The fight over Notre Dame’s windows isn’t really about windows. Claire Tabouret’s proposed stained glass would replace Viollet-le-Duc’s 19th-century panels — undamaged ones — and a lawsuit is now trying to stop it (ARTnews).
The Kennedy Center’s cascading cancellations continue — New York City Ballet has pulled out of its scheduled performances there (The New York Times). Hyperallergic argues that progressive art faces a double bind: the world is hostile to socially engaged work but perfectly happy to borrow its language for branding and real estate (Hyperallergic). And in Britain, a new report finds that Black genres have generated £24.5 billion of the UK music industry’s £30 billion recorded music market. (The Guardian).
And it turns out we’ve all been mispronouncing Thoreau. Now Meryl Streep is involved (The New York Times).
“The real Holmes – the one written by Conan Doyle – is endlessly fascinating. He is a genius but flawed because he is so supercilious that he gets bored too quickly and turns to drugs to keep him occupied. But he has a humanity to him.” – NPR
“Kidder was careful to eschew focusing on his longtime loves like fishing or baseball, afraid that if he spent too much time in one of those realms, it might cause him to ‘feel sick of it.’” – The Guardian UK (AP)
“At the crux of the controversy is the fact that Tabouret’s new windows would push out Viollet-le-Duc’s undamaged ones. Advocates for the project argue that since the windows date to the 19th century, instead of the Middle Ages, they are fair game to be replaced.” – ARTnews
The newest price increase includes a $27 a month premium (that is, not ad-supported; which was, one may remember, THE WHOLE POINT OF STREAMING) plan. Time to get out? – Decider (MSN)
“Yes, we’re living through a political revolution, but it’s not the one you think. It’s not the fast-paced hurtle towards fascist necropolitics we wake up to every day.” – The Guardian (UK)
“Short-form video habituates the brain to rapid stimuli, reducing its capacity to stay focused on the slower and more demanding. There’s a popular term for it that’s pretty self-explanatory: ‘brainrot.’” – Boston Globe
<a href="https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/2026/03/the-people-marched-no-kings-signs-and-costumes-spoke-for-them.html" title='The People Marched ‘No Kings’ Signs and Costumes Spoke for Them‘ rel=”nofollow”>‘No Kings’ marchers in Manhattan, March 28, 2026
An AI-generated LEGO movie mocking Trump as a pedophile “is the work of Iran-based propagandists called the ‘Explosive News Team’ and is just the latest in a long line of AI-generated LEGO videos aimed at mocking Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu.” – 404 Media
To celebrate, theatre makers give video messages. Willem Dafoe (a founding member of the Wooster Group) in his message: “Our challenge as theatre-makers is to avoid the corruption of theatre solely as a commercial enterprise dedicated to entertain as distraction.” – American Theatre
“Developers discovered the cultural value of place-making. Corporations embraced art as branding. Cultural nonprofits and academic institutions increasingly adopted the vocabulary of community engagement while operating within the same economic structures driving displacement.” What now? – Hyperallergic
It’s foundational: “Over the past three decades, music originating from Black genres has generated £24.5bn of the UK music industry’s £30bn recorded music market.” – The Guardian (UK)
“Angelus Novus is renowned not just in its own right, but for what its most famous owner made of it. … It was purchased in Munich in 1921 by the German-Jewish writer Walter Benjamin, a titanic figure in 20th-century letters.” Now, ironically, it’s represented by “an authorized facsimile.” – The New York Times
“To imagine a hospital administrator agreeing to this sort of project in a post-Titicut world speaks to the devastating impact of Wiseman’s work; anyone who had seen anything like it before surely would’ve said, You can see yourself out.” – Paris Review
Maybe it was this: “The platform’s operational costs proved unsustainable, with each 10-second video costing OpenAI approximately $130 in compute expenses. With millions of users creating content daily, these costs escalated to $15 million per day.” – Geeky Gadgets
“It’s the kind of television writing that you can see in the blueprints of everyone’s favorite shows nowadays. There’s a reason why Whedon was once admired for his craft. The long term, episode by episode plotting is just exquisite.” But there’s also a reason the remake failed. – Aftermath
Nominations for the Ivor Novello songwriting awards: “reveal the gender disparity in British and Irish music: there are more than twice as many male nominees (40) than female (19), with two non-binary artists making up the 61 songwriters and composers recognised.” – The Guardian (UK)
The infrastructure carrying culture to audiences — legal, technical, financial, corporate — was not built for the creative sector. It was built by and for technology companies, telecommunications firms, and entertainment conglomerates.
The “Tristan” participants at the Met on March 9, 1935. Artur Bodanzky is top center.
I am in Ann Arbor, participating in a Mahler project with Ken Kiesler and his fervent University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra – the group with which I memorably toured South Africa a year ago (and
Italian authorities said Thursday they had seized €20 million of assets in Tuscany, including property, vineyards. and artworks, allegedly bought with money embezzled from Andress. The onetime Bond girl, now 90, had filed a complaint alleging a “progressive and significant depletion of her assets” by her financial managers. – AFP (Yahoo!)
Once firms get consumers used to being sorted, profiled, and priced differently, the practice starts to feel inevitable. But it is not. It is a choice about what kind of business practices we expect. Personalized algorithmic pricing pulls together affordability, privacy, competition, consumer protection, and data extraction all at once. – The Walrus
It’s been widely assumed that the 8th-century manuscript was copied and illuminated at St. Columba’s monastery on Scotland’s island of Iona — this despite the fact that there’s no archaeological evidence that Iona had a place or materials for such a major project. Evidence has, however, been found at another Scottish site. – Artnet
Ignoring cultural property protections runs counter to a lesson many military forces, including the United States, have come to recognize: that safeguarding cultural heritage is not only a legal obligation, but also strategically smart. – The Conversation
One thing that has really struck me is that ordinary Americans are far less interested in fighting about history than it might seem. – The New York Times
When Wittgenstein referred to the “beginning of the end of humanity,” he was not envisioning sci-fi cataclysms… He was referring to what he called the “form of life” we inhabit. That form of life is threatened by a way of thinking that lowers human life to the plane of science and technology. – Commonweal
“In its first official season, starting May 2 in New York City, the International Dance League is offering contracts to top-level dance teams and presenting huge arena competitions. … It’s calling the format ‘the MMA of dance.’ And the dance community is reacting with both excitement and skepticism.” – Dance Magazine
Amid a projected $48 million deficit largely attributed to enrollment decline, the New School’s upcoming layoffs come as the newest development in the university’s sprawling workforce reduction saga, which the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) called the “largest attempted firing of faculty currently taking place in the nation.” – Hyperallergic
Searches for the phrase job apocalypse are spiking. Polls show that voters are beginning to freak out. But there’s a better question for white-collar workers to ask themselves: Am I coal, or am I a horse? – The Atlantic
Insulating yourself from inconvenient facts is not an effective long-term life strategy, even for someone powerful enough to externalize the costs of most of their bad decisions onto others. – Artnet
<a href="https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/2026/03/baghdad-bob-in-drag-sycophancy-is-a-feature-not-a-bug.html" title='Baghdad Bob in Drag Sycophancy Is a Feature Not a Bug‘ rel=”nofollow”>‘President Trump has been right about everything.” — White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. (This is old news by now, but the staff felt an obligation to memorialize it.)
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‘No Kings’ marchers in Manhattan, March 28, 2026
The infrastructure carrying culture to audiences — legal, technical, financial, corporate — was not built for the creative sector. It was built by and for technology companies, telecommunications firms, and entertainment conglomerates.
‘President Trump has been right about everything.” — White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. (This is old news by now, but the staff felt an obligation to memorialize it.)
