"What play did you ever see that's changed your life? That's not the purpose of theatre." "Acting has nothing in the world to do with feelings. Zero. ... What I'm looking for in an actor is the knowledge and courage to stand still and say the stupid fucking words." - American Theatre
“I think everybody should do what he can do best for the country. The snipers should kill the enemy. The singers should sing for the soldiers and the refugees. What I can do is write and tell things, and that is what I am doing.” - The New York Times
You'd probably picture some winsome soprano singing the Queen of the Night and Zerbinetta, not a big, bearded tenor who sings Peter Grimes. But that's how composer Brett Dean and librettist Matthew Jocelyn describe Allan Clayton, for whom they wrote the title role in their Hamlet. - The New York Times
“We are in the present losing more movies from the past faster than ever before. It seems like we aren’t, but the mere disappearance of physical media is already having corporations curating what we watch, faster for us." - IndieWire
"People tend to converge toward the language they observe around them, whether it's copying word choices, mirroring sentence structures or mimicking pronunciations. ... In fact, people converge toward speech sounds they expect to hear – even if they never actually hear them." - The Conversation
"Four years ago, Alicia Graf Mack — a former star of Dance Theatre of Harlem and Alvin Ailey — took the reins of the dance division, with plans to usher in an altogether more diverse experience. The pandemic, alongside changing conversations around race and gender, shifted that evolution into high gear." - Vanity Fair
His career flourished there after he fled statutory rape charges in the US in 1973. But there was a huge backlash when he won three Césars for An Officer and a Spy in 2019, and he couldn't get French financing (and had trouble getting actors) for his latest film, The Palace. - Variety
The Carabinieri say so, but at least two prominent art professionals disagree: Titian scholar Andrea Donati ("sensationally wrong ... I cannot even see the shadow of Titian in this portrait") and art historian and former Italian culture minister Vittorio Sgarbi ("If that's a Titian, I'm Napoleon!"). - Smithsonian Magazine
Roger Lynch: "We have 70 million people who read our magazines, but 300-something million that interact with our websites every month and 450 million that interact with us on social media. Our audience is already telling us that's not the way they interact with us." (podcast with transcript) - The New York Times
"Multiple former female staffers from the early aughts of the long-running sketch show described an environment that was routinely uncomfortable and at times unsafe. ... At worst, the environment was a space where they were objectified and often preyed upon." - Mic
"Insiders say the Korean film industry is facing a host of deeply rooted challenges that were only exacerbated during the pandemic, from the rise of streamers to widespread consolidation that has led to giant conglomerates dominating and squeezing out smaller, more adventurous releases." - The Hollywood Reporter
Rima Abdul Malak, who as a child fled with her family to France from the Lebanese Civil War, succeeds Roselyne Bachelot, who was in the position for only 22 months. (France has had 15 culture ministers in the past 30 years.) - The National (Abu Dhabi)
Two major projects were launched in 2017 aimed at getting more female acts on stages - ReBalance and KeyChange - after a BBC study had found around 80% of headliners were all-male. Five years on, new analysis by the BBC indicates there's been little change at the top of the bills. - BBC
Discovered by a Turin branch of the cultural heritage unit, a subsidiary of the Italian state police known as the Carabinieri, the 16th-century work, titled Portrait of a Man with a Beret, first went missing two decades ago from an undisclosed location. - ARTnews
We can at least say of the oil economy that its environmental damage, and consequent destruction of the human world, is only an epiphenomenon, whereas for the internet, the destruction of the human is itself the source of value. - LA Review of Books
