Employees at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced Wednesday that they are forming a union, LACMA United, representing more than 300 workers from across all departments, including curators, educators, guest relations associates and others. - Los Angeles Times
“A ‘once in a century’ discovery of a cache of long-lost letters has revealed how the English poet WH Auden developed a deep and lasting friendship with a Viennese sex worker and car mechanic after the latter burgled the author’s home and was put on trial.” - The Guardian
If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history. - The Free Press
The power of music has long been its ability to soundtrack a generation—to evoke emotion, as well as summon a specific time and place. Headphone listening not only isolates the listener; it shrinks music’s cultural footprint. - The Atlantic
Their whole lives, they had heard people talk about picturing, and imagining, and counting sheep, and visualizing beaches, and seeing in the mind’s eye, and assumed that all those idioms were only metaphors or colorful hyperbole. - The New Yorker
“Dance is already abstract, and so the role of us as artists is to be as specific as possible with what we want to say. That’s how we make dance speak. We are talking heart-to-heart, spirit-to-spirit, with the audience.” - The Minnesota Star Tribune
“At the Hot Club of New York, ... jazz from the 1910s through the ’50s crackles to life, spun on 78 RPM discs made of shellac (and heard) through a restored vintage hi-fi system … (in a room) where shelves sag under thousands of 78s, books and magazines.” - The New York Times
Arts Council England’s online portal, Grantium, was used by artists to submit and manage funding applications. It crashed in July, leaving thousands of applications in limbo until the portal reopened in late September. Yet, say applicants, ACE refused to extend deadlines and has distributed less money than grantees were promised. - The Guardian
The company was producing Michael Frayn’s backstage farce Noises Off, which is, as DTC’s executive director wrote to subscribers, “an intensely physical comedy that depends on precise timing and movement, (so) even one missing performer made it impossible to safely continue.” And the cast had a whack-a-mole series of health issues. - KERA (Dallas)
While the extremely affluent emirate has had commercial galleries and art fairs for years, the Dubai Museum of Art will be its first museum. (However, it will include space for art fairs and other commercial projects.) The architect is Pritzker Prize winner Tadao Ando. - Artnet
“Paramount on Wednesday began … the first wave of a deep staff reduction planned since David Ellison took the helm of the entertainment company in August” following a merger with Ellison’s company, Skydance. “Wednesday's cuts represent about 5% of the organization.” - Los Angeles Times (Yahoo!)
“One of the men detained ‘was a target of the investigators – we have traces of DNA linking him to the robbery’, (prosecutor Laure) Beccuau said. ‘He’s one we had in our sights.’ The other four ‘can give us information about how the theft was carried out’, she said.” - The Guardian
Prosecutor Laure Beccuau also said that the pair are believed to be the men who forced their way into the museum on Oct. 19. They have been given preliminary charges of criminal conspiracy and theft committed by an organized gang and remain in custody. - AP
A private collector brought a page from a mid-9th-century liturgical book to document dealer Nathan Raab, who, after research, identified some previously overlooked markings over the word “Alleluia” as notating the rising and falling pitches of a melody. - The Guardian
