Among them, this year’s survey finds that while the same proportion of Australians attended events and festivals as in 2019 and 2022, they are now attending less frequently. Weekly attendance has dropped across all art forms, with Australians choosing only to attend every few months. - ArtsHub
The Flower Fairies' influence has endured: they continue to be popular around the world – big in Japan and in Italy, where Gucci released a children's range featuring Barker's prints in 2022. Billie Eilish recently had Flower Fairies tattooed on her hand, while their whimsical, floral aesthetic can be seen in the TikTok "fairycore" trend. - BBC
A long-term cultural programme in Thamesmead in south-east London has provided artists with low-rent studios and access to affordable housing. Since it began five years ago, it has also produced more than 1,000 job opportunities. - The Art Newspaper
The venue will house a proscenium theatre with a capacity of 600, as well as a 200-seat studio theatre, two rehearsal studios and function spaces. It also features a soundshell, designed for festivals and outdoor events. - Limelight
“The good modern city doesn’t exist in any dataset that will be sampled by AI. What AI will sample is Chinese cities and cities built with massive highway interchanges. It’ll take a bad city and try to make it less bad.” - Bloomberg
"A higher education expert once said that putting the words 'liberal' and 'arts' together was a 'branding disaster' – one so toxic that it was undermining public support for higher education. To break down the meaning and origin of the term, The Conversation reached out to Blaine Greteman." - The Conversation
"The iconic St. Sophia Cathedral in the capital, Kyiv, and the medieval center of the western city of Lviv, are UNESCO World Heritage Sites central to Ukraine's culture and history. The decision Friday to (list the sites as) 'in danger' has no enforcement mechanism, but could help deter Russian attacks." - AP
Jane Friedman, who writes a newsletter about the publishing industry and was a victim of AI-generated content: "There’s not a lot of critical thinking that goes on in that first step of customer service with Amazon." - Slate
But art historian Erika López Prater, fired for showing an image of the Prophet Muhammad in an online Hamline class, may keep her lawsuit against the university on the grounds of religious discrimination. - Sahan Journal
Of course, there's Michelle Yeoh's Evelyn in Everything Everywhere All at Once, but that's not the only zeitgeist change. Middle-aged women "have had enough of the bullshit." - LitHub
Bard College's president says its online courses are useful for students who haven't yet fled the newly right-wing New College, but also those who have. "They want to know they’re not alone, and we’re telling them they’re not alone." - Fast Company
"We need an etiquette of pictures and videos of strangers, I think. We're far enough into the 'practically everybody has a camera' age that we know how it goes." - NPR
"A lot of what drove the programming decisions was where there was that emotional hook," said artistic director Bill Rauch. "What does it mean to do X, Y or Z at the World Trade Center? You walk by that North Memorial Pool on your way in and out. It's right there." - MSN (The Washington Post)
Queer historian Hugh Ryan describes the scene in Manhattan's then-cheap East Village, which started in the early 1980s as scrappy do-it-yourself performance art, was almost wiped out by AIDS, and was reborn in the '90s as persona-driven comedy and cabaret — all in dingy rock-n-roll dives. - Curbed
The opera, symphony and several other organizations have new leadership. It's a changing of the guard familiar now in many American communities. - Oregon ArtsWatch
