A visitor described as an "elderly person" vandalized Miriam Cahn's painting fuck abstraction!, which the artist and museum say is a response to human rights abuses by Russian troops in Ukraine but which conservative politicians and activists say promotes pedophilia. Cahn has decided to let the purple paint remain. - ARTnews
On the last day of April, Gov. Kevin Stitt vetoed a bill funding the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority, calling public broadcasting an "outdated system" and complaining of indoctrination, the over-sexualization of our children." Among the pernicious influences he cited was Clifford the Big Red Dog. - Deadline
The opera is based on the memoir of Omar Ibn Said, a scholar who was abducted in Senegal in 1807 and sold into slavery in Charleston, where it premiered last year at Spoleto Festival USA. Finalists were Tyshawn Sorey's Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) and Jerrilynn Patton's Perspective. - The Post and Courier (Charleston)
"Sanaz Toossi’s English has won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Set in an English language class in Karaj, Iran, the drama quietly unpacks the aspirations and disappointments of Iranians living under the Islamic Republic in the months leading up to the 2009 Green Movement." - TheaterMania
"Washington University professor Carl Phillips has won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his most recent book, Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020. The collection chronicles an era of American culture roiled by crises of politics, identity and the pandemic." - St. Louis Public Radio
She was honored for five essays, among them "Hanya's Boys," about how author Hanya Yanagihara (A Little Life) tortures her gay male characters so that she can heal them, and "The Mixed Metaphor," about the trend of the mixed-race Asian character in American literature. - New York Magazine
For the first time, two winners split the fiction prize: Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead, and Diaz's Trust. Also honored were Beverly Gage's J. Edgar Hoover biography G-Man, Jefferson Cowie's Freedom's Dominion, Hua Hsu's memoir Stay True, and Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa's His Name Is George Floyd. - AP
My research often focuses on how art and politics have intersected during the past few decades. With a whirlwind 40-year socio-political history this lens can be applied to the prize. - The Conversation
“Can we live without the phone for just one damn hour?” he asked. He went on to point out that the audience had paid money for a certain kind of experience, and that phones could wait. - Philadelphia Inquirer
His remark on Tuesday that he may transfer NPR's primary Twitter account with nearly 9 million followers to another entity is typical of how Musk has run the social media site. - NPR
The Beaux Arts Trio would go on to play more than 4,000 concerts throughout the world while recording virtually all the standard trio repertory. - Washington Post
Few audiences had ever heard a Black singer perform in an opera house when Ms. Bumbry was growing up in St. Louis in the 1930s and ’40s, the daughter of a railway clerk and a schoolteacher. - Washington Post
Raymond Chandler, in 1945, "described Hollywood as a cauldron of 'egos,' 'credit stealing' and 'self-promotion' where scribes were ruthlessly neglected, marginalized and stripped of respect; toiling at the mercy of producers, some of whom, he wrote, had 'the artistic integrity of slot machines.'" - Los Angeles Times
"Might they not unite over what they have in common? They all want sustainable communities and good design. Architects and the monarch also have a shared enemy: the sacrifice of positive architectural qualities to housebuilders’ pursuit of profit." - The Observer (UK)
"Remixing maypole dancing is just one of the myriad ways that English folk culture is currently having a reboot, thanks to a new wave of switched-on folkies diversifying the scene." - BBC
