If you are presenting art because you enjoy art and only because you enjoy art, you are not respecting your charter as a nonprofit. That’s vanity, not service. Vanity has weighed down this portion of the sector with 16 tons of irrelevance. - Medium
"During his brief six-week rehearsal periods, van Hove introduces sets, costumes, music and lighting as early in the process as possible. ... He wanted a set that felt cramped, dingy and claustrophobic, a house where multiple televisions play over each other and privacy is impossible." - T — The New York Times Style Magazine
This was one of the worst Emmys telecasts in recent memory. Not in the “claws are out” way that people tend to pounce on award shows for being out of touch. It’s the opposite. The awards of this awards show were beautiful. They were meaningful. - The Daily Beast
"Self-Portraits: Masterpieces from the Uffizi ... is the first to kick off a series of 10 exhibitions that the Florence-based museum will loan to (the Bund One in Shanghai) over the next five years. ... The partnership with the Bund Museum is generating some $6 million for the Uffizi." - Artnet
The arrival of widely available image synthesis models such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion has provoked an intense online battle between artists who view AI-assisted artwork as a form of theft (more on that below) and artists who enthusiastically embrace the new creative tools. - Ars Technica
"Everything Diaghilev did was ad hoc, on a wing and a prayer or a plea and a handshake. He answered to nobody; there was no board, no governance beyond his say-so; accounts were scribbled into a little black notebook. State subsidy put an end to this modus operandi." - Prospect
These new AI capabilities confront the world with a mountain of questions over the rights to the images the programs learned from, the likelihood they will be used to spread falsehoods and hate, the ownership of their output and the nature of creativity itself. - Axios
"The Victoria and Albert Museum in London is in talks to potentially return a collection of Asante gold artifacts that were looted during a British military raid of the Ghanaian city Kumasi in 1874." - ARTnews
“All the houses are trying to open up at the same time, and they all need the same people,” Terry Podgorski said, noting that they have great actors, but they’re lacking people in “the infrastructure, the management and the tech.” - Seattle Times
"Punk feminist" author Virginie Despentes's novel, titled Cher connard (roughly, "Dear Asshole"), goes deep into what this correspondent describes as "France's sometimes difficult relationship with the #MeToo movement." - The Guardian
Renée Fleming (Clarissa Vaughan), Joyce DiDonato (Virginia Woolf), and Kelli O'Hara (Laura Brown) give a joint interview about preparing Kevin Puts's opera (based on Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer-winning novel) for its fully-staged premiere in November. - The New York Times
After a turbulent summer that saw the artistic director fired, most of the rest of management resign, and the remaining staffers in open rebellion, the theater's board of directors voted to change the company's operating model and lay off remaining employees due to "operational realities." - MSN (Chicago Tribune)
"His use of long takes, jump-cuts and actors’ asides to the camera all changed the filmmaking vocabulary. He once famously stated that every film needs a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order." - MSN (The Washington Post)
When she took the position in 1989, she was only the second woman ever appointed concertmaster at a major US orchestra, and she served for 20 years. "She was, by a long shot," said former orchestra general manager Bob Neu, "the finest concertmaster I have ever known." - The Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
"After Netflix's record-tying performance in 2021, HBO reasserted its dominance in its now-annual battle with Netflix for supremacy in the realm of prestige TV. ... (The network) collected 12 of the 25 statuettes awarded at Mondays ceremony." - CNN
