There’s a new way to distract oneself while donating blood - to play immersive virtual reality games. And the games's soundtracks? “Abbott commissioned the Chicago Symphony Orchestra ... to record them in a whirlwind, one-day recording session in the spring.” - The New York Times
“What’s so revolutionary about Hockney’s paintings is not just that they portray male nudity and desire, but scenes of domesticity: men swimming, showering and brushing their teeth together.” - The Guardian (UK)
“Antic yet elegant, Mr. van Reigersberg was closely associated with two important strands of 21st-century performance: devised physical theater — in which an ensemble works together to create a script through improvisation — and a playful, let-the-chest-hair-show take on drag.” - The New York Times
“One of the cardinal rules of museum-going is that art should be enjoyed from a comfortable distance and never touched. However, in the 1960s, a cohort of artists began inviting audiences to interact with, and thus alter, their works.” - Aeon
As the men’s World Cup gets underway, LA’s Holocaust Museum has a show on the “beautiful game” that "shines a light on the important but largely overlooked relationship between Jewish life and the global game” - and how WWII changed everything. - Los Angeles Times (MSN)
Renell Shaw: “Our story is of growth, and it’s a love story, too. I mean, my grandmother came over here from Jamaica looking for work, and my grandfather came over to chase my grandmother!” - The Guardian (UK)
This actor did, though he adds, “When I first had the idea, oh, yeah, I'm going to learn them all. I … I did not realize how much work it actually was.” - NPR
The fiction award is well-known (as is, in this case, the award winner), but the Women’s Prize added the nonfiction award in 2023 to help redress an imbalance in nonfiction award winners in the UK. - The Guardian (UK)
“The museum initially removed the painting to have it repaired but later decided to display it — with the damage — on the last day of the exhibition.” - The New York Times
Can ‘Hot Girls Read’ be trademarked? One creator thought so. “She is using the trademarking this common phrase to retroactively target small businesses who very likely had the idea before her, or at the very least had it around the same time as her.” - Slate
“‘He loved the sunlight, the weather, the boys,’ said Richard Benefield, a veteran museum executive who served as the first director of the David Hockney Foundation.” - The New York Times
After WWII, “single-family homes spread across the nation like fireweed. In a distinctively American architectural feature, many of them were joined to a small dungeon dedicated to the tidy storage of automobiles—and other items.” - The Atlantic
Said one presenter at the Canadian screen awards, "A country that doesn’t tell its own stories in its own way is just a market for someone else, and we’re better than that.” - The New York Times