"The website was restored at around 1:30 p.m. on Thursday, and ticket sales have resumed after more than a week of chaos. Met Opera on Demand, the company's popular subscription streaming platform, has also been restored. ... The Met Opera normally processes more than $200,000 worth of tickets each day." - Gothamist/WNYC
A reasonable reaction to generative AI is concern; if not even the imagination is safe from machines, the human mind seems at risk of becoming obsolete. - The Atlantic
Following the stern directive from Arts Council England, the government funder, to leave the capital, "(Stuart) Murphy said he had been contacted by MPs or mayors in about 10 locations to express an interest in hosting the ENO's new headquarters, but declined to reveal where they are." - BBC
Let’s say there’s a writer named Derek. One of the things that Derek does for The Atlantic is explain stuff. Well, if there’s a technology that effortlessly explains stuff much faster than Derek, what exactly is Derek’s value to The Atlantic? - The Atlantic
"The war recalibrates everything. The humanism and decency of Chekhov now seem less relevant than the survey of Russian violence in the works of Maxim Gorky. ... Everything is situated around burning questions: How could a country come to this? How could a people commit these crimes?" - MSN (The Washington Post)
"I wouldn't be surprised to see (the) protest included in upcoming lists of top-ten artworks of 2022. Theirs is a form of performance art, but its message is muddled and unconvincing. ... They want to have it both ways, to act out their emotions and give up nothing." - New York Magazine
As Live Nation leverages its power across the concert ecosystem to increase its profits, concertgoers see higher prices, and artists experience challenging touring dynamics. Artists’ touring costs have become especially onerous, creating difficult economics for small and midlevel artists. - The New York Times
“The Internet itself is just patterns—so much of what we do online is just knee-jerk, meme reactions to everything, which means that most of the responses to things on the Internet are fairly predictable. So this is just showing that.” - The New Yorker
Hollywood sees this an affront to its identity. Film power players have long clung to the fantasy that the cultural world revolves around them. That delusion is hard to sustain when the masses can’t be bothered to come. Hollywood equates this with cultural irrelevancy. - The New York Times
KPOP marketed its characters over social media, leveraging some of the same tools and tactics that brought K-pop’s biggest names to widespread fame. Unfortunately, KPOP’s fictional groups haven’t yet reached the same success. Creating internet fandom, it turns out, is hard to do. - The Verge
It occurs to us, strolling past a pair of broken BuzzFeed Shopping–approved AirPods, that the new ugliness has beset us from both above and below. - n+1
The series highlights the cozy nature between curators, scholars, museums and dealers — and how incentives align to allow the dirty world of the international art market to proliferate. - Denver Post
For four decades, the consensus has been that — despite some excellent songs, and despite repeated adjustments during revivals — there's just no way to make Merrily We Roll Along into a good piece of musical theater. Then the director Maria Friedman, who's uniquely qualified, had a go. - The New York Times
The application of game design principles like leaderboards, progress bars, points, badges, levels, challenges, and activity streaks to nongame ends has seeped into just about every domain of modern life, from sleeping and exercising to studying and social credit systems. - The New Republic
NBCUniversal, Paramount Global and Walt Disney together own dozens of underperforming cable networks that are quickly losing relevance in the age of streaming. - Variety
"Oleksandr Tkachenko argues that such a 'cultural boycott' would not amount to 'cancelling Tchaikovsky', but would be 'pausing the performance of his works until Russia ceases its bloody invasion'." - The Guardian
"I’m a scientist myself, but I find it a bit unsettling that a brain scientist or computer might accurately predict whom I’ll fall in love with. At the same time, I admire the spectacular progress of science in understanding human beings and where we fit in the grand scheme of things. - The Atlantic
"The brutal material horrors of the struggle, might make any cultural reading of the conflict seem fantastical or glib. But at its core, and from its origin, this Ukrainian conflict has been a war over language and identity. And Ukraine's libraries are the key." - The Observer (UK)
D. H. Lawrence's novel had been banned in Britain since it was first printed privately in 1928, but in 1960, Penguin UK published the first uncensored edition — and was promptly prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959. Perhaps no other trial in modern British history had such impact. - Esquire
Comparing their campaign to that of the suffragettes — one of whom attacked a Velázquez at London's National Gallery with a meat cleaver in 1914 — Just Stop Oil spokesperson Alex De Koning said, "If that's unfortunately what it needs to come to, then that's unfortunately what it needs to come to." - Artnet
