"Some 30 theatres and concert halls are occupied in Strasbourg, Lille, Nantes, Châteauroux, Toulouse, Besançon, Marseille, and Saint-Etienne. All of the culture workers inside are asking for the same help from authorities, and conveying the same concerns and frustrations." - Artnet
In a letter to school boards last week, which was leaked to the media, Kabul’s Education Department said girls aged 12 and above would no longer be able to sing at public events, unless the events were attended solely by women. The letter also stipulated that girls couldn’t be trained by a male music teacher. - The Guardian
Levine had been in precarious health for more than a decade, canceling many of his performances after 2008 and undergoing spinal surgery. Even when conducting from a wheelchair, he remained a vigorous and indefatigable presence in American cultural life far beyond the rarefied opera world — widely considered the country’s most influential conductor since Leonard Bernstein. But accusations of...
The "Icarus of subscription services" seemed too good to be true when it started selling $9.99-a-month memberships that would let you see a movie in a theater literally every day — and so it was. The more customers it got, the more cash it hemorrhaged, and it died a long, humiliating death over the course of 2019. But this...
"The Israel Antiquities Authority, which carried out the excavations, believes the new scroll, written in Greek, is actually a missing part of the “Book of the 12 Minor Prophets” scroll, first discovered in 1961. … Dating from the third century BC to the first century AD, the parchment and papyrus manuscripts contain the earliest known texts from the Hebrew...
"In an informal poll, members of the Association of Art Museum have voted 91-88 against asking its trustees to explore a controversial change in its deaccessioning policy to permit institutions to sell art to finance direct care of their collections." - The Art Newspaper
"The pact, announced this week, was passed unanimously by the musicians, the SPCO board and the board of the American Federation of Musicians Local 30-73 some 15 months before the current contract was set to expire. It will maintain musicians' pay, benefits and work rules from July 2022 until July 2024." - The Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
Three years after Chris Dercon ended his brief, dissension-plagued tenure at the theatre, his successor as artistic director, Klaus Dörr, quit after it became public that 10 women at the Volksbühne had made formal complaints to the Berlin city government about Dörr's alleged sexual harassment of younger actresses and humiliation of older ones. - The New York Times
Oliver Wainwright: "It is a fitting moment for a prize once reserved for flamboyant sculptors of icons to be awarded to a practice that would prefer you didn't notice their presence at all. … In an age of demolishing public housing and replacing it with shiny new carbon-hungry developments in the name of 'regeneration', Lacaton & Vassal have worked...
More fully stated, the professional creed of Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal is "Never demolish, never remove or replace, always add, transform, and reuse!" The pair are best known for their innovative and economical work renovating public housing projects in France. - NPR
Sebastian Smee: "No painting by Titian or Raphael has ever fetched as much as “Everydays.” So of course this is big news. But it’s also just one more riotous example of high-roller groupthink, market manipulation and the seemingly unstoppable human urge to commodify everything. - Washington Post
"Most music from the past is lost. Written, performed, then fading into obscurity, like the millions of books in our libraries that no one reads, as forgotten as the titles of the lost Library of Alexandria. Lostness is bound up with temporal limits; we cannot maintain an iron grip on the past. The inevitability of time’s erosion of things...
It turns out the NFT craze has many parallels to the art world. After even a few short days in the aftermath of the sale, we can already see that NFTs are creating effects that are hilariously and tragically the opposite of the utopian fantasies so many have placed upon them. - ARTnews
Ivo van Hove at the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, Stéphane Braunschweig at the Odéon in Paris, Thomas Ostermeier at the Schaubühne in Berlin, Kajsa Giertz at the Helsingborg (Sweden) City Theatre, and Saheem Ali and Shanta Thake at the Public Theater in New York talk about government support, programming while their buildings are closed, and reopening plans. - The Observer...
Once data is “on-chain,” it cannot be deleted, and it can be reviewed forevermore by anyone with access privileges and enough technological know-how. This means each NFT’s scarcity and provenance are secure, which in turn amplifies demand, which in turn builds a more confident, more robust market than we’re used to seeing for digital artworks without blockchain backing. -...
