
Adelaide writers’ week was sacrificed to save the 2026 Adelaide festival, an event that ploughs more than $60m into South Australia’s economy each year, documents show. - The Guardian
“A new report from the Book Manufacturers’ Institute on the state of the book industry predicts that printing is on the cusp of potential major changes.” - Publishers Weekly
“That is the technical legal term for this: batshit crazy. … Legally there is no basis for removing a broadcast license because you don’t like the program. And if there is some kind of DEI claim here, I really don’t know what that would be.” - Vulture (MSN)
As expected, Brendan Carr and the FCC on Tuesday unleashed license-renewal hell on The Walt Disney Co. However, with another Jimmy Kimmel brouhaha erupting with Donald Trump and MAGAland, the Josh D’Amaro-led Disney is playing it cool and playing along, at least for now. - Deadline
Reviews are now even more crucial than they used to be while ratings have dipped in importance in a world of cannibalized viewing, Jeff Pope told a Broadcasting Press Guild lunch this afternoon in London. - Deadline
“They’ve got the books, and I (have no) desire to debate them over what they say their business model is and how it does not work anymore. But less than two years before, ... they were very eager for me to be signed for a long time. So, something changed.” - The New York...
While the rest of the world was getting hooked on cat videos and bedroom-dance routines, Chinese creators were tinkering with something more ambitious: serialized shows shot vertically, for phones, and packed with racy plots, absurd twists, and great swells of emotion. - The New Yorker
“Seventy per cent of India’s films made before 1950 are gone forever. Film Heritage Foundation founder Shivendra Singh Dungarpur is trying to save the rest.” - Variety
The company’s operating loss for 2025 was AU$4.7 million, down from AU$6 million in 2024. Losses are due to the costs of a temporary venue change; the company’s usual home, the Ian Potter State Theatre in the Melbourne Arts Precinct, closed for renovations in March of 2024 and will reopen this October. - AAP
Clarissa Hard argues that, with no hard evidence of serious sexual misconduct ever revealed, the gifted young choreographer should not have been made a total pariah and driven to take his own life. - The Critic (UK)
Graham saw herself primarily as a dancer—she made dances, she said, so that she would have something to dance. It could be said that she invented a people and a place. - The New Yorker
Sure, they’re relatively young, but that doesn’t avoid the energy and kinetic demands of high-energy dance and music performances. The stars “must train to develop stamina and prevent injuries while also maintaining the specific physique that their industry demands.” - The New York Times
To allow for genuinely open, honest exchange, the rules at the Creators in Dance Summit, which hosted 75 choreographers across numerous genres, were simple but strict: “You cannot name individuals or institutions, and you can use what you received at the summit, but you cannot name who said it.” - Dance Magazine
“(Their) show, titled ‘Official. Unofficial. Belarus.,’ (explores) how art is ‘made, censored, and experienced under authoritarian power and constant surveillance.’ … It’s a provocative and timely subject, made more so by the fact that the Belarus Free Theatre has been in exile since 2020, following widespread protests against President Alexander Lukashenko.” - ARTnews
The play is still the thing for these powerhouse performers, even if drama as good as Arthur Miller’s masterpiece is a rare occurrence in any age. But these actors are after more than a prestige showcase. They’re looking for an artistic lifeline. - Los Angeles Times
Trish Santini — who, as executive director, oversaw the construction, opening, and programming of the Barry Diller-funded Little Island just off the shore of Manhattan — will have the title of co-CEO at the Old Globe, working alongside artistic director Barry Edelstein. - Playbill
“This most recent outing allowed Hwang, 68, to address some flaws in the original and even in his own (2001) remake. … He also added a scene that drives home the fact that coming to America as a poor immigrant isn’t all flower drums and show tunes.” - The New York Times
“The reason? Minimum pay and terms settlement negotiations between Equity and the Society of London Theatre (SOLT) have hit a snag after ‘constructive’ beginnings, with Equity saying that there were still question marks over ‘expectations on pay, holiday, rehearsal working time, injury, and stage management differentials.’” - WhatsOnStage (UK)
In the past decade, the defining trend among curators has been to shine a light on artists who were previously “overlooked.” Various groups who were once misunderstood, neglected or ignored have been excavated and exhibited — artists of color, older women artists, women of Abstract Expressionism and so on (though “overlooked” is a deprecating...
"So you could also call me a soft Viking. I tend to stay away from crime, but I do like parallel fifths and parallel octaves, so maybe I’m not as innocent as I’d like to pretend to be." - San Francisco Classical Voice
“Dr. Ittai Gradel ... alerted the British Museum and the police after he was able to buy dozens of museum artefacts on eBay over the course of several years. Gradel died of renal cancer days after receiving a rarely-presented medal from the museum in recognition of what its director called his ‘very significant contribution.’” - The...
“From reimagined Greek and Roman classics to the exploration of identity and morality in the suburbs and landscapes of Australia, David Malouf successfully merged his passion for literature, language and imagination with his connection to home to become one of Australia’s most celebrated writers.” - The Guardian
The famous Torch Song Trilogy writer and performer: “I try something new every day, and you can try something new every day. … And some of it’s going to be great and some of it’s going to be terrible. But go out and have fun.” - The Guardian (UK)
Mark Swed: “MTT made music matter by making hope matter. He was, moreover, one of us. He achieved greatness though an epic amplification of a uniquely L.A. positivity in which grumpy became wistful.” - Los Angeles Times (Yahoo)
Tacoma Musical Playhouse seeks Executive Producer to lead the organization on an exciting journey to celebrate musical theater & build community in Tacoma, WA region.
Seattle Children’s Theatre, one of the nation’s premiere organizations for theatre-for-young audiences, invites applications from dedicated and collaborative leaders for its Director of Production position.
Indianapolis Ballet (IB) seeks its next Artistic Director, who will carry the organization’s mission forward, embracing the history and future of classical ballet through dynamic
The Fresno Arts Council seeks a strategic, collaborative, and community-centered Executive Director to lead the organization into its next chapter. Apply by May 1st!
Seeking a Vice President of Human Resources to lead TPAC’s strategic growth, culture, and talent while guiding staff through complex, transformative organizational evolution.
Emerson College invites applications and nominations for a visionary leader and experienced manager to serve as its inaugural Vice President for Media Arts and Ventures.
After months of protests from musicians and others over the slender qualifications of conductor Beatrice Venezi, the board of La Fenice confirmed her appointment and it looked like she was all set. Then she trash-talked the opera house and its audience to an Argentine newspaper. - The Guardian
"As a librettist, I’m always aware that I’m serving the music. It’s a humbling experience. Coming from the world of theater is a good thing, because theater is all about collaboration and interpretation—you place the work in the hands of others, and it begins to transform.” - Paris Review
“Lego’s appeal, represented by its zillions of plastic blocks and many movies and TV series, transcends nations. It is one of the planet’s top-selling toy brands, and the toy’s singular pixelated appearance is instantly recognizable on any screen.” - Salon
“Visitor numbers have indeed recovered after falling from their peak in 2019, but finances were hit hard during the pandemic. Those financial headwinds have led to multiple rounds of redundancies, restructures and several ‘culture war’ battles.” - The Guardian (UK)
“There is something in the embodied expression of a trained singer, on stage, in a room with other human beings, that no synthetic content can touch. But in an age when AI generates infinite aesthetic stuff at effectively zero cost, ‘irreplaceable’ needs to be made explicit.” - Opera America
“He was widely considered one of the most distinguished American conductors of his generation” — most notably for his 25 years as music director of the San Francisco Symphony. “In addition to making more than 100 recordings of both rare and familiar classical repertory, he created valuable instructional series for television and radio.” - The Washington Post (Yahoo)
“Screenmaxxing is big business for an imperiled theatrical exhibition industry. … PLF screens seem to be an effective way to lure them out of the house, and charge a little (or a lot) extra for the assurance that they’re seeing a version of the movie that goes above and beyond.” - The Guardian (UK)
Yes, you need to watch The Sorrow and the Pity, and you need to do it right now. Why? Because “Ophuls’s film is illuminating precisely because its lessons about complicity apply to evil and corruption of all kinds.” - The Atlantic
“Transparency, porousness — all the buzzwords of architecture today are antithetical to security. It’s a paradox implicit to museum design today.” - The New York Times
“The Winnipeg-born children's book author and illustrator of I Want My Hat Back, has won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, which is worth nearly $750,00” (Canadian). - CBC
In the company’s staging of Kaija Saariaho’s opera Innocence, seven stage managers, four prop masters, and a big flock of stagehands transform the set from a decorated wedding-banquet hall into a blood-spattered high-school classroom in a minute and a half — and they do it while the set is rotating. - The New York...
