When plans for Asia's biggest contemporary art museum were announced back in 2007, Xi Jinping wasn't yet president of China, few people anticipated political crackdowns in Hong Kong, and the biggest concerns were over the money being spent. Now people just hope M+ can survive. - Artnet
A longread on how the Metropolitan Opera's general manager is handling the company's reopening and its long-term problems, what people inside and outside of the Met think of him, and what he thinks of what they think of him. (He's fairer than you might expect.) - New York Magazine
Ireland will launch a basic income guarantee program for artists and arts workers in 2022. The three-year initial plan will have a budget of €25 million. - The Irish Times
Robert Nelson of Melbourne's The Age wrote several hundred words about Jeremy Deller's Father and Son — life-sized grey wax candles, lit and gradually melting, in the shape of a seated old man and his standing adult offspring — while completely overlooking the piece's key characteristic. - The Guardian
Representation absolutely matters. But ever since Broadway announced that so many Black plays would reopen its season, there has been a feeling of dread that if these plays don’t do well, there may not be opportunities for future artists. That pressure is unfair. - American Theatre
The external review, which interviewed 35 people, identified “a lack of diversity in the organisation, an absence of confidence in HR systems and in the handling of complaints and in managers to deal with or take seriously concerns of racism”. - The Guardian
In a widely cited paper from 2007, on a number of common measures of innovation and wealth creation, cities deliver benefits that exceed what we would expect by a simple scaling up of the numbers of people involved, and at lower cost in terms of the infrastructure required. - Aeon
Morlot, born in Lyon in 1974, will replace Kazushi Ono. The contract with the OBC is for four years, with a minimum of eleven weeks of work with the orchestra each season, of which eight would be for seasonal concerts, two for recordings and one for festivals. - Ara Balears
Those of us who were fortunate to be undergraduates in the 1980s remember the exhilarating combination of intellectual freedom and ambition to which all this gave rise. Yet, in the past decade, exhilaration has been replaced by suffocation. - Washington Post
Many musicians have watched, cringing, as the term “gig economy” has become a defining term of the national economic Zeitgeist. Not just because the word “gig” is our word—it originated with jazz musicians in the 1910s—but because, in a larger sense, we are the original gig workers. - Brooklyn Rail
John Mortensen has made a thorough study of how music students in Baroque-era Naples were taught to improvise harmony and counterpoint, then a basic skill. And he's seeing interest from present-day students who don't want to play the same hundred pieces everyone else does. - Early Music America
"I was looking forward to talking to students at the Cambridge Union this Friday, but I hear that someone there has been blacklisted for doing an impersonation of Hitler I regret that I did the same on a Monty Python show, so I am blacklisting myself before someone else does." - The Telegraph (UK)
In fact, there have been composers in China writing for European instruments for over a century. Since the end of the Cultural Revolution, though, the country has produced several generations of accomplished composers — and developed an audience eager to hear new scores. - Prospect
The latest plot twist has foreshadowed a potentially unhappy ending. Like the rest of Portland’s urban core — and like downtowns across the United States —Powell’s is contending with staggering uncertainty. - The New York Times
"The construction industry is responsible for nearly 40 percent of global carbon emissions, and it must be part of the solution, says museum president and executive director Aileen Fuchs, … (who believes) the museum is the perfect space for hashing out solutions." - MSN (The Washington Post)
