ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

Stories

Music@Menlo, Silicon Valley’s Chamber Festival, Names Its Next Artistic Directors

Less than a week after founding artistic directors David Finckel and Wu Han announced their 2026 departure, their successors have been revealed. They are longtime Music@Menlo participants Dmitri Atapine and Hyeyeon Park; like Finckel and Wu Han, they are a married cellist-pianist couple. - San Francisco Classical Voice

The Met Museum’s Difficult Line Through Its Re-thought African Collection

The wing’s design stresses each region’s singularity while fostering an atmosphere of cosmopolitan exchange. We’re meant to feel that the Met is no longer what the writer Ishmael Reed described a half century ago: “the Center for Art Detention.” - The New Yorker

The Struggle For A “Self” We Recognize

We imagine our choices are free, our selves sovereign, but much of our behavior arises automatically. We are driven by inner conditions, social cues, learned scripts, and neural flows—just as the machine is driven by token prediction and loss minimization. The difference, of course, is that the human brain is plastic. - Hedgehog Review

We All Read. But Our Reading Has Changed. This Has Changed Our Culture (And Not For The Better)

On average, we spend more than two hours scrolling through such platforms each day. But not all reading is created equal. The mind can skim over the surface of a sentence and swiftly decode its literal meaning. But deep reading — sustained engagement with a longform text — is a distinct endeavor. - Vox

What Toni Morrison Was Like As An Editor

 Her unwavering commitment to shoring up the integrity of a book at every stage solidified her legacy as an editor who could turn talent, hers and that of the authors she published, into cultural and literary power. - Slate

Kennicott On The Met Museum’s Non-European Wing: Making The Case For Context

To appreciate these works only as visual objects exacerbates the intellectual violence of decontextualization. The Met has responded to this by writing extensive object labels and wall texts, carefully parsed but unflinching even when subjects, such as headhunting, may make some visitors uncomfortable. - Washington Post

How Much Do You Know About Publishing At The Beginnings Of America?

Which of America’s founding fathers began writing his memoirs in the early 1770s, a project that remained unfinished when it was posthumously published in 1793? - The New York Times

Jordan Roth Made A Career Getting Other People’s Work Onto Broadway. Now He’s Making His Own

“I worked for a long time facilitating other people’s creativity, and that was very meaningful and very fulfilling, but I started to miss my own,” Roth, 49, told me during a rehearsal break at a black box studio in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood. - The New York Times

The 21st Century’s Best Movies Reveal The Collapse Of Genre

What strikes me most about the list is this: Long-held categories in the movie business are fading, just like they are in the broader culture. - The New York Times

Hollywood’s Big AI Dilemma

 The idea that AI-generated video is both the future of filmmaking and an existential threat to Hollywood has caught on like wildfire among boosters for the relatively new technology. - The Verge

The Relevance Of Glee, A Decade After It Ended

 “I was mad that the representation, whether of teenagers or queerness, was not completely akin to my own real-life experience — this show was my lifeline; the least it could have done was conform to my limited perception of reality, right?” - HuffPost

Pocahontas Came Out Three Decades Ago, But Gen Z Is Making Its Signature Song A Rallying Cry

The movie isn’t seen as progressive, but “on TikTok, people … have reinterpreted the ‘Colors of the Wind’ lyrics to comment on an array of contemporary topics they feel strongly about, like immigration, the Middle East, the president and Elon Musk, Black Lives Matter and oil drilling.” - The New York Times

China Is Arresting Women Who Write Sexy Gay Stories

"Although authors of heterosexual erotica have been jailed in China, observers say the genre is subjected to far less censorship. Gay erotica, which is more subversive, seems to bother authorities more.” - BBC

Documentary Makers Fear Being Turned Into Criminals By A Harsh New British Law

"We are being advised that the curtailing of Palestine Action could have a major knock-on effect for us as it could become not only illegal for others to voice support for them but also for us, as film-makers, to distribute this film.” - The Guardian (UK)

Just How Big Is Romantasy, As A Genre?

Oh, it’s big. Rebecca Yarros’s Onyx Storm “came out earlier this year and sold 2.7 million copies in its first week,” for instance. - NPR

Our Free Newsletter

Join our 30,000 subscribers

Latest

Don't Miss

function my_excerpt_length($length){ return 200; } add_filter('excerpt_length', 'my_excerpt_length');