Wesley Morris: "The gutter is where our popular culture began, and the gaminess lurking there is our truest guise. ... Trash is a persistent, consumptive force that'll set up shop in any eager host. And its shamelessness went and found a new home, in American politics." - The New York Times Magazine
Much truer to the spirit of viral jazz is the musician who fully inhabits a given platform, allowing it to inform their creative process — for a point of comparison, someone like the jazz-conversant polymath Jacob Collier, a harmony and rhythm savant par excellence. - NPR
"For an American, it can be easy to forget how much ideology is packed into the genre — until you watch a film from elsewhere, and are confronted with the cartoonish heroes and villains of other cultures." - The New York Times Magazine
Experiencing a game is weirdly different from experiencing a TV show, a movie, a play or a book. They are, to use a drab but accurate phrase, “lean back” culture. You’re the audience, experiencing the art — the artists and creators talking to you. Games, on the other hand, require you to do things. - Medium
The podcast industry built itself on an open ecosystem: any podcast player could make any particular podcast available. Then Spotify, after it bought Gimlet Media, started insisting on allowing its podcasts only on its own player. It's a standard big-business move — and it's backfiring. - Simon Owens's Media Newsletter
The institution of an orchestra was built for another time. In an age of attacks against institutions, perhaps it's necessary to tweak how the institution works. - The American Scholar
"Our current problem isn't an insufficient amount of Black representation in literature but a surfeit of it. And in many cases that means simply another marketing opportunity, a way to sell familiar images of Blackness to as broad an audience as possible." - The New York Times Magazine
"The 100-page report ... claims that instead of establishing an explicit, centralized censorship regime, the leading the Law and Justice party has taken a more 'devious' approach, exerting its influence by infiltrating art institutions." - Artnet
"A lost Fernand Léger painting has reappeared after more than a century of being hidden behind another canvas. The work, an unnamed piece from the Smoke over the Rooftops series (1911–12), was discovered on the flip side of Léger's Bastille Day, painted later that year." - ARTnews
The problem: during the period between the board closing the San Antonio Symphony and the musicians forming the new San Antonio Philharmonic, a stopgap organization was created to provide pit musicians for the opera and ballet. It's that last organization that's been funded in the next county budget. - San Antonio Report
"A lot of people think I'm burning millions of dollars of art but I'm not. I'm completing the transformation of these physical artworks into NFTs by burning the physical versions." - BBC
The arts figures included in this year's class of winners are visual artists Paul Chan and Tavares Strachan; musician/scholar Martha Gonzalez; film/video artist Sly Hopinka; novelist/journalist Kiese Laymon; percussionist and electronic music composer Ikue Mori; jazz cellist Tomeka Reed; and architect Amanda Williams. - NPR
Fundamentally, artists must realise that in copyright terms, their creative ideas are worthless until those ideas form part of a tangible piece of work – whether that be as a drawing, a painting, a script, a musical score or a work of literature (for example). - ArtsHub
“It’s kind of a generational movement that I see here. I see it as something coming out of a young workforce that is mostly college-educated and is aware of the role that they play in the economy. And you know, they understand that they need better benefits and better wages.” - Philadelphia Inquirer