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A Playwright, Two Filmmakers, A Cartographer, A Basket Weaver: Meet The 2025 MacArthur Fellows

Among the arts folks who won this year’s $800,000 no-strings grants are playwright Heather Christian, photographers Tonika Lewis Johnson and Matt Black, artist/filmmakers Garrett Bradley and Tuan Andrew Nguyen, artist/curator Gala Porras-Kim, composer Craig Taborn, author Tommy Orange, cartographer Margaret Wickens Pearce, and traditional Wabanaki basket weaver Jeremy Frey. - NPR

László Krasznahorkai Wins Nobel Prize For Literature

“Often described as postmodern, Krasznahorkai is known for his long, winding sentences, dystopian and melancholic themes, and the kind of relentless intensity that has led critics to compare him to Gogol, Melville and Kafka. Satantango, was famously adapted into a seven-hour film by director Béla Tarr.” - The Guardian

Hildur Guðnadóttir On Her Scores For “Joker”, “Tár”, And “Hedda” — And What Women Composers Still Face In Hollywood

“I’ve been asked, straight up, if I could ‘handle’ composing for a big film because I’m a woman. I was asked that after I won the Oscar (for Joker). This isn’t ancient history.” - The Hollywood Reporter

Akram Khan Talks About His Last Work For His Dance Company Before It Dissolves

After 25 years, the Bangladeshi-British choreographer is closing down his touring troupe to pursue new creative directions. In a Q&A, he discusses the Akram Khan Company’s final project: Thikra: Night of Remembering, which uses dancers trained in Bharatanatyam for a ritual work inspired by the ancient Nabataean culture of Petra and AlUla. - ArtReview

Sotheby’s Sells Its Longtime Manhattan Headquarters

The move marks the latest step in a real estate overhaul that includes its 2023 acquisition of the Breuer Building, the Whitney Museum’s former home on Madison Avenue, and Gantry Point, a new 240,000-square-foot complex in Long Island City. - ARTnews

Major UK Galleries Report Precipitous Drop In Sales

Both galleries reported a nearly 90% decline in pre-tax profits, coinciding with a rumored multiyear art market downturn marked by a global decline in public auction sales and a slew of gallery closures in the United States. - Hyperallergic

Europe’s Great Rare Books Theft Spree

The Warsaw book heist was not an isolated incident but one of the final stops on an unprecedented grand tour of bibliophilic crime, which snaked its way from north-east to south-west Europe between spring 2022 and winter 2023. - The Guardian

Louis CK Defends His Decision To Appear At Saudi Arabia’s First Stand-Up Comedy Festival

“There’s a woman who’s a lesbian and Jewish, who did a show (at the Riyadh Comedy Festival), and she got a standing ovation. … So, the fact that that’s opening up and starting to bud, I wanna see it, I wanna be part of it. I think that’s a positive thing.” - The Guardian

America’s Largest Supplier Of Books To Libraries To Shut Down

Baker & Taylor let go about 520 employees yesterday and plans to wind down the business by January. Employees who were laid off had their severance plans canceled as well. B&T had undergone some layoffs earlier this year, but recently had as many as 1,500 full-time and part-time employees. - Publishers Weekly

As We’re On The Verge Of AI, It’s Useful To Reconsider The Luddites

“Ultimately they said: ‘We only want to prevent the implementation of technology as it is harmful, as it is injurious to the working man.’ So they weren’t trying to stop technology. What they were trying to do was stop the monopoly of the wealth that technology created. - The Guardian

The Jimmy Kimmel Affair Exposed Growing Rift Between Networks And Affiliates

As affiliates, they’re not happy. And as they lobby the FCC to abolish the cap on how many stations one company can own (currently maxed at a number that all together reaches no more than 39% of TV households in the country), a bulked-up Nexstar and Sinclair are flexing their power and heft. - Variety

Future Of Chicago’s Only Arts-Focused Public High School Is Suddenly In Doubt

Citing “unsustainable” deficits, the board that oversees the Chicago High School for the Arts has decided not to renew its contract with Chicago Public Schools and will cease operating the school after next spring. ChiArts is a privately managed contract school – similar to a charter – funded by public and donor dollars. - WBEZ (Chicago)

Longtime ARTnews Owner Milton Esterow, 97

Esterow purchased ARTnews in 1972 from Newsweek, which at the time was a division of the Washington Post Company, and owned it until 2014, when ARTnews was sold in 2014 to Sergey Skaterschikov. - ARTnews

Australian Arts Industry Hampered By Rise In Touring Costs

‘We have no shortage of invitations to show our work overseas, but our level of secure, ongoing funding is not enough to underpin these international tours.’ - ArtsHub

How Does Our Brain Perceive The World?

Most of the time, our intuition tells us that what we are seeing (or hearing or feeling) is an accurate representation of what is out there, and that anyone else would see (or hear or feel) it the same way. But we all know that’s not true and yet are continually surprised by it. - Aeon

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