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- A Photographer Who Portrayed Women As Bold And Self-Possessed, Even In 1960s Hong Kong
Sheung was “deeply invested in crafting an image of female autonomy and audacity at a time when women’s lives were constrained by traditional expectations.” – The New York Times
- Museum Gift Stores Have Always Been A Little Special, But They’ve Leveled Up
“Rather than an exit point, this new wave of merchandising is quickly turning museum gift shops into a desirable entry point. Curated edits … are now beginning to treat them as a stand-alone shopping destination, marking a shift from cultural institution to cultural retailer.” – The Guardian (UK)
- The Five Top Takeaways From The Kennedy Center Ruling
And yes, we sure do mean the Kennedy Center. – The New York Times
- The Creator Of This Animated Cupcake Is Furious At Buzzfeed’s GenAI Plan
Remember when Jonah Peretti of Buzzfeed seemed like a good guy? That was a long time ago, and we were all so much more innocent, including the creator of Good Advice Cupcake: “I trusted them, though naively, when they said they had no interest in continuing Cuppy without me.” – Wired
- Marcia Lucas, Who Truly Created Star Wars Through Editing, Has Died At 80
Lucas not only co-edited the first movie and Return of the Jedi but also made various Spielberg, Scorsese, and many other movies far, far better through her mad skills. – The Hollywood Reporter
- A Critic Begs Us All Not To Forget These Performances In The Lead-Up To Emmy Noms
These actors aren’t going to be nominated, but they (maybe!) should be. And some of us could at least watch their shows. – Vulture
- The Serious Business Of Creating Illustrations For Children
“For years, illustrators have been overlooked, seen as people who come in and do the decorating after the house has been built. But this couldn’t be further from the truth.” – The Guardian (UK)
- The Biggest AI Writing Tell
The prose – whether in a text or fiction submission – is “perfectly clean, without a stray comma; uniform in length, with evenly paced paragraphs and a distinctive tone that is simultaneously breezy and grandiose.” – The Atlantic
- On TikTok, Scammers Are Using AI Blackface To Push Cheap Products
Those belt buckles sure aren’t handmade. And: “Nearly all aspects of the accounts appear to be AI-generated — from the ‘person’ in the video to automated responses to comments, which in some cases attempt to mimic African American vernacular.” – The Verge
- A Novel Twenty Years In The Making
“If you work on a book for twenty years—whatever we mean by work—people really act like you’re very neurotic. Like there’s something wrong with you, or you’re doing something wrong—and it’s easy to internalize that.” – Paris Review
- How Allen Toussaint, Post-Katrina, Found Himself Onstage At Joe’s Pub
Slowly, in front of star-studded crowds that included the rockers Elvis Costello, Bonnie Raitt and Boz Scaggs, Toussaint reinvented himself. – The New York Times
- Is Melbourne, Australia, The Vinyl Capital Of The World?
Probably it’s Tokyo – Australian record shops go on record-buying trips there to prop up their own inventory – but there is the new statistic that says “Melbourne has the most vinyl record stores per capita in the world (5.9 stores per 100,000 residents).” – The Guardian (UK)
- AJ Chronicles: Google Just Changed the way We’re Going to Find Culture
What Google presented this month was revolutionary, a declaration that the web as we know it is dead, and an operating manual for how the new web will work. More important, it suggests how we all will find — or fail to find — culture over the next decade. - Reinventing models that don’t work
This Week’s Highlights:
The economic logic that built our cultural institutions showed distress this week, and the pieces are reorganizing. CBS announced it will earn $15 million a year by leasing Colbert’s Late Night slot rather than producing anything in it (Variety) — a network ditching its highest-watched late night show and deciding it would rather collect rent than make television. NPR laid off journalists while restructuring around an uncertain federal future (NPR). And it was revealed that Hollywood executive pay rose 51 this past year while the industry shed 17,000 jobs (The Wrap).
The institutions gaining ground seem to be the ones rewriting the model entirely. London’s Wigmore Hall reports record sales since walking away from Arts Council England funding (The Stage). Opera Philadelphia, eighteen months from collapse a year and a half ago, now runs a surplus on $11 tickets (The New York Times). Sydney Dance Company is closing four years of deficits by hosting Pilates classes (Australian Financial Review). And the Heinz Endowments are exiting individual artist grants to fund cultural infrastructure (WESA).
Above all of it, AI keeps flattening the field — a study reported that on the basis of reviewing hundreds of thousands of college essays assisted by AI that they converge into homogenized sameness (The New York Times). And the observation that non-fiction book publishers are caught completely unprepared for what’s already arriving in the AI era (New York Magazine). The question facing every cultural organization right now isn’t how to defend the existing model, it’s defining what comes next.
All this week’s stories below, organized by topic.
Doug
- Neil Barclay shares strategies for sustainability for BIPOC organizations
Neil Barclay, President & CEO of the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, talks the evolving landscape for BIPOC organizations and avenues for sustainability.
- Federal Judge Orders Trump To Take His Name Off The Kennedy Center
A federal judge Friday ordered that President Donald Trump’s name be removed from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and that officials halt its plan to close the venue for two years. – Washington Post
- OMG, Audio Of Harpo Marx Actually Speaking!
Harpo (né Arthur) developed his silent persona due to his own stage fright; in later years he said he didn’t want to “tear down a character it took me decades to build.” On rare occasions, though, he did speak in public, though not when microphones were around — except for this one time. – The Guardian
- Top Hollywood Exec Pay Rose 51 Percent As Industry Shed 17,000 Jobs
The total compensation for the top executives surged a stunning 51% from a year earlier, based on a tally of $615 million vs. $408.5 million in 2024. – The Wrap
- ESPN Meets The Savannah Bananas’ Choreographer
“Maceo Harrison deftly designs routines that emphasize charisma over technical precision and spotlight the teams’ natural showmen while camouflaging the players with two left feet. … Sometimes he has mere hours to choreograph and just as little time to teach his routines to the players.” – ESPN
- The Art Looter Who Supplied Museums
Latchford’s success depended not just on criminal networks that supplied and transported these objects, but on the willingness of museums, dealers, collectors, and scholars to accept fragmented or problematic provenance so long as the objects themselves retained the aura of rarity and beauty. – Hyperallergic
- Universities Rethink The SAT
“We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields,” the professors write in an open letter to the Board of Regents. – The Wall Street Journal
- Summing Up Dudamel’s Time With The LA Philharmonic
Unlike his immediate predecessor, Esa-Pekka Salonen, who also served as the Philharmonic’s music director for 17 seasons, Mr. Dudamel seems not to have matured on the podium. – The Wall Street Journal
- Hudson Valley Shakespeare Finally Has A Real Theater Building
Designed by award-winning architects Studio Gang, the 451-seat Scripps Theater Center — in Garrison, NY, 60 miles north of New York City — is a curved mass-timber structure with open sides, set on 98 landscaped acres overlooking the Hudson River. Year-round facilities will let the festival expand beyond a summer schedule. – Time Out New York
- FCC Action Against ABC Is A Threat To Free Speech, Says Disney
“The order is inconsistent with a legitimate exercise of investigative authority and is plainly incompatible with the First Amendment,” Disney said in its Thursday filing. Carr has insisted the early renewal order is strictly about DEI. – The Wall Street Journal
- Looking At 100s Of Thousands Of College Essays: AI Flattens Creativity
This seems to be especially true for students. A.I.’s smooth sentences, elegant transitions and rich vocabulary give the illusion of expansive creativity and individuality. But the underlying ideas often converge into a few homogenized categories. – The New York Times
- Gehry Partners Will Work On Renovation Of The Getty Center
Gehry Partners will design a variety of upgrades to the Getty Center — including a major revamp of its entry experience — during its upcoming year-long closure, the museum announced Thursday. – Los Angeles Times
- English Can Be A Weird Language. That’s Why It’s Perfect For Competitive Spelling Bees.
Sure, there are some other languages whose speakers have spelling contests, but there are plenty — Italian, Finnish, Malay, etc. — whose words are spelled exactly as they’re pronounced. But English? In what other language could “ough” be pronounced eight different ways, depending on the word? – The New York Times Magazine
- The Publishing Industry Is Very Vulnerable To AI
The book-publishing industry had already been wrestling with the prospect of a flood of AI-authored texts in the fiction market, and now the Rosenbaum scandal was showing the way AI could blow a hole in the nonfiction sector, too. – New York Magazine
- YouTube Will Start Labeling AI Video
YouTube is making AI-generated content labels more prominent for viewers — and it’s going to start automatically applying the labels if it detects that a video includes “significant photorealistic AI use.” – Variety
- Science: Yes, Pianists Can Control Sound By Their Touch
Their findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), suggest that the subtle motions of a pianist’s fingers and hands influence how listeners perceive qualities such as brightness, heaviness, and clarity in musical notes. – Science Daily
- Smithsonian Chief Lonnie Bunch Has Curated A New Exhibit About America’s Ideals. He Thinks It May Be His Last Show.
“(He) did not set out to make the exhibit American Aspirations his swan song. But he said that his organizing of an exhibition that honors America’s 250th anniversary could well be among his final acts as secretary. ‘It’s probably the last exhibit I will curate, there’s no doubt about that.’” – The New York Times
- England’s Arts Funding Body Changes Its Criteria To Re-Focus On “Excellence”
Arts Council England has unveiled a new strategy to replace the “Let’s Create” regime, which was widely criticized for appearing to de-emphasize high quality in favor of inclusiveness. The new policy aims for ACE’s grants to “support excellence, deliver for everybody, and reach everywhere.” – The Stage (UK)
- ARTnews Lists “The 100 Best Artworks About America”
“What, exactly, defines America? It’s a question that’s been asked for more than two centuries, and it’s unlikely to be conclusively answered anytime soon. But, with the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding fast approaching, we took the occasion to hash out a response to that query, using art as a guide.” – ARTnews
- How We Selected Our “100 Best Artworks About America”
“We started working on this list over a year ago and spent more than a month alone wrestling with how best to define its purview. We decided this would not be a list of the best American artworks, which is both too challenging an exercise and too wide a net to cast.” – ARTnews
- ABC TV Stations Say Trump FCC’s Review Of Their Broadcast Licenses Is Illegal
“Local TV stations owned by ABC across the United States blasted the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday for launching an ‘unlawful, arbitrary and unconstitutional’ early review of their broadcast licenses as a dispute between the network and the Trump-controlled agency intensifies.” – AP
