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Ian McKellen On Playing Hamlet At Age 81

"I can't pretend I'm 20. No one's going to believe it. But I can feel that I'm 20. … One advantage is, when I was starting out as a young actor, I often played old men. Well, I didn't know what it was like to be old, but being old, I do remember what it's like to be young."...

Maybe Public Radio Stations Should Cut Two-Thirds Of Their Weekend Programming

Eric Nuzum: "The average number of unduplicated shows aired over Saturdays and Sundays is 25. Do all those programs help build audience? Station listeners — including even core listeners who love your station and are its heaviest users — usually listen for a total of one or two hours every weekend. By scheduling so many programs, most stations are...

Where The Candidates For Mayor Of New York City Stand On Arts And Culture

"New York City is heading into one of its most consequential elections in decades. … For the purposes of this inquiry, we asked eight leading Democratic candidates to spell out their specific proposals for arts and culture in New York City." - Artnet

How A Gang Of Wall-Climbing, Web-Slinging Rare Book Thieves Was Brought To Justice

In January of 2017, a group of skilled, acrobatic robbers began a series of daring break-ins — climbing walls, breaking through skylights and barriers, lowering themselves dozens of feet with ropes, never setting off alarms — to steal shipments of rare books worth millions from storage facilities around London. Here's the story of how Scotland Yard, working with detectives...

It Was Inevitable: New NFT Of ‘Salvator Mundi’ Holding Fistful Of Benjamins

"It sounds like an April Fools joke, and it both is and isn't. Author and art historian Ben Lewis has created a real non-fungible token (NFT) of Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi — and, like the original, he's hoping to auction it for $450 million. Okay, he's not really expecting to sell it for that much." Because it makes...

Venice Finally Bans Big Cruise Ships From Lagoon And Historic District

"For years, campaigns to oust cruise ships from the lagoon have been gaining traction, with locals claiming that the ships' massive structures erode the seabed, effectively turning the lagoon into an offshoot of the Adriatic Sea. And now, finally, the Italian government has agreed with them, passing a decree to ban cruise ships and other large vessels from the...

UK Theatre Returns To Stages, Having Learned Some Things During Lockdown

Shakespeare’s Globe has announced a mid-May reopening, albeit with a capacity of up to only 500 in a popular auditorium that can hold as many as 1,700. The coveted standing places that allow the so-called Globe groundlings to jostle one another, and on occasion the actors, will be replaced by seats; a lack of intermissions will further limit unwanted...

Experimental Film Captures Dance In The Wild

“We were demonstrating that we were still there, that we were still dancing, that we still wanted to dance, that we were still those people that engage in practices that are not Zoom-able, and that the things that we offer the world are not essential. We’re demonstrating that our bodies are these things that are meaty and fleshy and...

What Music Festivals Could Look Like This Summer

Certainly with international travel likely to be restricted in some form for a while, the chances are that international and local demand for festivals will still not be the same as they were pre-COVID. - The Conversation

What Good Is Criticism After Something Bad Happens?

Every day I’m thankful for the work I get to do. I am paid to watch, to think, to write. But this week, like so many others recently, it has felt pointless, even silly, to analyze fictional stories when real people are dying." - The New York Times

Big Claims For The Kind Of Art AI Will Make

Miller argues that AI-fueled art gains independence from its algorithmic parents and takes flight in works that bear the hallmarks of creativity and genius and will one day exceed human artists’ wildest imaginative dreams. Miller says he sympathizes with what I’m saying about the power of art coming from the connection with a human artist, plumbing their emotions and...

In Search Of Classical Music From Africa

Cellist Julian Lloyd Webber writes about his colleague Rebeca Omordia, a pianist of Romanian and Nigerian parentage who, since 2013, has been pursuing a project to find and present music by African composers working in Western classical genres. She's found more than 200 of them, and she presents their work every year in a concert series in London. -...

Now Clear: How Brexit Is A Disaster For UK Artists

“It is being slightly masked by Covid, but we are already seeing individuals losing their jobs because they don’t hold an EU passport. People are being told their application for a post is not welcome anymore, or that gigs are being postponed or cancelled because EU promoters are not certain whether British talent will be able to make it...

Podcasts By Retired Sports Stars Are Becoming Big Business

"If athlete-driven podcasts were once shoestring affairs, they've now been absorbed into the sports-media economy. Last year, The Ringer was acquired by Spotify for around two hundred million dollars." And the athlete-hosts don't talk only about the game; they sometimes have on as guests rock musicians, movie stars, entertainment execs, and politicians. - The New Yorker

How Big New Money Is Ripping Up The Art Market

The traditional hierarchies of the art market, where values, both monetary and aesthetic, were established and policed by art historians, curators and museums, are being assaulted by a new breed of wealthy new players, with new tastes and “new” money. Their wallets are stuffed with the currently surging cryptocurrencies. The traditional art world may sniff at some of their...

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