Now that the pandemic relief funds have stopped, many arts organizations are scrambling to balance their budgets. The new report says "the duration" of those funds hasn't matched the "slower rebuild" many arts organizations are facing. - NPR
Today, free will, individual agency, forgiveness, personal improvement, and healthy cultural cross-pollination are all obliterated by omnipotent determinisms. - The Atlantic
On the chopping block is the Argentine Ministry of Culture, along with the ministries of Health, Labor, Social Development, and Education (which Milei had previously referred to as “the Ministry of Indoctrination”). - ARTnews
"Recent cancellations, … and growing fear that artists may lose funding and opportunities due to political views on Israel-Palestine ..., are casting a shadow on the nation’s reputation as a bastion of free expression. (And) more and more public figures are circumventing Germany’s invitations and funding, in protest of its current policies." - Artnet
Epic had accused Google of restricting smartphone makers, wireless carriers, and app developers from providing any competition to the Play store, which accounts for over 95 percent of all downloads onto Android phones in the US. - Wired
Madison Square Garden Entertainment (MSG), the organisation behind the venue, wanted to build a Sphere on a former coach park at Stratford in east London, starting the planning process in 2018 – long before the Vegas building was completed. Supporters saw a London Sphere as a game-changer for the city's status. - Dezeen
"When the European Union put out a call to researchers to help museums enhance the impact of their digital collections, 'We immediately thought: smell,' says Inger Leemans, ... the principal investigator for Odeuropa, an E.U.-funded research project aimed at showcasing the significance of olfactory heritage in European culture." - Smithsonian Magazine
"Just one day after his December 10 swearing-in, Javier Milei, … a hard-right libertarian economist and former tantric-sex coach who beat out center-left former economic minister Sergio Massa thanks largely to the votes of young jobless men, … signed a decree slashing the number of Argentinian ministries from nineteen to nine." - Artforum
The portrait of a cowed institution has little in common with the reality of campus politics. The truth is that a university, like any other institution, chooses which complaints it will hear, whom it does and does not want to protect. - The New Yorker
"The conflict is forcing leaders to navigate larger existential questions about the power and limits of arts institutions at this moment, including whether museums should try to stay neutral or whether they should take an active role in responding to political and social issues." - Vox
The real problem was that none of these university leaders made a clear, coherent case for their institutions’ values. So when they did invoke academic freedom, they came across as insincere or hypocritical. - The Atlantic
Ariel Dorfman: "The smiling, friendly form of capitalism now presents — the very fact that it doesn’t wish to shock or alienate its customers — may, in the end, prove even more dangerous to our ultimate well-being than was true half a century ago." - Salon
The problem isn't Apple vs. Android, say the Wired folks. It's that we're addicted to our phones - and missing chats, aka discussions, with humans in our non-phone lives. - Wired
"It includes bans on biometric systems that identify people using sensitive characteristics such as sexual orientation and race, and the indiscriminate scraping of faces from the internet," plus some copyright protections as well. - Wired
The question of the relation between one’s life and one’s taste has become a fraught one, and is still more troubled when the taste in question has a kind of public authority—as Sasha Frere-Jones came to have for readers of the New Yorker, the LA Times, and the Village Voice. - BookForum
