Even though there’s still $2B-$3B missing in the post-Covid annual domestic box office, there was plenty to be thankful for in 2024 which is coming in at an estimated $8.72B, -3% from 2023’s $9B. - Deadline
2024 was peppered with lawsuits, auction records, and disappointing performances, more than a few gallery closings, and a lot of hot air forecasting that the art market was near the end. The art market, perhaps even more than, say, the stock market, is a fragile mechanism. - ARTnews
The year 2025 begins with some short-term questions about theater – the fate of “Warriors,” the effect of “Wicked”?– and more long-term ones – what new leadership will mean to Off-Broadway. - New York Theatre
To help us recap the highlights we're joined now by two familiar faces, Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR's "Fresh Air," and Gilbert Cruz, editor of The New York Times Book Review. - PBS News Hour
Wagner described his ideal opera as a “total work of art”, meaning an artwork that brings together all the arts into a single masterwork": music, dance, drama, literature, and visual art. An artwork that uses all the arts, especially in lush Romantic operas like Puccini’s, can be like a circus of sensation. - Current Affairs
Aura matters, and for good reason. The presence of a historical object focuses the mind on it, its maker, and its context in ways that replicas, reproductions, and photographs of it cannot. - Boston Globe
"Ghetto Classics provides lessons to about 1,000 students, who feed three orchestras, a choir and a dance group. … (The organization) works in schools and community centers in Nairobi and Mombasa, but its headquarters is in the St. John compound in Korogocho." - The Washington Post (MSN)
"Although El Escorial is hardly an unknown destination — it received more than 450,000 visitors last year — Pérez de Prada and his colleagues are keen to offer people a fresh perspective, literally and metaphorically." - The Guardian
"Much of this drama stems from a debate about whom Metro Arts should serve with its limited budget. The debate can be summed up like this: should Metro Arts focus its grantmaking on individual artists or arts nonprofits? The issue has divided Nashville’s arts community." - WPLN (Nashville)
"Young artists ... have always had to promote themselves, but the balance between that element of the job and the actual art feels worryingly lopsided in our current digital age. The stigma of selling out is long gone, now replaced by the guilt of not doing it, constantly." - The New York Times
"On December 27, the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that Amanda Jones’s 2022 defamation case against two local men who accused her of pushing pornography to children can continue. In a 4-2 ruling, the court found that an appeals court erred in denying Jones’s appeal based on an apparently missed deadline." - Publishers Weekly
"Cultural venues, festivals and events have been given a new £20 million boost weeks ahead of crucial decisions on their future funding by (Creative Scotland). The Scottish Government has committed to provide a record £74m a year for long-term funding programmes by 2026 — much more than had been expected." - The Scotsman
The funding application process for local productions has been streamlined, and the cash-back production grant (which covers foreign studios shooting in Germany as well) has been raised from 5% to 30%, making the country more competitive as a location. - Variety
A pan-European forgery network, a disputed Malevich at the Pompidou Center, supposed Monet and Renoir on eBay, yet more fake Basquiats, and the bogus Picassos in Tasmania that went undetected for over three years. - ARTnews
