"If you go into a community to make a work and you try to follow the demands of the local people, which are never homogeneous anyway, you end up serving their interests more than your own. And usually their interests are transitory . . . So you have to hold fast to your work." - New Left Review
“We can’t dumb down the audience. We have to continue as composers of opera in the 21st century to move people, and you don’t do that by forcing in things that don’t naturally fit into the story. Once you get didactic, that’s it. You’ve lost them.” - Salon
"A US magistrate (ruled) that a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting used by Philbrick in his illegal scheme belongs to a collector he misled — and not the high-profile art lender he also duped. The collector, Alexander Pesko, has been locking horns with the art lender. Athena Art Finance, for over five years. - ARTnews
"I think our houses are generally too big; they are, in design terms, a bit lazy in this sense. We’d benefit enormously by cutting maybe 20% out of most new builds, and I’d rather see smaller, more intensely designed homes that are personal and quirky than large spaces." - The Guardian
Last year, the station, which serves Harrisburg, Lancaster, and Chambersburg, was gifted Lancaster's daily newspaper, LNP, and its website, LancasterOnline, by their now-former owner. A new parent organization called Pennon was created last month, and it has announced layoffs of 10% of its staff. - LancasterOnline
The library we enjoy today may have been built with debt instead of venture capital, but its sheer enormousness reveals it as a visitor from another universe, something that could have only been dreamed up in Los Gatos. - The New York Times
"By gutting and rebuilding the interior (of the New York Philharmonic's home), the project was meant to break, once and for all, the acoustical curse that had plagued the hall for decades. … So, after two years and more than 270 concerts, how does the hall sound?" - The New York Times
“What’s really surprising … is that there was an understanding of human impact on the environment much, much earlier than most people understand today.” - Smithsonian
This is DDP's first-ever report examining the value of ballet companies' endowments and the book values of buildings the companies own. - Dance Data Project
"A number of companies that cater to smaller audiences with niche or experimental productions are struggling to find or keep their spaces in the city. And now the Source Theatre, an intimate 120-seat stage … that has served audiences for nearly 50 years, is up for sale." - The Washington Post (MSN)
Regular weeding — librarians' term for removing from collections books that are out-of-date, damaged, or too seldom checked out to be worth shelf space — is standard practice. Some officials have started using the process to remove books about race or LGBTQ issues, and courts will soon weigh in. - The New York Times
"An esteemed Viennese-American author and translator, (her) gift for words helped her family escape from the Nazis and … later drew upon her experiences as a Jewish refugee and immigrant for such fiction as Other People’s Houses and Her First American." - AP
The organization itself has filed a case against two former board members who led a schism of the group into rival factions. Those two are suing the orchestra's executive director and acting board chair, demanding monetary damages and the court's formal decision as to which board faction is legitimate. - San Antonio Report
Not to say there isn’t trouble brewing, particularly with its unions, but the opera’s numbers, and budget, have been on an upward trajectory for a while. - The New York Times
