The exiled Chinese artist's Water Lilies #1 is 50 feet long and incorporates 650,000 Lego bricks in 22 colors. The first public display of the work will be in Ai's exhibition at the Design Gallery in London next month. - ARTnews
"The number of titles published in Ukraine was cut almost in half last year, dropping from 17,000 in 2021 to just under 9,000. … The war has been especially difficult on the printing sector, which is centered in Kharkiv and had a significant amount of infrastructure destroyed." - Publishers Weekly
The songs "How to Handle a Woman" and "What Do the Simple Folk Do?" haven't aged well, and the book of the Lerner & Loewe musical, always a weakness, is even worse today. So the producers asked Sorkin to do what he did with To Kill a Mockingbird. - The New York Times
"Subscribers to Fresh Air+ will also get more recent exclusives, such as unaired excerpts from recent interviews and behind-the-scenes content that pulls back the curtain on how the Peabody Institutional Award-winning interview show is made." - Inside Radio
Jesse Thorn, host/producer of the public radio show Bullseye and founder/owner of Maximum Fun, which produces several other podcasts, worried about the fate of his staff if he sold the company to a larger enterprise. So he turned it into a co-op. - Yahoo! (Los Angeles Times)
Just a month after the director of the Tretyakov Gallery was forced to resign after being pressured to make the exhibits "in line with spiritual and moral values," Marina Loshak is stepping down (voluntarily, she says) as director of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. - MSN (The Washington Post)
"The conductor Richard Bonynge ranked her among the top four sopranos of the 20th century. And according to Ms. Zeani, Maria Callas's husband, Giovanni Battista Meneghini, confided to her that she was 'one of the very few sopranos that my wife is frightened of.'" - The New York Times
O-1 visas for “individuals with extraordinary ability or achievement” would increase from $460 to $1,655. P-2 visas would jump from $460 to $1,615. The USCIS proposed the changes in January, arguing that the new rates would reflect an increase in costs at the agency. - MixMag
Spotify says it's not been able to reach an agreement with the owners of the tracks after the old one expired. Soundtracks with millions of plays were among the deleted hits. - BBC
The Functional Grammar of Dance (FGD) explains how body parts create meaning by interacting with the space and the people surrounding dancers in a performance. We used it to annotate and interpret data collected from live dance rehearsals. - The Conversation
The more pressing question, now that theatres are back in some kind of business, is: How is business? Are audiences coming back at anything like pre-pandemic levels? And are theatres able to make ends meet? The evidence is mixed, and seems to vary by region. - American Theatre
Using this data from the brain, audiences create a non-conscious edit of the film in real time – reinforcing the films’ respective stories of science-fiction dystopia and a wandering, daydreaming mind. - The Conversation
Collective campaigns, lawsuits, international rules and IT hacks are all being deployed at speed on behalf of the creative industries in an effort, if not to win the battle, at least to “rage, rage against the dying of the light”, in the words of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. - The Guardian
The oasis town of Chinguetti in north-central Mauritania, a major trans-Saharan trading stop in centuries past, has 13 libraries housing more than 6,000 manuscripts. As desertification spreads ever onward, outside experts fear for the books, but their custodians are holding on. - MSN (The Washington Post)
Paradoxically, we may come to want the things that we cannot have in an instant, that demand our time and patience before they will reveal all they have to offer: the art that demands that we slow down. - 3 Quarks Daily
