Composer Tobias Picker and librettist Dr. Aryeh Lev Stollman have written Awakenings, based on the late neurologist Oliver Sacks's memoir/case study about treating encephalitis lethargica patients and about to premiere in St. Louis. (And this isn't even the first opera based on an Oliver Sacks case study.) - The New York Times
How low has Putin driven Russian culture? Here are two indications. Thousands of scientists and other intellectuals along with hundreds of ballet dancers and other artists are leaving or trying to leave Russia, ashamed of Putin’s wars and immobilized by his repression. - Hedgehog Review
He had knowledge, taste, charm; two high-profile galleries; a beautiful partner and baby daughter. Now he's in prison for fraud, internationally reviled, and owes $86 million. As one friend-turned-victim puts it, through "a toxic mix of arrogance and alcohol, ... he's sabotaged his entire life for short-term greed. It's just stupidity." - The Guardian
The scientific revolutions of the last four centuries took place not just at the same time as political and religious conflict, invasion and enslavement, but because of these things. - New Statesman
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
