I know why Weyant’s friend protested the dress: It could fuel the fire hose of attention that the glamorous, photogenic, and precocious painter has generated over the last several years for her ultrafast rise in the art world, her staggering secondary market prices, and her personal life. - GQ
If contemporary fiction’s capacity for objectivity and thus critique is threatened by first-personalism, these failures are consolidated, Kornbluh argues, by a broader celebration of “formlessness” that manifests as genre-blurring and “medium swirl.” - LA Review of Books
Academia is a serious place, and it takes itself seriously. But it is also, like Hollywood or Washington, profoundly ridiculous — the kind of symbolically overburdened, sociologically peculiar environment that can only really be understood through satire. Luckily, we have an entire literary subgenre, the campus novel, to fulfill that requirement. - The New York Times
Nihar Malaviya, 49, has been at the helm of Penguin Random House for a year — not enough time to turn a battleship, but enough to make some key decisions that give clues to his outlook and goals. - The New York Times
LEDs have also transformed cultural events involving creative lighting. They’re why stadium shows and EDM festivals look so freaking awesome, to fangirl for a minute, and why even many just-getting-started bands have pretty neat light displays. - The Atlantic
As controversy continues over Michelle Terry, artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe (and able-bodied), casting herself as Shakespeare's only explicitly disabled character, actors with disabilities who have played the role themselves weigh in. - The Guardian
Having seen audience members, viewing an admired staging considered as close as possible to the 19th-century original, laugh and applaud at inopportune times, Matthew Paluch considers whether the aesthetic and mentality of the ballet are too far from our own — or whether the problem is more basic. - Gramilano (Milan)
A potential Swift appearance at Super Bowl LVIII alongside her boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, has already prompted the MAGA right’s culture-war pugilists into a conspiracy-fueled froth about how this NFL season has been rigged to boost Biden. - Rolling Stone
"It hews so closely to the real-life absurdities of the Cold War, with two saber-rattling superpowers escalating an arms race that could only end in mutual annihilation. … Some of the best bits barely have to reach for a joke: Kubrick merely points out the folly behind modern man’s greatest fear." - The Guardian
Edward Teller? John von Neumann? Herman Kahn? Wernher von Braun? "Despite all the speculation, Kubrick never clarified the character's origins. So did he base Strangelove on one of them, all of them, or none of them? … The most compelling candidate ... is the only one who sounded nothing like him." - BBC
Rather than ceasing to exist, the museum will continue on as a spaceless institution that provides long-term loans and as an organization that will facilitate research. - ARTnews
"The trumpet soloist materialized in different parts of the virtual room … Flutists appeared and vanished. … At one point, when I tried giving one of the cellists a needed shoulder massage, the virtual musician seemed to standoffishly crumble in my hands. (The project's mastermind) shrugged. 'Well, he is German.'" - Classical Voice North America
Dance sells everything from Nike to Pepto Bismol, and now we have TikTok. But concert dance as an art form is a hard sell. Yet when new audiences get the opportunity to experience dance, they often fall in love. - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
