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- Free, free, free. It matters!
Good Morning,
Sadiq Khan defends free museum admission with a number that’s hard to argue: London visits to formerly paid institutions rose about 151% in the decade after the charges came off (LBC). Access as a core strategy.
The same logic surfaces twice more today. San Diego is launching an arts pass covering 40-plus organizations across the county and metro Tijuana (The San Diego Union-Tribune). And bands watching the average top-tour ticket climb from $84 to $130 in a decade have started offering their own $20 seats (The Wall Street Journal).
The return on that isn’t only attendance. The Smithsonian is absorbing a sustained White House pressure campaign, but the public’s love of the museums is holding it up — including among people otherwise receptive to the attack. This runs straight through free entry (The Atlantic).
Which makes Justin Davidson’s verdict on building hyperflexible theatres sting. Moving walls, precision lifts, rooms that expand on command — and the revolution arrives as anticlimactic and overpriced (Curbed).
All of our stories below.
- Taking John Cage’s “As SLow aS Possible” Into A Whole Other Dimension
“A rare chord change on Wednesday — from seven notes to eight once an A4 pipe was added — represented the completion of about 4% of the 639-year endeavor of the John Cage Organ Project Halberstadt. … The’“ORGAN²/ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible)’ composition is scheduled to finish on Sept. 4, 2640.” – AP
- What We Lost When Video Rental Stores Went Away
The early video store was often a place to talk as well as to shop, and the persona and expertise of retailers and clerks structured the consumer experience of home video as much as the shelves on the wall. – MIT Press
- The Problem With Super-Flexible High-Tech Performance Venues
Justin Davidson on New York’s Perelman Arts Center and The Shed: “Now the boldest experimenters can take advantage of walls that move at the touch of a button, precision lifts, rooms that shrink and expand, projected images (on) moving surfaces. … Yet the revolution, now that it’s here, feels anticlimactic and overpriced.” – Curbed (MSN)
- The Edinburgh Fringe Is Huge. But Is Success Just Getting Bigger?
Edinburgh has wrestled with for years: what is tourism actually for? If the answer is simply “more visitors, more spending”, the city will keep winning by numbers while residents feel they are losing by experience. – The Conversation
- David Ellison Makes His Case For The Paramount/Warner Merger
I want to build a company with the strength and resources to deliver for those audiences who turn to us, for the storytellers who rely on us and for the country that dreamed this all up. – The New York Times
- Why Is Music Being Released On Vinyl Missing What’s In The Digital Versions?
It’s the year’s worst pop trend: fans paying the highest price to pre-order what is ostensibly the most desirable, collectible or elaborate edition of an album are instead receiving incomplete or unpolished versions of the music. – The Guardian
- This Standup Comedian Sold Out Arenas In His Homeland — And Angered The Government. Now He’s Figuring Out American Humor.
Pandji Pragiwaksono was a household name in Indonesia, the world’s fourth-most populous country. In a Netflix special last year, he made fun of the president and was interrogated on criminal charges. Now he’s in New York, working comedy clubs, learning which routines don’t translate, and preparing for his first English-language tour. – Variety
- The Difficulties Of An AI For Africa
- The Video Game Industry Is Collapsing. Why?
As movies and shows like “Super Mario Galaxy Movie,” “Sonic the Hedgehog 3” and “Fallout” prove Hollywood has finally figured out how to successfully adapt video games — after years of failure so deep a “video game movie curse” moniker was coined — the makers of those games are in disarray. – The Wrap (MSN)
- Sure, Attack The Smithsonian. But Americans Really Love It
Even now, as the museum complex continues to face a pressure campaign from the White House, public fondness for the Smithsonian—for its free entry and eclectic collections—is hard to break among those otherwise receptive to President Trump’s anti-institutionalism. – The Atlantic
- Building An AI Program To Generate K-Pop Choreography
Youngjun Choi, who has created dance routines for some of South Korea’s biggest pop stars (including BTS), and Joon Jung, a choreographer-turned-tech exec, co-founded the startup MVNT to build an AI system for dance, much like Suno, the generative AI music platform. – Business Insider
- English National Ballet Suffers Cyberattack
ENB said some customer email address and business contact information “may have been included in the affected data” from the cyber attack and that it was taking the matter seriously. – The Standard
- Author Denies He Used AI To Write Book That He Sold For Millions
The author accused of using artificial intelligence to craft the debut novel that landed him a multimillion-dollar book deal said he was innocent and that the claims against him were racially motivated. – The Wall Street Journal
- Concert Ticket Prices Soared. Some Bands Are Figuring Out Discounts
A decade ago, the average ticket to a top 100 tour went for $83.74, according to Billboard Boxscore. By 2024, that had risen to $130.36. That’s before taxes, fees and additional markups if tickets end up on the secondary market. – The Wall Street Journal
- Fra Angelico’s First Major Altarpiece Restored After Five Centuries Of Disrepair
The Fiesole Altarpiece, painted in the 1420s, suffered its first damage during an updating in 1501; it was subsequently broken up, had some of its parts looted or sold off, and was gnawed by wood-boring insects. The work has now been restored to roughly its 1501 condition with an ingenious spring-fitted wood frame. – Artnet
- Benjamin Alire Sáenz, First Latino Author To Win PEN/Faulkner Prize, Has Died At 71
In poems, short stories, novels, and two widely-praised (and occasionally censored) books of young-adult fiction, he drew on his gay identity and on life on the US-Mexico border around El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. He received the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2013 for his story collection Everything Begins & Ends at the Kentucky Club. – AP
- Russian Airstrikes Have Destroyed Almost Three-Quarters Of Ukraine’s Book Output This Year
Just since May 1, Russian drones and bombs have damaged or burned at least 9.65 million books. That equals 74% of the Ukrainian publishing industry’s output so far in 2026 and nearly 29% of books printed throughout the country in all of 2025. – United24 Media (Ukraine)
- Judge Sets Very Expensive Date For Paramount-Warner Bros. Antitrust Trial
The trial of the lawsuit brought by 12 state attorneys-general seeking to block the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger is now scheduled to start next March 2. The problem: Paramount will owe a fee to Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders of $7 million per day from Oct. 1 until the deal closes. – Variety
- London Mayor Sadiq Khan Writes Defense Of Free Museum Admission
“Until 2001, many of the capital’s most important cultural institutions required visitors to pay for entry. … It’s impossible to overstate just how revolutionary this (change) was. In the decade after free admission was introduced, visits to formerly paid-for museums in London increased by around 151%.” – LBC (UK)
- San Diego To Launch An Arts Pass Program
The San Diego Arts Pass — inspired by New York City’s Culture Pass, Britain’s National Art Pass, and the like — will offer purchasers reduced-price or free admission to over 40 organizations, including the Old Globe, San Diego Symphony, and La Jolla Playhouse, in San Diego County and metro Tijuana. – The San Diego Union-Tribune (MSN)
- Hearst Buys Disney’s Half Of A+E For $1.2 Billion
“The Walt Disney Co. has sold its 50% equity stake in A+E Global Media to Hearst for $1.2 billion in cash, ending the joint venture that was first created in 1984. The deal will see Hearst take full control of the media company formerly known as A+E Networks, which owns brands like A&E, History and Lifetime.” – The Hollywood Reporter
- Some Cruise Lines Are Shifting Onboard Entertainment From Schlocky Revues To Legit Theatre
Okay, they’re not doing Long Day’s Journey Into Night or Titus Andronicus; after all, the audience is on vacation. But cruises from the UK have started presenting professional productions like Come From Away and the RSC staging of The Constant Wife. Ambassador Cruise Line even has a playwriting competition. – The Guardian
- Are These The 25 Most Significant Sculptures Of The Modern Age?
To choose the 25 most important works of sculpture made since 1945, we asked a panel of experts to gather at the New York Times building in March. – The New York Times
- Torn To Shreds: The Writers Workshop
Joyce Carol Oates is known for her strict style. One of her students once described her crossing through the first several pages of a story and asking: “What’s the point?” I commiserated with him, but he looked at me and said: “No, that’s what I want. To be ripped to shreds.” – The Guardian
- You Know About Microdramas. Get Ready For Microsports.
“Brett Morris, the CEO of World 1, wants you to watch his ‘Microsports,’ which he describes as ‘entirely original sports where world titles are won or lost in 30 seconds.’” – The Hollywood Reporter
- Reading Isaac Butler’s The Perfect Moment
Isaac Butler has written a history of the controversies – dubbed the “culture wars” – that arose in the United States around the arts and arts-adjacent fields from the mid-1980s to around 2000. These were fights over state censorship of art, and the separate issue of restrictions on the content of art that could be available for government funding, even if quite indirectly.
Butler tells a vivid story with good portraits of the artists whose work was at issue. He is especially good at defining the bind that National Endowment for the Arts chairs John Frohnmayer, and then Jane Alexander, found themselves in as they endeavored both to keep the NEA alive in the face of Congressional threats to kill it, and to preserve the ability for the NEA to give grants to artists and presenters on the basis of recommendations of peer review panels regarding the quality of the art independently of restrictions, often quite vague, on what was politically acceptable. At one point in the tale Frohnmayer laments that he doesn’t see how he could possibly do both. He was correct.
One thing that has changed since the culture wars is the end of state censorship of artistic speech. Butler gives the details on the attempted prosecution, on the grounds of obscenity, of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati in 1990 for displaying The Perfect Moment, a retrospective of the photography of the (by then) late artist Robert Mapplethorpe, and, in the same year, the almost comic attempt to charge the rap group 2 Live Crew with obscenity in the state of Florida. In both cases the defendants were found not guilty, and that has more or less been the end of it. With only a very limited set of exceptions, artists, or anyone, can record what they want, publish what they want, exhibit the art that they want.
Public funding for the arts is a different story. “I don’t want my tax dollars paying for Z” is the crux of the matter, though what turned this commonplace complaint into a “culture war” was the political theatre around particular examples of Z, in the works of artists such as Andres Serrano, David Wojnarowicz, Mapplethorpe, and, in the end, the performance artists Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, John Fleck, and Tim Miller. Butler reminds us of the appeals to homophobia that were used in attacking many of the artists (though not all of the above are gay), and of the appalling cruelty towards gays, especially those who had contracted HIV, in the 1980s.
There were various attempts to put boundaries around what the NEA would be permitted to fund, beginning with what became known as the “loyalty oath” produced by Senator Jesse Helms, which included the provision that no art could be funded that “denigrates the objects or beliefs of the adherents of a particular religion or nonreligion”, though in the end the Endowment adopted the milder language of a provision that “artistic excellence and artistic merit are the criteria by which [grant] applications are judged, taking into consideration general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public.” The constitutionality of this provision and whether it, in practice, would entail viewpoint discrimination, was tested at the Supreme Court in National Endowment for the Arts v Finley, and it was upheld; it is in the NEA grant guidelines to this day (I wrote about the case here, so I won’t go on about it again). Thereafter, writes Butler, we would have a National Endowment for Nice Art.
What Americans will tolerate outside of publicly funded art is quite at odds with what right-wing firebrands were demanding of the NEA.
Politicians are free to, and do, publicly denigrate religion (well, Islam) at will without censure.
The President of the United States had produced on his behalf, and circulated on social media, a video of himself flying a jet plane and bombing American protestors with (literally) shit.
Jesse Helms and his fellow travelers during the culture wars seemed a bit cartoonish, but Butler tells us they were highly organized and (pre-internet) knew how to reach and to activate their base. And so defenders of uncensored public funding of the arts had to gather forces, and defend the NEA at all costs, though they were not always strategic about it. Butler writes:
The liberal establishment seemed afflicted with a novel recurrent form of amnesia that kept them from seeing that each of these flare-ups were not individual moments of disagreement, but rather the work of a movement that wanted to return the country to a mythical past where women, people of color, and LGBTQ Americans knew their place.
What I observed at the time was that, if you worked in the cultural policy field, criticism of any aspect of public arts funding was frowned upon as giving aid and ammunition to an evil enemy. Solidarity was called for. It was a culture war, after all.
And yet … Butler sees the culture wars as involving two clearly defined sides – there are baddies and goodies, even if the goodies are sometimes a bit hapless. I’m less sure. I think there is something of a middle, people who support public funding of art even when it might cause some people offence, and yet who still think that offence can be genuine, and not just a result of religious fanaticism or right-wing power politics. That a photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine is offensive, and not only to Catholics, or Christians in general. These “middle” people support freedom of artistic expression, and full rights and equal dignity for gays, and still see some of Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio as gross and dehumanizing. It’s a cohort that is overlooked in this book, but it might be larger, and more influential, than Butler thinks.
Relying on the judgment of experts in their fields what art, or what research into the sciences or the humanities, is worth public funding, will never yield perfect results – there will always be a few regrettable choices – but it beats the alternative of either a permanent bureaucracy or elected officials making such decisions. I’m with John Maynard Keynes that “arm’s length” is the best way of organizing all this. But there will be a loss of faith in that system as more art is championed where it is hard for the layperson, a reasonable and open-minded layperson, to see what the thinking was.
We have had the “decency and respect” clause at the NEA for over three decades now, suggesting a pretty stable equilibrium. I wish it were not there, and that there could again be grants to individual artists, that they could pursue their artistic vision where it leads, and that there could be some public funding for this.
But the NEA of the 1970s is not coming back – it has been made abundantly clear that the American public does not want it to, and that the only way for public funding to persist is to fund “nice art”, even as the world of commercial entertainment, and politics, sinks ever further into the muck. We get the cultural policy we deserve.
Cross-posted at https://michaelrushton.substack.com/
- San Francisco Opera Signs Matthew Shilvock For Another Five Years
Shilvock became San Francisco Opera’s seventh general director in August 2016, following in the footsteps of his mentor David Gockley. He has led the company for ten seasons and has introduced several premieres. – Operawire
- Other Minds, Bay Area New-Music Nexus, Sees Its First-Ever Change In Leadership
Composer Charles Amirkhanian, who co-founded the festival/audio producer/archive in 1992, is retiring as executive and artistic director as of January. Joseph Bohigian, currently Other Minds’ associate director, will become artistic director, and the search process for a new executive director is currently underway. – San Francisco Chronicle (MSN)
- Is Classical Music Now A Form Of Underground Music?
These days, classical music is underground; it is no longer part of mainstream culture. By “underground,” I don’t mean that the San Francisco Symphony is punk, but that classical music has become something you will only hear if you seek it out. – San Francisco Classical Voice
- Evolve Or Die: How Jeopardy! Is Evolving
As strong as Jeopardy! remains on broadcast, rapid changes to the television business have demonstrated how quickly viewing habits can shift and why studios and platforms need to constantly rethink how they connect with audiences. – Vulture (MSN)
- Hollywood Has Its Biggest Box Office Weekend In History
A powerful one-two punch from “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” and “The Odyssey” has fueled the biggest collective weekend in box office history, with roughly $430 million across all movies in the marketplace. – Variety
- Jacob’s Pillow Amid The Palms? A New Dance Festival In Florida
As co-founder Ericka Squire puts it, “Palm Beach County is ripe for a festival that feels like Jacob’s Pillow” — a pitch that worked on the right funders. The first-ever Banyan Dance Festival is running this week in downtown West Palm Beach. – WLRN (Miami)
- A Small Arts Project Supporting Emerging Artists Hits A Home Run. What Can We Learn?
This innovative new venture is perhaps best described as a super-smart business strategy that could also be a blueprint for other entrepreneurs to ignite arts spaces in their own communities, boost social connectedness and give young, emerging artists some much-needed financial support. – ArtsHub
- Founding Donor Of Human Rights Museum Suspends Funding Over Palestinian Exhibition
She complained of a “lack of context” in the exhibition about the forced displacement of Palestinians during the creation of Israel, such as the omission of information about the Palestinian rejection of a state that was offered in the United Nations’ 1947 partition plan and about Jews displaced in Arab lands. – The Art Newspaper
