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- 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)
- Nobody Boos At A Screen
Good Morning,
The U.S. has lost a fifth of its movie theaters and nearly a third of its bowling alleys since 2001 (Fortune). That’s not a taste story, it’s an infrastructure one — the places where strangers used to end up sitting next to each other are disappearing.
The consequence shows up inside the rooms still standing: moviegoing has stopped being habit meeting spontaneity, and the question of what to see has collapsed into whether to go at all (The Atlantic). Instagram, meanwhile, is building a TV app on the theory that private scrolling becomes a shared activity if you move it to the big screen (The Atlantic).
But a room still does something a feed can’t. Bayreuth audiences booed the AI-assembled projections in a Wagner staging (Los Angeles Times). Some additional evidence: remembering sequences, processing music and staying present with other people is exactly the demand researchers think helps hold dementia off (Harper’s Bazaar).
All of our stories below.
- 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
- An Actor Who Was Slated To Star In Hadestown Has ‘Departed’ After His Hostile Comments About Trans People Emerge
For instance, in one video clip that surfaced after Geno Segers was announced as Hades, “Segers likens transgender people to people pretending they are service animals in hopes of receiving discounts on airfare.” – The New York Times
- Australian Library Waives Fine For Book Returned After 150 Years
The book, The Antiquities of Athens, published in 1858, “was discovered inside a tea crate bricked into a sealed fireplace.” Normal place to put a book down and then never see it again, right? – Salon
- Writers Just Can’t Resist Writing From The POV Of A Dog
Virginia Woolf with Flush, Paul Auster with Timbuktu, Garth Stein with The Art of Racing in the Rain, and now another Paul – Yoon – with Etna. Why? Yoon says, “I deeply believe dogs have superpowers and secrets.” – The New York Times
- Ballet Might Help Stave Off Dementia
“When we’re learning choreography, we’re asking the brain to do so many things at once: remember sequences, process music, coordinate movement, adapt when we make mistakes, and stay present with other people in the room. It’s a perfect puzzle for keeping the mind fresh.” – Harper’s Bazaar
- How Samantha Morton, Circe In The New Odyssey, Survived A Grim Childhood To Become A Star
“It was theater that ultimately changed her life. Between the ages of 14 and 16 she began acting while, offstage, she kept stealing food to survive, used drugs and accumulated several arrests for violent incidents.” – El País English
- Question: Is It Even Possible To Make Non-Creepy Smart Glasses?
Sure, everyone has phones, but “the phone still needs to be pulled out, held up, and have its camera activated to capture a photo or film a video. Smart glasses, with small built-in cameras and the user’s ability to obfuscate the recording notification, are much sneakier.” – Wired
- How Fender’s Newish CEO Seems Intent On Ruining The Famous Guitar Company
The CEO “appears to be suggesting that, by learning to play other people’s songs, internalizing those influences, and then synthesizing them into something new, you are essentially doing the same thing as an AI.” – The Verge