Yes, the favorite sculptor and architect of 17th-century Rome was the first designer whom the Sun King commissioned to make over the traditional Paris home of France’s monarchs. Yet construction was stopped and Bernini returned to Rome just a few days after the foundation stone was laid. Here’s why. - Artnet
The question isn’t whether the future will be synthetic; it already is. Our challenge now is to ensure that it is also meaningfully human. - The Conversation
“(He) enjoyed a wide-ranging career as a theatre and opera director without any of the obvious attributes for being so – no university or musical education, no artistic background, no connections – yet he succeeded over many decades in opera houses around the world, and for 10 years at the Royal Shakespeare Company.” - The Guardian
“You can’t speed-read a poem,” he explains. “You have to read it, hear the sounds, the rhythms, reread it, not be in a hurry. Slowing down helps us realize that for our speed, we sacrifice things.” - Christian Science Monitor
Nouvel’s latest movie: a new home for the Fondation Cartier, a private art foundation established in 1984 that’s dedicated to the accumulation, display and creation of contemporary art. It is now headquartered in a remodelled 19th-century building in the heart of bourgeois Paris, right across the rue from the Louvre. - The Guardian
Put simply, “Chess,” first produced in the U.S. in 1988, didn’t work on Broadway. So remounting the show, even though it’s become a cult favorite, is risky at a time when the box office is largely driven by long-running, big-brand musicals like “Wicked” and “Mamma Mia!” - Variety
“As the Metro Arts Commission works its way back from several years of instability, it’s hoping the more than $3.2 million in grants it’s awarded for the 2026 fiscal year will be a sign of progress.” Most stakeholders seem to be relieved, though there’s one in particular which is still unhappy. - The Tennessean
Of course, some will argue that performing in authoritarian or oppressive countries is a means of reaching the masses; opening up art to those underserved. And while that may be true on occasion, it is a different thing entirely from being sponsored by the state itself to launder its sovereignty. - The Guardian
Its meaning and symbolism are under the spotlight in debates often producing more heat than light. Is the increasingly widespread public display of the union jack – and the St George flag – patriotism or provocation? - BBC
US District Judge Eumi Lee on Monday ruled that Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group and ABKCO can press forward with claims that Anthropic bears legal responsibility when users of its Claude chatbot generate copyrighted lyrics. - Music Business Worldwide
A library director in Wyoming who was fired two years ago because she refused to remove books with sexual content and L.G.B.T.Q. themes from a library’s children and young adult sections was awarded $700,000 in a settlement on Wednesday. - The New York Times
They did the evening’s performance — fulfilling their contract obligations, as they pointedly mentioned — but skipped the red-carpet photo ops and left vacant their places alongside wealthy patrons at the dinner tables. The quasi-strike comes amid contract negotiations, with dancers insisting that their pay reflect New York’s soaring cost of living. - Page Six
While A.I. speeds along, upending any number of careers and lives, some in the art world have chosen to embrace it while also, in a sense, subverting it. These artists integrate A.I., gaming and other tech-heavy aesthetics into their work. - The New York Times
More than any other artists, comedians are alert to how language reveals meaning, and what all the explanations have in common is a maddening vagueness. What does this specific festival represent? - The New York Times
So: a victory for high literature, for inevitability, for oppositional culture, for men. But for the obsessives who have been attending to the saga of the Nobel Prize in literature over the past decade, it’s also something of a bummer. - The New Republic
It’s not just that he was the first famous Asian-American playwright. With Face Value in 1993 and then Yellow Face in 2007, Hwang took on the issue of onstage racial representation and explored the possibilities of autofiction years before either became ubiquitous in the American theater. - T — The New York Times Style Magazine
Andrés Orozco-Estrada, who was in Houston from 2014 to 2022, will become music director of the Swedish Radio Symphony next fall. He is also music director of the orchestra and opera house in Cologne and is now in his last season as chief conductor of the RAI National Symphony in Turin. - Moto Perpetuo
With federal funding now at zero, as one exec puts it, “Station programmers are looking at their schedule and saying, ‘Where can I save money here?’” - Current
“The bus was hard to miss as it cruised purposefully, South to North, making pit stops at pivotal civil rights landmarks. Its exterior was all black with large pictures of Black actors and the words ‘Harlem Stage Presents FREEDOM RIDERS.’” - The New York Times
The question isn’t whether the future will be synthetic; it already is. Our challenge now is to ensure that it is also meaningfully human. - The Conversation
Artificial intelligence, George Miller said, represents “the most dynamically evolving tool in making moving image.” “As a filmmaker, I’ve always been driven by the tools. AI is here to stay and change things. The balance between human creativity and machine capability, that’s what the debate and the anxiety is about.” - Variety
The backlash has grabbed far more attention than the product itself, so I wondered: How does Avi Schiffmann, the 22-year-old founder and CEO of Friend, feel about being the most despised tech founder in America’s largest city? - The Atlantic
High-engagement, AI-generated posts on Reddit are an example of what is known as “AI slop” – cheap, low-quality AI-generated content, created and shared by anyone from low-level influencers to coordinated political influence operations. Estimates suggest that over half of longer English-language posts on LinkedIn are written by AI. - The Conversation
“Ultimately they said: ‘We only want to prevent the implementation of technology as it is harmful, as it is injurious to the working man.’ So they weren’t trying to stop technology. What they were trying to do was stop the monopoly of the wealth that technology created. - The Guardian
Most of the time, our intuition tells us that what we are seeing (or hearing or feeling) is an accurate representation of what is out there, and that anyone else would see (or hear or feel) it the same way. But we all know that’s not true and yet are continually surprised by it. - Aeon
“As the Metro Arts Commission works its way back from several years of instability, it’s hoping the more than $3.2 million in grants it’s awarded for the 2026 fiscal year will be a sign of progress.” Most stakeholders seem to be relieved, though there’s one in particular which is still unhappy. - The Tennessean
While A.I. speeds along, upending any number of careers and lives, some in the art world have chosen to embrace it while also, in a sense, subverting it. These artists integrate A.I., gaming and other tech-heavy aesthetics into their work. - The New York Times
In the 21st century, those who control digital infrastructure control the conditions of possibility for democracy itself. Europe faces a choice: build sovereign technological capacity or accept digital colonization. - Noema
“From the beginning, Clinée Hedspeth’s tenure was marked by turmoil. Eighteen percent of the department turned over in her first six months. … Before reaching her year anniversary, Hedspeth faced bullying accusations from several staffers. By spring, many artists were openly calling on Mayor Brandon Johnson to address the dysfunction.” - WBEZ (Chicago)
Citing “unsustainable” deficits, the board that oversees the Chicago High School for the Arts has decided not to renew its contract with Chicago Public Schools and will cease operating the school after next spring. ChiArts is a privately managed contract school – similar to a charter – funded by public and donor dollars. -...
‘We have no shortage of invitations to show our work overseas, but our level of secure, ongoing funding is not enough to underpin these international tours.’ - ArtsHub
US District Judge Eumi Lee on Monday ruled that Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group and ABKCO can press forward with claims that Anthropic bears legal responsibility when users of its Claude chatbot generate copyrighted lyrics. - Music Business Worldwide
Andrés Orozco-Estrada, who was in Houston from 2014 to 2022, will become music director of the Swedish Radio Symphony next fall. He is also music director of the orchestra and opera house in Cologne and is now in his last season as chief conductor of the RAI National Symphony in Turin. - Moto Perpetuo
The invitation for Caterina Barbieri to lead the Music Biennale gave “a platform to another side of contemporary music that is generally excluded from these more institutional places.” There is “another scene that often doesn’t get taken quite as seriously because it’s not as technically virtuosic.” - The New York Times
“The strike will be held on Friday 17 October, the date of the opera house’s first performance of a run of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, which will close its 2024-25 season. The theatre’s musicians and staff have for months called for Beatrice Venezi’s appointment as music director to be revoked.” - The Guardian
A group of independent music venues in Chicago have come together to protest the building of Lincoln Yards, a $5 billion new development on the city's North side, which is set to include three to five new concert halls run by Live Nation. - Pitchfork
“James Meena, former principal conductor and artistic director for (the Charlotte-based company), said he took to Facebook to refute ‘unsubstantiated rumors’ by (board members and staffers) at the opera company that he stole money from the group and that artists weren’t paid because of that.” - The Charlotte Observer (Yahoo!)
Yes, the favorite sculptor and architect of 17th-century Rome was the first designer whom the Sun King commissioned to make over the traditional Paris home of France’s monarchs. Yet construction was stopped and Bernini returned to Rome just a few days after the foundation stone was laid. Here’s why. - Artnet
Nouvel’s latest movie: a new home for the Fondation Cartier, a private art foundation established in 1984 that’s dedicated to the accumulation, display and creation of contemporary art. It is now headquartered in a remodelled 19th-century building in the heart of bourgeois Paris, right across the rue from the Louvre. - The Guardian
Its meaning and symbolism are under the spotlight in debates often producing more heat than light. Is the increasingly widespread public display of the union jack – and the St George flag – patriotism or provocation? - BBC
“The National Portrait Gallery has postponed the opening of an exhibition for its triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition as the Smithsonian Institution prepares to run out of federal funding. The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today exhibition was expected to open next Saturday, October 18, and remain on view through August 30, 2026.” - Hyperallergic
The change to “Philadelphia Art Museum” was simply an acknowledgment of basic reality, says Luis Bravo, PhAM’s design director. And yes, the new acronym is PhAM, not PAM. There’s also a new logo, a new typeface and even new museum guard uniforms. - The Philadelphia Inquirer (MSN)
These episodes highlighted the vulnerability of the US’s state-funded cultural sector under an autocratic populist president determined to suppress artistic expression perceived as intolerably “woke”. - The Art Newspaper
“You can’t speed-read a poem,” he explains. “You have to read it, hear the sounds, the rhythms, reread it, not be in a hurry. Slowing down helps us realize that for our speed, we sacrifice things.” - Christian Science Monitor
A library director in Wyoming who was fired two years ago because she refused to remove books with sexual content and L.G.B.T.Q. themes from a library’s children and young adult sections was awarded $700,000 in a settlement on Wednesday. - The New York Times
So: a victory for high literature, for inevitability, for oppositional culture, for men. But for the obsessives who have been attending to the saga of the Nobel Prize in literature over the past decade, it’s also something of a bummer. - The New Republic
A report by charity Inclusive Books for Children found that of the 2,721 books surveyed, only 51 featured a Black main character, down by 21.5% since 2023. - The Guardian
“Terri Lesley was fired as the library system director in northeastern Wyoming’s Campbell County in 2023, two years into the dispute … over books with sexual content and LGBTQ+ themes that some people complained were inappropriate for youngsters and sought their removal from youth shelves … at the library in Gillette.” - AP
With federal funding now at zero, as one exec puts it, “Station programmers are looking at their schedule and saying, ‘Where can I save money here?’” - Current
Fourteen of the state’s public radio stations, the ones deemed to serve Alaska Native people, will receive a total of $4.5 million from the federal government’s Bureau of Indian Affairs. Those stations were highly dependent on grants from the now-defunded Corporation for Public Broadcasting in Washington, DC. - Anchorage Daily News
Ross, with his distinctive afro, soothing voice and sunny outlook, empowered millions of viewers to make and appreciate art through his show The Joy of Painting. More than 400 half-hour episodes aired on PBS (and eventually the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) from 1983 to 1994, the year before Ross died of cancer at age 52. -...
As affiliates, they’re not happy. And as they lobby the FCC to abolish the cap on how many stations one company can own (currently maxed at a number that all together reaches no more than 39% of TV households in the country), a bulked-up Nexstar and Sinclair are flexing their power and heft. -...
“(We) collected TikTok watch histories from 1,100 users. We created a database of roughly 15 million videos served up to them in a six-month period last year. Our analyses showed just how effective TikTok is at getting even its heaviest users to swipe more and watch more on its platform.” - The Washington Post (MSN)
“BBC executives are hoping to ease the burden on the stretched Foreign Office budget (which usually funds the World Service) by classifying some of its spending as national security. That would probably include its efforts to monitor foreign media and to put out information to counter propaganda from other countries.” - The Guardian
They did the evening’s performance — fulfilling their contract obligations, as they pointedly mentioned — but skipped the red-carpet photo ops and left vacant their places alongside wealthy patrons at the dinner tables. The quasi-strike comes amid contract negotiations, with dancers insisting that their pay reflect New York’s soaring cost of living. - Page...
He hasn’t danced for nearly a decade. He has damaged bones and tendons and claims to know all his vertebrae by name. But he’s still fiendishly driven. - The Guardian
After 25 years, the Bangladeshi-British choreographer is closing down his touring troupe to pursue new creative directions. In a Q&A, he discusses the Akram Khan Company’s final project: Thikra: Night of Remembering, which uses dancers trained in Bharatanatyam for a ritual work inspired by the ancient Nabataean culture of Petra and AlUla. - ArtReview
“I was thinking, she’s the mother of modern dance,” said English National Ballet artistic director Aaron S Watkin. “She’s so iconic and famous, but hardly anyone is doing (her work in the UK).” His company and a few others may be changing that. - The Guardian
“By now I’ve spent upward of 5,000 hours in ballet classes, and roughly 1,600 hours more in other, non-ballet dance classes. … I dance as if it were my job.” - Slate
Walsh helped Scarlett create several scenes for the London premiere in 2016, then danced the title role in the 2017 revised version at San Francisco Ballet. Walsh was injured for the 2018 revival, so he helped stage it, and he has restaged it several times since Scarlett’s death in 2021. - L.A. Dance Chronicle
Put simply, “Chess,” first produced in the U.S. in 1988, didn’t work on Broadway. So remounting the show, even though it’s become a cult favorite, is risky at a time when the box office is largely driven by long-running, big-brand musicals like “Wicked” and “Mamma Mia!” - Variety
Of course, some will argue that performing in authoritarian or oppressive countries is a means of reaching the masses; opening up art to those underserved. And while that may be true on occasion, it is a different thing entirely from being sponsored by the state itself to launder its sovereignty. - The Guardian
More than any other artists, comedians are alert to how language reveals meaning, and what all the explanations have in common is a maddening vagueness. What does this specific festival represent? - The New York Times
It’s not just that he was the first famous Asian-American playwright. With Face Value in 1993 and then Yellow Face in 2007, Hwang took on the issue of onstage racial representation and explored the possibilities of autofiction years before either became ubiquitous in the American theater. - T — The New York Times Style...
“The bus was hard to miss as it cruised purposefully, South to North, making pit stops at pivotal civil rights landmarks. Its exterior was all black with large pictures of Black actors and the words ‘Harlem Stage Presents FREEDOM RIDERS.’” - The New York Times
Actors’ Equity members have already voted to authorize a strike; American Federation of Musicians members are close to authorizing one. Box office revenue has hit an all-time high, and performers believe they deserve a piece of it; producers say new musicals have been failing at a shockingly high rate. - The New York Times
“(He) enjoyed a wide-ranging career as a theatre and opera director without any of the obvious attributes for being so – no university or musical education, no artistic background, no connections – yet he succeeded over many decades in opera houses around the world, and for 10 years at the Royal Shakespeare Company.” - The...
Among the arts folks who won this year’s $800,000 no-strings grants are playwright Heather Christian, photographers Tonika Lewis Johnson and Matt Black, artist/filmmakers Garrett Bradley and Tuan Andrew Nguyen, artist/curator Gala Porras-Kim, composer Craig Taborn, author Tommy Orange, cartographer Margaret Wickens Pearce, and traditional Wabanaki basket weaver Jeremy Frey. - NPR
Esterow purchased ARTnews in 1972 from Newsweek, which at the time was a division of the Washington Post Company, and owned it until 2014, when ARTnews was sold in 2014 to Sergey Skaterschikov. - ARTnews
“Over a career that spanned more than six decades, Mr. Klíma emerged as one of Central Europe’s most distinctive literary voices, chronicling what it means to live with both fear and conscience in societies ruled by ideology … (and) how ordinary people navigate systems designed to crush individuality.” - The Washington Post (MSN)
“The novels were robust, and full of comic observation – she had a caricaturist’s eye for telling contrasts of detail, a handsome sleek horse next to a shaggy-shanked pony. … Upper and middling natives pursued land, sports, profitable businesses, and each other, with lust and gusto, as in the works of Henry Fielding.” - The...
Burney, who created a new zine to showcase the artists of his city: "Baltimore is a good microcosm, not even just for the social aspects of America, but the social aspects of the western world in general.” - The Guardian (UK)
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The Music Center seeks an inspiring and strategic individual to lead its cultural programming division, TMC Arts. Reporting directly to the president & CEO..
“Often described as postmodern, Krasznahorkai is known for his long, winding sentences, dystopian and melancholic themes, and the kind of relentless intensity that has led critics to compare him to Gogol, Melville and Kafka. Satantango, was famously adapted into a seven-hour film by director Béla Tarr.” - The Guardian
Countless casual classical listeners will tell you they hate the “new stuff.” When asked for an example, they’ll cite some highly dissonant music written between 40 and 80 years ago — in a “modern” style which hasn’t been dominant in contemporary classical music (in North America, at least) for decades. - The New York...
“It is the first major museum in D.C. to shutter because of the shutdown. The Smithsonian Institution, which runs an array of museums in D.C. and beyond, is using its own funds to remain open at least through Monday.” - ARTnews
Portland is very clearly not “hell,” and just as clearly not a war zone. But also: "Although the number of events and the amount of ticket sales have not yet recovered to pre-pandemic levels, they have increased significantly ... and are now getting close to pre-2020 levels.” - Oregon ArtsWatch
Andrea Bartz “was furious that the writing she had labored over for years got vacuumed up and fed into an algorithm, without her permission.” Then she (and others) did something about it. - The New York Times
One artist who removed his music: “Spotify is going to have to make Herculean efforts to roll back tons of damaging choices they’ve introduced to their platform over the years. I don’t see that happening.” - The Verge (Archive Today)
At the V&A East Storehouse, “visitors have the option to choose up to five via the ‘order an object’ service and have them delivered to a study room for a private viewing.” - The Guardian (UK)
"If The Best American Poetry captures ‘the zeitgeist of the current attitudes in American poetry,’ we should be asking: Why are those attitudes so fucked up?” - The Defector (Archive Today)
“Two lighting technicians and a video operator bring the opera to its full pyrotechnic life. Hunched over banks of consoles, screens and keyboards, they execute a tight script as they manipulate videos, lights, scrims, screens, stage panels and dry ice.” - The New York Times
The Smithsonian museums and National Gallery will remain open for as long as leftover cash-on-hand lasts, which will be at least through Monday. Kennedy Center events are privately financed and should proceed as scheduled. As for the monuments, it depends … - The Washington Post (MSN)
Denis Raisin Dadre, 69, a recorder virtuoso and specialist in Renaissance reed instruments, founded Ensemble Doulce Mémoire in 1990 and developed an impressive array of programs in performance and on disc. His lifeless body was discovered in his apartment in Tours; drugs were found at the scene. - RTBF (Belgium) (via Google Translate)
