After an eye-popping NFT sale for the Uffizi turned out to net the museum only €70,000, far less than half of the sale, the government worries that its museums will forever lose control over Italy's culture in digital environments. - Artnet
"Shelley's greatest gift was in the deftness with which he interwove the poetical and the political. Poetry had, for Shelley, of necessity to appropriate a political dimension. And politics required a poetical imagination. That was why ... 'poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world'." - The Observer (UK)
The Museum of London - whose collection and attitude are absolute gems - has been squeezed into "an eccentric building" for years. Now "in a five-month blowout, the museum will host a packed programme of events" before moving to a new, larger home. - The Guardian (UK)
Ada Limón "assumes the role with two primary intentions: to use poetry to help people reclaim their humanity and to repair their relationship with the natural world. ... Instead of seeing nature as separate from humanity, she implores us to remember that 'we are nature too.'" - MSN (The Washington Post)
"In a quiet corner of the bohemian district of San Frediano, hidden behind an 18th-century iron gate that opens onto a whimsical wisteria-covered alleyway, lies a Florentine cultural treasure: the Antico Setificio Fiorentino." - The New York Times
"The country's small film industry has made 20 horrors in the past six years, with another two (this) autumn. ..." Says one filmmaker, "Irish folklore is particularly dark and lends itself to horror. Not a lot of happy endings – a lot of people being dragged to their doom." - The Guardian
David Bromwich: "In The Importance of Being Earnest, Algernon recoiled from the display of affection by the happily married: 'It is simply washing one's clean linen in public.' A great deal of the admired and well-rewarded art of our time consists of washing one's clean linen in public." - The Nation
"Hustle is fluid, fleet, as elegant as it is funky. A dance in 3/4 time, it moves elliptically through disco's 4/4 beat. ... Hustle offers a progressive vision of social dance — especially in its gender-neutral approach to partnering." So Abdiel Jacobsen is spreading the gospel of hustle. - The New York Times
She got the idea after losing a music director post, following a successful audition, because "we just didn't know how to market you" (meaning a Black woman). Says Johnson, "It's like, we have this piece of grit — how do you create something beautiful out of that awfulness?" - MSNBC
Founded in 1986 to focus on new plays from and about the South, the company moved into a new space in 2018 that raised its expenses by 50%; shortly before the pandemic shutdown, Southern Rep cancelled a production and laid off six staffers. - The Times-Picayune / New Orleans Advocate
Hirst's A Hundred Years, a glass cube in which flies hatch on one side and then fly into a bug zapper on the other, was removed from an exhibition at a German museum — whose director said, "We thought that flies were not covered by the Animal Welfare Act." - Artnet
On a Tuesday in May, just arrived in town, Mélisse Brunet started rehearsing the Lexington Philharmonic in Kentucky for the season's final concert. By Thursday, musicians were texting the board president about how good she is. By Friday, the whole search committee was watching rehearsal. And now ... - Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader
"In response to a precipitous slide in attendance during the 2021-22 season, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra has canceled 10 concerts originally scheduled to be performed next season at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. ... By the end of last season, attendance at BSO performances was averaging about 40% of capacity." - The Baltimore Sun
Bill remembers the myriad performers who came from abroad and his trips overseas covering Canadian ensembles: in Prague in 1968, weeks before the Soviet tanks rolled in, and in China in 1978, when everyone still wore Mao hats. Plus his North American odyssey trying to interview Luciano Pavarotti. - Toronto Star
