"Los Angeles Unified officials repeatedly violated Proposition 28 — a state law requiring the hiring of arts teachers — misusing millions in state funds and denying promised arts instruction to students across the school system, according to allegations in a lawsuit filed Monday." - Los Angeles Times (Yahoo!)
"A wealth of Neoclassicist art has joined the holdings of the Art Institute of Chicago via collectors Jeffrey and Carol Horvitz, who have gifted the museum around 2,250 works of French art made between the 16th and 19th centuries." - ARTnews
For the second consecutive season, Los Angeles Opera has cut costs by canceling a planned world premiere. After withdrawing Mason Bates’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay from this season, the company is abandoning the planned February 2026 debut of Mazzoli’s Lincoln in the Bardo. - AP
"Ashraf Omar Eldarir, 52, … pleaded guilty on Monday to smuggling hundreds of precious artifacts, including ancient Egyptian talismans, gold amulets and a sculpture with the carving of a king from the Ptolemaic dynasty." - The New York Times
He had just finished law school when his mother suddenly died in 2009. Within two weeks, he was heading the Pina Bausch Foundation, where he oversees licensing of her works to her own company and others and is assembling a freely available online archive documenting all of her creations. - The Observer (UK)
The homophobic incidents come as a new bio-musical about Parton, titled Hello, I’m Dolly, is prepping for a bow on Broadway in 2026, with the country legend writing the music, co-writing the book, and serving as a producer. - Deadline
AI is, obviously, kind of cool. But in their insistence on sameness and comfort, these tools remind us of the value of good old-fashioned music discovery. The process of finding new music is work, and it should be. - LA Review of Books
"People now watch so many programs at so many different times in so many different ways — via antenna, cable, app or a website, as well as live, recorded or on demand — that it is increasingly challenging for the industry to agree on the best way to measure viewership." - The New York Times
Among them are terms that Trump and others might dislike, such as diversity, inequities, or multicultural. But there are also words that almost certainly get caught in the dragnet inadvertently, including women and historically. - Fast Company
Was this the political subversion America needed? A protest performance force-fed to no one as influential as the reinstalled aspiring dictator, Donald Trump, who attended the Super Bowl to root for his beloved Kansas City Chiefs? - The New Yorker
"The budget cuts ... will axe €150 million in the Ministry of Culture's funding, leaving museums, theatres, and festivals reeling. And it’s not just the central government making cuts – local councils have been stripped of €2.2 billion in state subsidies, prompting them to slash their own arts funding by (up to) 70%." - Euronews
Many creators of important cultural works sell (or give away) their interests early on, when the value of their efforts is still unknown and unknowable. Authors now have the unequivocal and unwaivable right to terminate any assignment after a certain number of years. For most authors, it’s 35 years after the assignment was made. - Variety
Someone who knows more, is more successful, or who seems to be smarter than you is often seen as a threat, and so in order to prevent them from standing out too much (or surpassing too many others), we glorify ignorance as the de facto normal position. - Big Think
Here reflects an aspiration of Hollywood executives and some above-the-line talent to wield AI to create big films on (relatively) small budgets and help them skirt the headwinds of craft labor backlash. At the same time, the ways AI surfaces on-screen demonstrate the messy realities. - LA Review of Books
"WikiTok, where users can swipe through an endless stream of Wikipedia article stubs in a manner similar to the interface for TikTok, (is) a neat way to stumble upon interesting information randomly, learn new things, and spend spare moments of boredom without reaching for an algorithmically addictive social media app." - Ars Technica
