The overhaul, which removes permanent members such as the heads of the Cannes Film Festival and the César Académie, comes out of criticism that the old committee kept submitting movies that premiered at Cannes but had little chance of actually getting a Best International Film nomination, let alone winning. - Variety
The challenge for larger companies like Stratford, which depend heavily on earned revenue, is how to afford to operate at partial attendance as they rebuild. - The Globe & Mail (Canada)
RMIT University in Melbourne let the employment contract with its faculty/staff union expire last year and refuses to start negotiations until 2023. To get management to the table, the union has threatened a no-off-hours-work action which includes boycotting the biggest student recruitment event; management calls that illegal. - The Age (Melbourne)
The calculations that determined the figure (currently US$79 billion), described as the Colosseum's "value as a social asset," included both the estimated €1.4 billion which the monument and its visitors contribute to Italy's economy each year and the intangible value of such "an iconic, historical and cultural site." - Artnet
Mark Swed, who had dealings (not always pleasant) with both men, considers how, despite their antithetical demeanors, "while neither was quite what he seemed on the surface, each was possessed by the need to dig under surfaces. Each was an exposer extraordinaire." - Yahoo! (Los Angeles Times)
Hirst attached NFTs to 10,000 of those works and sold them for $2,000 each; a buyer could keep the NFT or get the real-life painting but not both. 5,820 buyers are hanging onto their NFTs, so Hirst is burning the canvases. The title of this endeavor: "The Currency." - The Guardian
"Last month, ... a British tourist was sentenced to 15 years in an Iraqi prison for taking a dozen pottery shards from an unguarded archaeology site. Now, the man's conviction has been overturned and he is set to be released from confinement." - Artnet
Arts Council England's Transfer Programme is pushing companies to move away from the capital into the underserved rest of England. But those whose work is mostly outside the capital already say that moving would block them from getting London funding but with no guarantee of Transfer Programme money. - The Stage
Before this year, the controversies around the Greek-born conductor were usually over his music-making, which classical mavens tend to either adore or loathe. But his hand-picked orchestra and choir, called MusicAeterna, are based in and supported by Russia, so institutions elsewhere are under pressure to avoid them. - The New York Times
Julius Eastman: the fierce black queen iconoclast, scorned and consigned to oblivion in his day, is finally being celebrated for his unabashed talent and the sheer audacity of his inimitable genius. - Arts Fuse
From Timbaland to Sting to the next rapper to say inshallah, Arab culture has been a persistent influence on American music. But songs actually in Arabic have never been a presence on the charts. - Los Angeles Times
Today, they comprise the third largest sector of the U.S. economy: well over 1.5 million nonprofits employ roughly 12.5 million people as of 2017, the latest year for which comprehensive data is available, according to the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies. - The Baffler
This process transformed improbable rumors into seemingly solid facts, backed by evidence from different sources and accepted by political and religious leaders. - Lapham's Quarterly
Why can it feel as though the entire ecosystem of content that we interact with online has been engineered to influence us in ways that we can’t quite parse, and that have only a distant relationship to our own authentic preferences? - The New Yorker
We humans are besotted by intelligence, especially our own. And yet “intelligence is not the miracle of evolution we like to think it is. - The Wall Street Journal
