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Spotify Has Insisted On Exclusive Rights To The Podcasts It Carries. Maybe That Wasn’t A Good Idea

The podcast industry built itself on an open ecosystem: any podcast player could make any particular podcast available.  Then Spotify, after it bought Gimlet Media, started insisting on allowing its podcasts only on its own player.  It's a standard big-business move — and it's backfiring. - Simon Owens's Media Newsletter

The Modern Orchestra Is An Exquisite Piece Of Technology. Its Operating System Could Use An Update

The institution of an orchestra was built for another time. In an age of attacks against institutions, perhaps it's necessary to tweak how the institution works. - The American Scholar

What’s A Poor Stage Director To Do When The Script Calls For Eyeballs Coming From The Floorboards Or The Entire Set On A Steep...

Michael Longhurst, Ned Bennett, Milli Bhatia, and Nadia Latif talk about meeting the challenge of staging the (presumably) unstageable. - The Guardian

Black Writers And Characters Are Appearing In American Fiction More Than Ever Before. Here’s The Difficulty With That.

"Our current problem isn't an insufficient amount of Black representation in literature but a surfeit of it. And in many cases that means simply another marketing opportunity, a way to sell familiar images of Blackness to as broad an audience as possible." - The New York Times Magazine

Intimidation And Self-Censorship Are Rampant In Poland’s Cultural Sphere, Says Report

"The 100-page report ... claims that instead of establishing an explicit, centralized censorship regime, the leading the Law and Justice party has taken a more 'devious' approach, exerting its influence by infiltrating art institutions." - Artnet

This Fernand Léger Painting Was Missing For 100 Years. Turned Out It Was On The Flip Side Of Another Painting.

"A lost Fernand Léger painting has reappeared after more than a century of being hidden behind another canvas. The work, an unnamed piece from the Smoke over the Rooftops series (1911–12), was discovered on the flip side of Léger's Bastille Day, painted later that year." - ARTnews

Which San Antonio Orchestra Will Get County Funding? There’s Been A Bit Of A Battle

The problem: during the period between the board closing the San Antonio Symphony and the musicians forming the new San Antonio Philharmonic, a stopgap organization was created to provide pit musicians for the opera and ballet. It's that last organization that's been funded in the next county budget. - San Antonio Report

He’s Actually Going Through With It: Damien Hirst Is Burning His Own Paintings After Selling NFTs Of Them

"A lot of people think I'm burning millions of dollars of art but I'm not. I'm completing the transformation of these physical artworks into NFTs by burning the physical versions." - BBC

Here Are The 2022 Winners Of The MacArthur Fellowships (Okay, The “Genius Awards”)

The arts figures included in this year's class of winners are visual artists Paul Chan and Tavares Strachan; musician/scholar Martha Gonzalez; film/video artist Sly Hopinka; novelist/journalist Kiese Laymon; percussionist and electronic music composer Ikue Mori; jazz cellist Tomeka Reed; and architect Amanda Williams. - NPR

An Idea Isn’t Copyrightable. But Art Is

Fundamentally, artists must realise that in copyright terms, their creative ideas are worthless until those ideas form part of a tangible piece of work – whether that be as a drawing, a painting, a script, a musical score or a work of literature (for example). - ArtsHub

Philadelphia Museum Of Art Strike Enters Third Week. Here’s What’s Driving It

“It’s kind of a generational movement that I see here. I see it as something coming out of a young workforce that is mostly college-educated and is aware of the role that they play in the economy. And you know, they understand that they need better benefits and better wages.” - Philadelphia Inquirer

Why Superfans Treat Disney Like A Religion

To Deborah DeGiovine — and others around the world — visiting a Disney park isn't just a summer vacation. It's the site for important life events, and personal meaning that may border on the spiritual, or even religious. - CBC

Appreciating The Singular Talent Of Angela Lansbury

Lansbury’s ability to be both broad and subtle, larger than life yet unmistakably human, was indispensable in introducing the world to “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.” - Los Angeles Times

Riding AI Image Generators Down A Rabbit Hole Of Bizarre Pop Culture

After a while I started to realize that this was more than just fun and more than just horror: Stable Diffusion is birthing a multiverse of alternate realities, all distilled from the very personal visions of tens (hundreds?) of thousands of fans who probably jumped at the possibility. - Fast Company

Inside Orange County’s New Museum

Los Angeles-based Morphosis, which was founded by Pritzker Architecture Prize-winning architect Thom Mayne, designed the structure to have a "gradient of architectural intensity, from complex forms at the museum's entry to rectilinear and flexible forms within the galleries". - Dezeen

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