"The characters in the showdown were as colorful as any drawn on the studio's animation cels: union activists, gangsters, communists and anti-communists, and, not least, Walt Disney himself, who, dropping his avuncular persona, played a long game of political hardball." - Salon
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, "Oral arguments were held on Monday this week, and the judges 'seemed to struggle with basic tech concepts.'" The tech companies will likely appeal. - Wired
Look at 2007's Knocked Up. It's "a self-consciously edgy movie that declines, again and again, to say the word abortion out loud. It has much to say about Roe’s looming tragedy—precisely because, so often, it opts to say nothing at all." - The Atlantic
The Belgium-born, Amsterdam-based director, known in the US for his Broadway stagings of A View from the Bridge, The Crucible, Network, and West Side Story, will be artistic director of the Ruhrtriennale, one of Europe's largest interdisciplinary arts festivals, for the 2024-26 cycle. - M-Festival.biz
A review, commissioned by the British branch of Actors' Equity, of 111 academic studies performed over 20 years found (among other conclusions) that, in addition to the depression figures, performers are from four to ten times (depending on the particular genre) as likely as regular folks to suffer anxiety. - The Guardian
As one director of a presenting venue puts it, "It's like, we're driving straight up (to) the cliff ... but we're swerving and bumping and jogging, and there's still a cliff there. We know it's coming, but we have no idea when we're gonna get there." - Yahoo! (Los Angeles Times)
UNESCO's confirmed count stands at 127, while President Volodymyr Zelensky said last week that the number is nearly 200. Much of that destruction was clearly deliberate; "Targeted attacks on museums" said Zelensky, "this wouldn't cross even a terrorist's mind. But this is the army that's waging war on us." - Artnet
“It’s still a way to erase identity,” said Corine Wegener, on why culture continues to be a major target in contemporary warfare. Some 200 cultural sites in Ukraine have already been reported to have been targeted in the war with Russia. ARTnews
The plan, first approved by Netanyahu's government and just affirmed by city authorities, will involve a half-mile zipline from a ridge between East and West Jerusalem into the Peace Valley and a cable car to the Western Wall of King Herod's Temple. - The Art Newspaper
"Hawley's bill would dramatically rewrite U.S. copyright law, shortening the total term available to all copyright holders going forward by several decades. It would also seek to retroactively limit Disney's copyrights." Introducing the legislation, Hawley explicitly cited "woke corporations like Disney ... pandering to woke activists." - Variety
Whereas fundraising efforts in 2019 raised $6.22 for every fundraising dollar spent, return on fundraising increased to $7.35 in 2020, driven mostly by fundraising expense reduction. SMU Data Arts
For much of the past six centuries, the neighborhood was the Jewish quarter of Vilnius. Following World War II, the district was badly neglected by the Soviet occupiers; after Lithuanian independence in 1991, Užupis was cheap, and artists flocked there. The "Republic" was an April Fool's gag that never ended. - Euronews
Happy day after Mother's Day in the U.S.: "The kingdoms are at odds. The baby cannot care for itself, the art cannot create itself, and rarely can the two be done in tandem." - The Atlantic
The Keller, where the Portland Opera and Oregon Ballet Theatre perform, isn't seismic safe, a report says. (That's not even addressing the myriad of acoustic problems in the auditorium.) But it's part of Portland's civic architecture. What should the city do? - Oregon ArtsWatch
Not shocking, perhaps, but still pretty monstrous: "The increasing pride with which the studio uses exact replicas of artists’ work leads one to wonder whether those artists are being fairly compensated for that usage, if at all." (The answer is pretty much "nope.") - Hyperallergic
