Robbie Praw, who spent 12 years as programmer at Just for Laughs in Montreal before joining Netflix in 2016, talks about how he chooses which comedians to present, whether Netflix is focusing too much on "politically incorrect" material, and mounting the company's, and Los Angeles's, first-ever major comedy festival. - Vulture
 Sanitized and caricatured by corporate marketing schemes, Basquiat’s work has been defanged. Today, Basquiat the artist has become Basquiat the brand. - Jacobin
Volt, an annual project whose first featured writer is Karen Hartman, is meant to spotlight, as founder Val Day put it, "somebody who (is) more widely produced in the regions, who (has) a fairly large canon of work which deserved to have eyes on it in New York." - The New York Times
Researchers have found that a troop of 46 chimps in the Ivory Coast has 390 unique vocal sequences that they use among themselves. Â They employ "single vocal units," combine them into double units, and in turn combine those doubles into three-unit sequences. - Salon
"They serve as field reporting, pleas for weapons, arias that glorify Ukraine. But the videos have done more than win Ukraine moral and military support. They have created a serialized manifesto — one that makes the case for liberal democracy over oligarchic autocracy, ... clarifying, day by day, democracy's reason for being." - Wired
Composer Stewart Wallace and librettist Michael Korie have removed 70 minutes, and many cameo roles, from Milk, and made arrangements for orchestras of 66 and 31 players, down from over 80. Says Wallace, "There's not a single bar that's the same, even though it's definitely the same opera." - The New York Times
"It must be close to the Capitol, close enough to implicate and shame those inside it on a daily basis. ... After every mass shooting, turn on the lights and the microphones, and let no political leader who makes the symbolic pilgrimage escape speaking actual truth on the site." - MSN (The Washington Post)
Jean-Luc Martinez, who stepped down as director last year when his contract wasn't renewed, as well as the head of the museum's Egyptian art department and the editor of the journal Revue d'Egyptologie, were questioned about items sold to the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the Met Museum. - ARTnews
An Afro-Caribbean repertoire of quadrille square dances (accompanied by drumming and singing) that combines a complicated vocabulary of symbolic movements with improvisation, bèlè is seeing a revival on the island after long years of discouragement by a central government in Paris keen to promote continental French culture. - The Conversation
As American arts workers watch and weep with envy, "Germany's new culture minister, Claudia Roth, has announced a 2022 budget of €2.3 billion ($2.4 billion). The figure is an increase of €148 million ($156 million), or 7 percent, over last year's budget." - Artnet
Guston didn’t know what to say about the Klan or about racial violence, except that he knew to fear it as a Jew, and to both oppose and feel implicated in it as a white American. Nearly 50 years after he painted The Oracle, I can’t honestly say I know more. - The Atlantic
The act of writing poses a predicament for anyone who recognizes the temptations of pride and self-aggrandizement. We simultaneously desire to attract recognition and seek to avoid it. We want to engage an audience, yet we see that approbation flatters our egos and that criticism is painful. - National Affairs
An L.A. native, Clara Kim has been senior curator of international art at Tate Modern since 2016, where she organized an acclaimed survey of artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen in 2020 and Kara Walker’s lauded Turbine Hall commission, Fons Americanus, in 2019. - ARTnews
What everyone agrees on is that this very talented and still very young conductor will have the kind of opportunities in Germany that simply aren’t available here. - Edmonton Journal
The report, titled “Thumbs Down: Film Critics and Gender, and Why It Matters,” shows that in early 2022, males continue to outnumber their female counterparts by more than 2 to 1 in the U.S. - Variety
