Unlike the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, which imposed ideology on their populaces by means of culture and entertainment, America’s current reality is the overturning of the political order by the country’s entertainers. Washington today can be understood only as a product of show business, not of law or policy. - The Atlantic
For over a decade before that spring day in 1992, Barry Joule, a Canadian handyman with a rock-star mane, had been one of Bacon’s helpers, doing odd jobs around the artist’s London home and driving him to exhibitions. - The New York Times
As the Oscar-winning director/screenwriter (Parasite, Snowpiercer, Okja) once told an interviewer in his native South Korea, “Whatever genre I choose, I intend to destroy it.” With his first English-language film, Mickey 17, he is taking aim at science fiction. - The New York Times Magazine
Jackson-Dumont’s departure comes just months after the museum quietly delayed its opening from this year to 2026. The museum has now delayed its opening three times. - ARTnews
Harvard is the flagship of American higher education ...and what started as a crisis of speech and authority on campus has grown into a fear that internal conflict, amplified by outside pressures, can run it and the whole fleet of American universities aground. - The New Yorker
I feel for public figures in a way: damned if they do, damned if they don’t. After Sunday night, the film industry looks craven and weak – on the other hand, as Ricky Gervais memorably pointed out when he hosted the Golden Globes in 2020: “You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. - The Guardian
David Faber, cellist of the Dudok Quartet Amsterdam: “In the early days of recorded classical music, string players exclusively used gut strings. Musicians like Leopold Auer and Fritz Kreisler achieved a full, sustained sound closer to Tchaikovsky’s era than today’s practices.” - The Strad
“An artist known for his ubiquity around New York City’s cultural scene, (he) nevertheless managed to exist outside its manic commercial hustle, using antique cameras and homemade paints to produce haunting photographs and landscape paintings.” - The New York Times
The piece, titled Theater of the Mind and based on current research in neuroscience, will be housed in a 19,000-square-foot space inside the Reid Murdoch Building on LaSalle Street for an indefinite run. (And what was the previous David Byrne immersive theater piece? Here Lies Love, the Imelda Marcos disco musical.) - Axios
“All of the performances (are) staged readings, with actors working from scripts without the costumes and sets of a full production. The goal is to workshop brand-new plays that cover big themes, from criminal justice reform and climate change to gender identity.” - WBEZ (Chicago)
“For contemporary classical composers, writing children’s opera (is) like casting a spell that lets them be both big and small. Artists with highly experimental aesthetics get to embrace their silly sides and reconnect with the childlike urge to create. … As (composer Thierry) Tidrow often says, ‘They haven’t read Adorno.’” - The New York Times
“Woman Carrying the Embers vanished from the National Museum in Gdansk, Poland in 1974. Journalists from the Dutch culture magazine Vind spotted what they suspected was the painting at an exhibition in the Netherlands last year, and they alerted art sleuth Arthur Brand. - AFP (Yahoo!)
“The French Government has announced a 50 percent cut in their lauded Culture Pass, four years after its nationwide launch for young people aged fifteen to eighteen to take up cultural activities.” - ArtReview
“The heist of artist Maurizio Cattelan’s $6.1 million gold toilet from a British palace was caught on video that was just revealed to the court in the long-awaited criminal trial, as prosecutors explained how the men behind it smashed their way into (Blenheim) Palace … in September 2019.” - Artnet
In many ways, rationalism is the result of people with STEM educations attempting to tackle questions that had long been the purview of the humanities, guided by a stubbornly autodidactic conviction that definitive answers could be reached through a rigorous application of logic untainted by psychological biases. - The Point
