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- Broadway’s Next Stage Comes With Lifeboat Drills
Good Morning,
Cruise lines have quietly become one of the largest employers of musical theatre performers, and they’ve stopped commissioning schlocky revues in favor of real productions (The Guardian).
The container keeps moving faster than the field’s map of it. Microdramas — vertical, two-minute, phone-native — are already spawning microsports (The Hollywood Reporter). And a Bay Area critic argues classical music is now underground music (San Francisco Classical Voice) — not an obituary, a repositioning. Underground scenes have workable economics, while mainstream-adjacent ones don’t.
Meanwhile Hollywood posted the biggest box office weekend in history on the strength of exactly two titles (Variety). Not hard to guess which.
Against all that, London’s Royal Ballet and Opera says it needs £60 million simply to keep its building open (The Times).
Also today: Mozart’s best librettist ended up an American, and his descendants are still here (The New York Times).
All of our stories below.
- 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
- Our Complicated Relationship With Boredom
Boredom isn’t merely the result of a boring external environment, as a schoolchild might think, or inadequate mental resources, as my mother suggested. It is either a mysterious nexus of dysfunction or a healthy adaptive function (it’s complicated) that afflicts both individuals and societies at large. – Portico Quarterly
- Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart’s Best Librettist, Ended Up In The US. His Descendants Are Still Here.
After a life and career around Europe that might euphemistically be described as picaresque, da Ponte fled to Philadelphia and New York, ran a grocery store in rural Pennsylvania, and ended up as Columbia University’s first professor of Italian. For eight generations, his family has held onto his memory. – The New York Times
- Sacramento Philharmonic And Opera Names Ari Pelto Music Director
The Connecticut-born maestro, who is also music director at Opera Colorado, has been Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor at the California company since 2023. As of the coming season, he is Music Director and Chief Conductor, a newly-created title. – Moto Perpetuo
- Looks Like An Educational-AI Company Scraped The Poetry Foundation’s Website For Content
“According to its website, Giggle Academy is a nonprofit and was started by cryptocurrency mogul and Binance founder Changpeng ‘CZ’ Zhao in 2024. It also claims to have one million users in 182 countries.” Hundreds of poems, evidently copied from the Poetry Foundation’s website, are on Giggle Academy’s website without permission. – Publishers Weekly
- Why New York Historical Is Deliberately Displaying Copies In Its Latest Show
“This is because it was only as the exhibition — ‘Democracy Matters’ — was about to open on June 18 that the museum fully reckoned with the fact that windows in the new gallery would shower sunshine on some very light-sensitive artworks.” – The New York Times
- Trump White House’s Proposed Budget Includes Funding Cuts And Staff Layoffs At Smithsonian
“For fiscal year 2027, the White House has proposed giving the Smithsonian $961.3 million in federal funding, roughly an 11% cut from the $1.08 billion Congress provided to it fiscal year 2026 and the institution’s lowest proposed funding level since at least 2020.” – ARTnews
- London’s Royal Ballet And Opera Says It Needs £60 Million Just To Keep Its Building Open
“The historic Covent Garden venue … has reported a ‘critical’ need to invest in its stage infrastructure and the ‘fabric of our building’. Without doing so, the theatre is at risk of equipment failures and performance cancellations, according to a review of the organisation’s financial health.” – The Times (UK)
- Hirshhorn Museum’s New Sculpture Garden Has Its Opening Date
“After a long period of being fenced off and closed to the public, a reflecting pool will soon be reopening after a major renovation. No, not that one. This reflecting pool is in the center of the Hirshhorn Museum’s sculpture garden, which will reopen Oct. 31.” – The Washington Post (MSN)
- A Boston Symphony Lesson: Limits Of A Music Critic?
The answer cannot simply be that the critic is more objective. Objectivity is valuable, but proximity matters as well. Critics attend performances. Audiences hear concerts. Administrators oversee institutions. But only the musicians experience the entire artistic relationship. – Orlando Alonso
- Sonny Rollins — A Generation Of Change
He was the last major figure to work in almost every era of jazz history: swing, bebop, hard bop, free, fusion. He was the terminal representative of the American music we call jazz, the final titan to fall. It’s unclear whether the music can still sustain the spontaneity and power that he and his peers represented. – n+1
- Guardrails For AI Didn’t Work. So Bring In The Philosophers
“Efforts [to stop the generation of harmful content] were initially focused around putting in simple black-and-white guardrails, such as forbidding a model from talking about bombs entirely. But these proved clumsy and easy to circumvent. Now, companies are pursuing methods that lean heavily on a philosophical understanding of right and wrong.” – The AI Humanist
- Bayreuth Audiences Boo Use Of AI In Wagner Performance
The collage that the technology projected onstage puzzled the audience, DPA reported, with images including late former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the towers of the World Trade Center after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and a special postage stamp marking German reunification in 1990. – Los Angeles Times
- The Odyssey’s Success on Movie Screens Produces A Big Surge In Video Game Use
Once The Odyssey zapped onto IMAX screens on July 17, “the cultural spillover into games was immediate.” 10 days later, Ubisoft‘s 2018 ancient Greek adventure Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey had nearly doubled its active player count, swelling from an approximate total of 122,000 players to 233,000 across platforms. – GamesRadar
- America Is Losing Its Public Gathering Spaces
According to its Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages—which counts business establishments by industry down to the county level going back to 1990—the U.S. has lost a fifth of its movie theaters and nearly a third of its bowling alleys since 2001. – Fortune
- There Are 35,000 Museums In The US. Here Is ARTnews’ List Of The Top 30
They’re spread out across the lower 48. – ARTnews
- Did Someone Steal A Nicholas Cage Movie On A Hard Drive?
A new lawsuit claims Netflix did not safeguard an as-yet-unreleased Nicolas Cage WWII movie, which allegedly was just sitting around on a hard drive until somebody stole it. – Rolling Stone
- Google Briefly Allowed AI Manipulation Of Google Earth Satellite Images. Bad Idea
Google briefly allowed anyone to create AI-modified versions of satellite imagery available in Google Earth—before quickly reversing its decision as people shared examples of AI-generated pictures that illustrated the potential for misinformation and disinformation. – Ars Technica
- Misty Copeland Takes The Reins
“It’s about creating opportunity. It’s about creating access. It’s about continuing to not just be a voice in my time, but how are we setting up the next generation?” – The New York Times
- Happy 420th Birthday To The Scottish Play
Yes, Macbeth has been around for a while. “Fun fact: Samuel Pepys saw it at least nine times himself.” – LitHub
- Hollywood’s Open, Horrible Secrets, Such As The Whisper Network Concerning Jared Leto
“When a lot of people make a percentage off the earnings of one famous individual, the capacity for denial is vast” — and now there’s a huge, “well-oiled anti-accountability machine” that cranks up as well. – The New York Times
- Instagram Wants To Be On Your First Screen Now
“The idea with the channels seems to be that making the secret, private shame of scrolling into a collaborative activity will give it a new place in the home.” – The Atlantic
