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Unknown El Greco Painting Discovered In Spain

The small canvas depicting Christ carrying the cross and wearing the crown of thorns, owned by a private individual, was authenticated after two years of study by a team at the University of Lleida. - ARTnews

Dorms Designed By Louis Kahn In India Saved From Wrecking Ball

The board of governors of the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad admitted that an international outcry prompted their decision to call off plans to demolish 14 of the school's 18 buildings designed by Kahn in the '60s and completed in 1974. But the buildings are still considered unsafe to use because of deterioration in their bricks and damage...

Lee Breuer, Experimental Stage Director, Dead At 83

"A tenacious outsider who refused his sole Tony Award nomination — for his biggest hit and only Broadway show, the Sophocles adaptation The Gospel at Colonus — Mr. Breuer flourished in the scrappier realm of Off Off Broadway, even as the scale of his works and ambitions took him to larger stages, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the...

As Australia’s Arts Festival Season Begins Amid The Pandemic, All Eyes Are On Sydney

"The Festival is poised to open on Wednesday and its administrators are on high alert. Though Covid-19 case reports remain low, the list of exposure sites is growing by the day. … With Perth Festival following in early February and Adelaide Festival" — the largest arts event in the Southern Hemisphere — "a few weeks later, what...

Sydney’s Reopening Theatres Say They’re ‘COVID-Safe.’ Are They?

The Opera House finally became the last of the city's major venues to require masks, but enforcing the policy is not easy, and most of the theatres are selling up to 75% of capacity, as opposed to the less-than-half that's been standard in where venues have been open in Europe and North America. Will these performances become super-spreader events?...

IRS: Executors Undervalued Prince’s Estate By $80 Million

The IRS determined that Prince’s estate is worth $163.2m, overshadowing the $82.3m valuation submitted by Comerica Bank & Trust, the estate’s administrator. The discrepancy primarily involves Prince’s music publishing and recording interests, according to court documents. - The Guardian

The TikTok Musical That’s Already Earned $1 Million

At a running time of 51 minutes, and with perhaps only half the numbers required for a full adaptation of the 2007 animated Oscar-winner, this “Ratatouille” is a mere appetizer. But with a winning Tituss Burgess as the human embodiment of Remy, the Parisian rodent who can stir up a mean beef bourguignon, it is a promising first course....

The Institutions That Used To Support Creative Work

"Artists in the middle of the twentieth century flourished not because the economy was inherently favorable to them, but as a result of powerful economic winds and the groups that joined in an attempt to harness them. Together, creative class groups wielded the crowbar of politics in an attempt to pry some autonomy out of consumer capitalism. If these...

Frida Kahlo Has Become An Icon – At The Expense Of Her Art?

Her claims to eminence were those of someone who as a woman of her time, and disabled too, needed to find ways to make herself heard. It is Kahlo’s supporters, trumpeting her — rather than name-checking her — as a martyr or mater dolorosa to everything from feminism, racial and sexual fluidity to anti-colonialism and anti-capitalism, that do her...

Lessons For Classical Music After The Lockdown

"Yes, musical organizations will talk about learning pragmatic lessons from this pandemic. But as the industry begins the long march back toward some semblance of normalcy, let’s hope the lessons internalized also include keeping sight of the art form’s unique modes of immediacy, of intimacy, of direct expression, and of vulnerability. These qualities carried classical music through 2020 —...

25 Dancers, Choreographers And Companies To Watch In 2021

Want to know where dance is going in 2021 as the world (hopefully) comes out of COVID lockdown? Here are 25 bright lights to follow. - Dance Magazine

Metropolitan Opera Orchestra Musicians Protest Met Tactics

“Every other major orchestra has been compensated since the very beginning of the pandemic. Met management is using the pandemic opportunistically. They are not seeking a short-term crisis-plan to balance out pandemic circumstances. They are seeking permanent cuts. The cuts they seek are so deep that the orchestra would need unrealistic salary gains over the next quarter-century just to...

Congress Passes New Controls On Antiquities In The Defense Authorization Bill

Regulators have long worried that the opacity of the antiquities trade, where buyers and sellers are seldom identified, even to the parties in a transaction, made it an easy way to shroud illicit transfers of money. The new legislation empowers federal regulators to design measures that would remove secrecy from transactions. - The New York Times

Study: Was Stonehenge Built As A Giant Amplifier?

The study found that people who spoke or played music inside the monument would have heard clear reverberations against the massive standing stones. Testing on the model also suggests that the stones increased the volume on interior sound, kept exterior sound out, and made it hard for anyone outside the structure to hear what was going on inside. -...

Star Museum Directors Talk The Future Of Museums

As the Ford Foundation’s president, Darren Walker, recently told me, “museums are in a crisis because America is in a crisis.” Museums shape narratives that matter, so it’s no surprise young people are passionate about pushing for change. It’s time now to do better—a lot better. That means looking at ourselves honestly and fixing a whole lot about the...

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