When theater officials announced last week that La Fenice’s new music director would be the conductor Beatrice Venezi, some members of the company were outraged, saying she hasn’t had enough experience. - The New York Times
“UC Irvine will oversee the OCMA’s 53,000-square-foot, $98 million facility, which opened in 2022, within the Segerstrom Center for the Arts campus in the neighboring city of Costa Mesa. … The new institution will now be named the UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art.” - ARTnews
“U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth in Washington, D.C., ruled that the U.S. Agency for Global Media cannot implement a reduction in force eliminating 532 jobs for full-time government employees on Tuesday. Those employees represent the vast majority of its remaining staff.” - AP
“Electronic Arts Inc., the maker of Madden NFL and The Sims, is set to be acquired for about $55 billion … (in) the biggest leveraged buyout in history, backed by Saudia Arabia's Public Investment Fund and private equity firms Silver Lake and Affinity Partners, … run by President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.” - Los Angeles Times (MSN)
“Anne Hagan, the group’s executive director, said it had become ‘difficult for us to keep up with payments’ for Kimmel base rent and the other costs of performing there. ... The group had been a resident company at the Kimmel’s Perelman Theater since the arts center’s opening in 2001.” - The Philadelphia Inquirer (MSN)
They’ve left the classic façade (and the acoustics) of Powell Hall intact and built around it the gleaming new Jack C. Taylor Music Center, which provides some of the desperately needed facilities (dressing rooms for musicians, sufficient bathrooms for the audience) which Powell, once a movie palace, had lacked. - The New York Times
"I am now the most banned author in the United States — 87 books," he tweeted. "May I suggest you pick up one of them and see what all the pissing & moaning is about? Self-righteous book banners don't always get to have their way. This is still America, dammit." - Newsweek
In July, as part of a widely-reported sweep which affected high-profile critics in three other disciplines as well, the newspaper removed Green as chief theater critic. In his new position, Green will cover classical music and visual art as well as theater, writing “news and news analysis, features and multimedia pieces.” - Playbill
The streaming site says Labs will offer a glimpse of the AI features it's developing for YouTube Music, and it starts with AI "hosts" that will chime in while you're listening to music. Yes, really. - Ars Technica
Mann, whose work is held at major art institutions around the world, is reeling after police seized four of her most celebrated — and reviled — photographs off the walls of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas in January. "Awful" and "shocking," she recalled. - NPR
NPR had been told by CPB in early April that it would soon receive more than $30 million to cover the next three years for running the service. CPB then swiftly reversed course, with an executive citing a decision at the CPB board level saying NPR could not be involved, the court filing alleges. - NPR
A conductor is fired only for sex, a reviewer not even for that. So when four chief critics are blown away in one afternoon, it’s no small earthquake and a shaft of aftershocks ensued. - The Critic
The tensions and controversies over how Mexico, the largest Spanish-speaking country in the world today, should interpret both its Indigenous and Spanish past remain live issues, not just for academics but for politics and culture at large. - Foreign Policy
In the late 20th century and into the early 2000s, museums relied on a value proposition of individual prestige: big collections, big buildings, big donors, big sums. For today’s rising generation of patrons, clout alone no longer justifies investment. What they want instead is transparency and meaningful engagement. - Artnet
