"The complaint, dated April 23 and made public this weekend in Italian newspapers, alleged that staff faced health and security risks due to cost-saving and apparent profit-generating initiatives at the museum, including overcrowding and reduced security guards to keep tourists at bay." - AP
"The Iranian film director Mohammad Rasoulof has secretly fled Iran after he was sentenced to prison amid pressure over his latest film, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, which is due to premiere at the Cannes film festival this week." - The Guardian
"Wagner, who turns 46 on May 21 and is a great-granddaughter of Richard Wagner, became co-head of the festival in September 2008, along with her half-sister Eva Wagner-Pasquier. Katharina then took over as sole head in 2015." A business manager will be hired to keep the festival within budget. - AP
"(Two octogenarians) entered the British Library in London on Friday morning and 'smashed the glass enclosure that surrounds the Magna Carta.' After this, the pair glued themselves to the document’s enclosure and held up a sign that said 'The government is breaking the law,' Just Stop Oil said." - CNN
John Catsimatidis, the supermarket mogul and perennial New York state Republican candidate who owns news/talk radio station WABC-AM, canceled Giuliani's one-hour weekday radio show after he refused to stop raising now-refuted claims about voting machines in the 2020 election. - Inside Radio
She leaves the foundation, which she started in 2000 with then-husband and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, three years after the pair announced their divorce. Bill is giving her $12.5 billion from his own fortune to continue charitable work on her own. - AP
Rooted in the thinking of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, John Muir and David Brower, this idea influences people who love wild places as well as those who consciously avoid them. - Hedgehog Review
"To me this highlights something sometimes missed about musical expression: AI doesn’t need to experience emotions and life events to successfully express them in music that resonates with people." - The Conversation
Since the era of Napster, digital music has lacked robust metadata frameworks, leaving compositions vulnerable to misattribution and exploitation. I believe we urgently need comprehensive databases containing metadata. - Music Business Worldwide
"I still don’t believe any important work is done on mobile, I think an excess of this is a very clear signal of a distracted team looking to fill time, look busy and feel important. You can’t do big things if you’re distracted by small things." - HotTakes
After downloading a variety of pictures, Carina Popovici discovered that a supposed Monet, titled Forest With a Stream and with a price of $599,000, was almost certainly counterfeit. - Artnet
With the institution now in a state of crisis, the administration and the board face a crucial test: They must stabilize the organization, reassure worried donors like me and set a clear, positive direction forward. - San Francisco Standard
As widely loved as Impressionism remains today, its overexposure has some rolling their eyes at museums now rushing for the opportunity to spotlight what skeptics tend to reduce to “pretty pictures” and “a plaything for rich people and fancy museums." - Artnet
Over the next week, more than 1,700 modern and contemporary artworks are expected to come under the hammer through the three dominant houses – Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips. Between them, art estimated at $1.2bn to $1.8bn is expected to be auctioned soon. That’s a decline of roughly one-third over two years. - The Guardian
Pretty soon the majority of Americans, and of people in other, industrialized nations, will be living in vast suburban tracts … our old downtown areas will become tourist attractions, probably operated by Walt Disney Enterprises, and kept much cleaner and safer and prettier by the Disney people than our present bureaucracies maintain them now. - The Atlantic
