“Isaac Thompson has been named president and chief executive officer of the Minnesota Orchestra, returning to his home area after two years of holding the same positions with the Oregon Symphony. He succeeds Brent Assink, who has served in an interim capacity since September 2024.” - The Minnesota Star Tribune
This summer, five artists — Yumzhana Sui from Buryatia, Michel Lafleur from Haiti, Boluwatife Victoria Lawal and Samuel Olayombo from Nigeria, and Patrick Ruganintwali from Rwanda — had intended to participate in the residency, but their visas were denied. - Hyperallergic
There’s the softer version of wellness, one characterized by some combination of smoothie consumption and aspirational TikTok videos. Then there are the more hard-line (and health hazardous) variations involving everything from (basically) bleach drinking to parasite cleanses to “wellness farms” designed to wean you off antidepressants. - Wired
The cancellation came after more than 16,000 people, including Nobel laureates, Italian and international politicians and activists, signed a letter addressed to De Luca and the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, calling for Gergiev’s appearance not to go ahead. - The Guardian
Any given night, the lineup may include mainstream country stars of the present and the distant past, bluegrass bands, gospel vocal groups, singer-songwriters, hotshot instrumentalists, down-home comedians, square dancers and more. - The Guardian
Unhelpful incentives around academic publishing are blamed for record levels of retractions, the rise in predatory journals, which publish anything for a fee, and the emergence of AI-written studies and paper mills, which sell fake papers to unscrupulous researchers to submit to journals. - The Guardian
"If you look at one of our works randomly on the street, you wouldn't be able to say that's made by a robot, but we can't yet do all art under the sun because there's a lot of techniques that we haven't yet built in." - CBC
The Clock, a 24-hour, MoMA-headlining video-clock, has enjoyed a rare Barbenheimer blockbuster status in the art world. It’s a real-time video, edited from thousands of films pulled from what appear to be shitty DVD rips, wherein the viewer’s time of day is synchronized to match up with the clocks and watches that appear onscreen. - ARTnews
Resistance from Murkowski and other lawmakers from rural states exposed an uncomfortable truth about federal funding for public media stations: Rural stations — often in red states — depend heavily on federal funding to survive, unlike stations in larger markets that can better tap donations from listeners with money to spare. - Washington Post
Donors are reportedly planning to pull support from, or have already severed ties with, the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art following its controversial transfer from Florida State University to New College of Florida earlier this year on the orders of Governor Ron DeSantis. - ARTnews
Neil Postman, who died in 2003, predicted that America wasn’t trending toward existence under the boot of totalitarianism, as in George Orwell’s “1984,” but drifting through the languorous haze of a feel-good dystopia that instead resembled Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” Postman was right. - Washington Post
Does silence have its own language, I wonder? And if it does, what is it? Is it that of benumbed Russians, lost to resurrected, wooden Soviet propaganda – forever young, forever courageous, forever successful in replacing the grim realities of Dostoevsky’s world with a cheery ‘paradiZe’? - Eurozine
Johnny Depp’s new film Modi: Three Days on the Wings of Madness explores the artist’s struggle to sell his work, and the tension that existed between his own idealism and the need to be commercially minded. - The Conversation
From the role of large-scale cultural events like the European Capital of Culture to the so-called “Bilbao effect” (where a new cultural site is thought to spark revitalisation and economic growth), the same questions arise. Who is it for? What type of value is created – and is it shared in equitably? - The Conversation
When AI is generating all the scripts, performances, music and visual design, and there are no more creative humans whose work the machines can ingest and regurgitate, we may start to wonder why cinema is so homogenous and cold. - Unherd
