"Many private Polish TV channels and radio stations fell silent and online sites and newspapers ran black front pages on Wednesday in a concerted protest over a planned tax that critics fear will weaken or destroy some media." The ruling Law & Justice party says the tax is a "solidarity fee" to fund healthcare and COVID relief for arts...
The money was to go toward developing a Carpathian "heritage" trail" in Poland's Podkarpackie region. After a local activist brought to funders' attention a resolution passed by the regional government "expressing opposition to the promotion and affirmation of the ideology of the so-called LGBT movements," the grant was withdrawn. - Thomson Reuters
Even though it has a little more flair, I hope we can accept the Turkish monolith as a normal part of life in 2021. It is not a mystery — even though we don’t know who exactly put it there, we know human beings did it, and we know that they were undoubtedly inspired by the 100-plus other monoliths...
The immense force of Western institutions – capitalism, democracy, Christianity – stamped itself on other parts of the globe, creating independent democratic nations committed to freedom, end of story. Or is it the end of the story? If 21st-century world trends are any indication, we might have badly overstated Westernisation’s influence and achievement. - Aeon
“We are thinking that we will have a slate of work with both digital and in-person opportunities. Because digital is not going away. We’re in a digital space. There’s a lot to figure out from a union standpoint, an actors’ standpoint from all sorts of things about how we stay in the space, but I believe that it’s here...
"My name is Leo and I am 8 years old. I listen to All Things Considered in the car with mom. I listen a lot. I never hear much about nature or dinosaurs or things like that. Maybe you should call your show Newsy things Considered, since I don't get to hear about all the things. Or please talk...
“If we artists had a basic income, that stress and fear over basic necessities would no longer weigh over our heads and we could be much more productive. It would help grow the economy, because when people have the means to do more than just get by, they put more back into the economy.” - The Tyee
Christopher Rudd’s creation is the first romantic same-sex pas de deux in ABT’s history, and one of the first—if not the first—to celebrate queer lust so explicitly in ballet. Such a feat, while to be applauded, is long overdue for a world in which more than half of the men who perform in and champion the artform are members...
Alisher Navoiy was born in 1441 in Herat, now in Afghanistan but historically a Persianate city. He wrote in Arabic, Persian, and Chagatai, the Turkic literary language used all over Central Asia in the Middle Ages and considered the ancestor of modern literary Uzbek. In one of his most famous treatises, he compared Persian (with a centuries-old literary tradition...
It started with a standing ovation. "At this point, allegedly, the gentleman swatted Academy award-winning Kidman with his program, prompting Urban to accuse the man of assaulting his wife. Quick as a flash, Urban summoned his burly security to escort the couple and Kidman’s mum out of the audience, while Opera House security were sent in to retrieve the...
In fact, he was a very promising art student, excelling at plants in particular, but a professor who worried that he couldn't support himself as an artist suggested he go into botany — and the rest is history. His career came full circle: one of the 300 uses he came up with for peanuts was to make inexpensive paints....
Hungary, Poland, and now Slovenia are assembling and executing a “playbook” to shift cultural institutions to the right. Often, the rhetoric around this has blended fears of anti-communism with populist, nationalist, anti-immigrant, and, in some cases, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. In the process, political memory has become a flashpoint in Europe’s so-called culture war. - Artnet
"As they announce plans for the spring and summer — mostly digital, garnished with a little outdoors and in-person — many New York dance presenters spoke in recent interviews about what they've been up to and how the pandemic has changed their business. … Even without box-office revenue, most have continued paying artists, sometimes with no expectation of any...
Awards don’t help us quantify these qualities, but for a composer who burst onto the operatic scene so spectacularly with X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X at the New York City Opera in 1986, it’s an acknowledgement of his eminence in a world, classical music, that has usually struggled to deal honestly with Black musicians and Black...
"Many workers regarded it as a positive step this summer when numerous leading institutions released detailed diversity, equity, and inclusion issues (DEI) plans. But more than six months later, employees are still waiting for progress reports. Artnet News surveyed more than a dozen museums across the country, none of which agreed to share the full amount of money they...
