Back in 1930, Gaetano visited Athens with the Italian Navy. And at the Acropolis—the Greek capital’s hilltop covered in ancient architecture—he picked up a small piece of carved marble near the base of the Parthenon, a temple built for the goddess Athena in the fifth century B.C.E. - Smithsonian
“(Mayor Brandon) Johnson’s proposed budget allocates just north of $62 million for (the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events) for next year. That’s a 15% decrease from the nearly $73 million allocated in last year’s budget.” - WBEZ (Chicago)
… in effect, “no comment.” Of 21 organizations WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times approached, only seven completed the survey. One answered part of it, three sent statements, and ten declined to participate or simply didn’t respond. - WBEZ (Chicago)
“By the accounts of many industry insiders, Ellison has been leveraging his family’s extraordinary wealth and access to President Trump to prepare for a buying spree. With the help of his father, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison (the world’s second-richest person), the Silicon Valley scion wants to take on Netflix, Amazon and Apple.” - Variety
“That’s the question on the minds of Hollywood and Wall Street after the company put itself up for sale, citing ‘unsolicited interest’ from ‘multiple parties.’” - TheWrap (Yahoo!)
“’Vibe coding,’ an emerging software development that turns natural language into computer code using artificial intelligence, … was coined ... to describe how artificial intelligence can enable someone to create a new app while being able to ‘forget that the code even exists’.” - The Guardian
“DIA staff are seeking to unionize with AFSCME Cultural Workers United (AFSCME Michigan), a division of the national AFSCME union that represents workers at cultural institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, and Philadelphia Museum of Art (sic).” - ARTnews
“It was tough on me, but I’m not going to answer any questions about it because I dealt with it. It nearly broke me, and that’s all I’m going to say. You probably know my heart, so you probably know. … Anybody that knows me knows how I believe.” - The Hollywood Reporter
Composer Stephen Schwartz and book writer Joseph Stein spent months on a pre-Broadway tour in 1976 trying to fix the show. It didn’t work, although one song, “Meadowlark,” became a hit. Since a revival in 2002, productions have been trying to address the piece's problems, and now there's a high-profile staging Off-Broadway. - TheaterMania
Roughly speaking, globalization flattens space and pares away cultural particularity; neoliberalism flattens value, reducing everything to its going rate on the market; the internet, and especially social media, flatten transactions and relationships into their barest, most instrumentalized form. - Commonweal
“This is not quite everyday delinquency … but it is a type of delinquency that we do not generally associate with the upper echelons of organized crime,” Laure Beccuau told France Info Radio. - ARTnews
“The Ballet National de Marseille has also taken a bold new direction under the leadership of the experimental collective (LA)Horde, producing edgy performances drawing on internet-native styles like jumpstyle and TikTok choreography. Dancers and choreographers are relocating to the city, too.” - Dance Magazine
2024’s total figure of 836,199 was its biggest volume performance since 2009 and, so far in 2025, we have seen 628,431 books pass through the tills, an increase of 6.7% against the first 42 weeks of last year. - The Bookseller
Two of New York’s most prominent dance philanthropists are donating $15 million to the Joyce Theater, a leading dance stage in Manhattan, helping to assure the theater’s long-term financial stability at a time when dance organizations are struggling with declining financial support and audiences. - The New York Times
