"Museums have at times withheld information about thefts, fearing that revealing security weaknesses could make other institutions less likely to loan them art or that it could encourage other thefts, according to current and former museum officials. Art security experts say the failure to report thefts, particularly involving items stolen from storage, has prevented museums from recovering items." -...
"Here millennials sit, following begrudgingly in the boomers’ wake, at the centre of a generational Venn diagram: in the unique position of having CDs, vinyl and iTunes and streaming. For the best part of a year now, it’s been time for a clearout: so as we edge back to something resembling a normal life, dare we take the ultimate...
Constant bullying at school (he was the headmaster's son, and he paid for it); repeated adolescent suicide attempts; Benzedrine and Nembutal and lots (and lots) of alcohol (and opium if he was in the right country for it). Both under and above it all, bipolar disorder, which Greene "saw … as key to his personality and his work." -...
"I’m taking my cues from the health experts, who are preaching a different message from state, city and municipal officials. While COVID-19 new infections, hospitalizations and deaths have been dramatically declining since the post-holiday surges, the number of new cases has plateaued at a still worrisome level." - Los Angeles Times
"'What would you do if you had no idea when a season would begin, what venue capacity you could perform in and what the cast size can be for repertory?' says Larissa Saveliev, founder and artistic director of Youth America Grand Prix of roster building. 'The old rules don't apply anymore.' With all the uncertainty, what is hiring and...
"All around the country, companies that normally produce outdoors but were unable to do so last year are making plans to reopen, while those that normally play to indoor crowds are finding ways to take the show outside. This is not business as usual." - The New York Times
"Some 30 theatres and concert halls are occupied in Strasbourg, Lille, Nantes, Châteauroux, Toulouse, Besançon, Marseille, and Saint-Etienne. All of the culture workers inside are asking for the same help from authorities, and conveying the same concerns and frustrations." - Artnet
In a letter to school boards last week, which was leaked to the media, Kabul’s Education Department said girls aged 12 and above would no longer be able to sing at public events, unless the events were attended solely by women. The letter also stipulated that girls couldn’t be trained by a male music teacher. - The Guardian
Levine had been in precarious health for more than a decade, canceling many of his performances after 2008 and undergoing spinal surgery. Even when conducting from a wheelchair, he remained a vigorous and indefatigable presence in American cultural life far beyond the rarefied opera world — widely considered the country’s most influential conductor since Leonard Bernstein. But accusations of...
The "Icarus of subscription services" seemed too good to be true when it started selling $9.99-a-month memberships that would let you see a movie in a theater literally every day — and so it was. The more customers it got, the more cash it hemorrhaged, and it died a long, humiliating death over the course of 2019. But this...
"The Israel Antiquities Authority, which carried out the excavations, believes the new scroll, written in Greek, is actually a missing part of the “Book of the 12 Minor Prophets” scroll, first discovered in 1961. … Dating from the third century BC to the first century AD, the parchment and papyrus manuscripts contain the earliest known texts from the Hebrew...
"In an informal poll, members of the Association of Art Museum have voted 91-88 against asking its trustees to explore a controversial change in its deaccessioning policy to permit institutions to sell art to finance direct care of their collections." - The Art Newspaper
"The pact, announced this week, was passed unanimously by the musicians, the SPCO board and the board of the American Federation of Musicians Local 30-73 some 15 months before the current contract was set to expire. It will maintain musicians' pay, benefits and work rules from July 2022 until July 2024." - The Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
Three years after Chris Dercon ended his brief, dissension-plagued tenure at the theatre, his successor as artistic director, Klaus Dörr, quit after it became public that 10 women at the Volksbühne had made formal complaints to the Berlin city government about Dörr's alleged sexual harassment of younger actresses and humiliation of older ones. - The New York Times
Oliver Wainwright: "It is a fitting moment for a prize once reserved for flamboyant sculptors of icons to be awarded to a practice that would prefer you didn't notice their presence at all. … In an age of demolishing public housing and replacing it with shiny new carbon-hungry developments in the name of 'regeneration', Lacaton & Vassal have worked...
