The decision was made by the institution’s senate in its first meeting of the 2025-26 academic year without faculty input. Among the majors affected are fine arts, music history, classics, digital humanities, African-American and Latino/Latin American Studies, and French, German, Italian, and Russian language and literature. - ARTnews
The Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre, opening on October 13 and built for £185 million ($250 million), includes a 500-seat concert hall, a 250-seat theatre, a black box performance space, a dance studio, a cinema, lecture and exhibition halls, a library, and rehearsal rooms. - BBC (Yahoo!)
“Starting with eighth-graders this year, Oklahoma won’t require fine arts credits to earn a high school diploma. ... The decision to offer fine arts curriculum will now be left up to school districts across the state. Advocates worry about the future of drama, art and music opportunities in public schools.” - The Frontier (Tulsa)
Mann, whose work is held at major art institutions around the world, is reeling after police seized four of her most celebrated — and reviled — photographs off the walls of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas in January. "Awful" and "shocking," she recalled. - NPR
“A lot of gen AI supporters see it as a tool that’s ‘democratizing’ art by lowering traditional barriers to entry like ‘learning how to draw,’ ‘learning how to play an instrument,’ or ‘learning how to write a story.’” - The Verge (Archive Today)
Oops, the MP who’s the parliamentary secretary for combating crime forgot to give a heads up about his statement that Kneecap were banned to public safety colleagues. Now, he says, “any further comment I'm going to leave to the officials at Immigration and they will manage that accordingly.” - CBC
The levy includes funding to maintain three arts centers, which offer dance, art, and music classes - and in one case, valuable studio space - for low and middle-income Oregonians. - Oregon ArtsWatch
The fest is “a state-sponsored event in Saudi Arabia that Human Rights Watch said was designed to deflect attention from the country’s ‘brutal repression of free speech’ and other human rights violations.” - The New York Times
“Sinclair and Nexstar may be potent media players, but they would have run into serious problems if they had preempted Kimmel’s show for an extended period of time.” Also, there’s Monday Night Football. - The Atlantic
“The first floor, equipped with lighting and a sound and video projection system, will be home to poetry readings, film screenings, open mics, and community forums. The second floor consists of administrative offices and a hardwood dance studio, which (management) envisions becoming a rehearsal room for local performers.” - The Philadelphia Inquirer (MSN)
"Although cities develop new activities and abandon old ones, they do so in a way that keeps their coherence constant. This suggests that such transformations are constrained: although cities can develop new activities and drop old ones, while doing so, the set of industries they maintain seems to need to stay coherent.
Over the last several months, Harvard has made significant changes to identity-focused programming — eliminating or rebranding entire programs abruptly and with minimal, if any, public explanation. - The Crimson
In 2010, to boost an economy still reeling from a 2008 banking crisis, Iceland’s government took advantage of the global attention brought by a volcanic eruption (which disrupted air traffic for days) to start a major advertising campaign for tourism. That campaign worked all too well. - The New York Times
