To celebrate, theatre makers give video messages. Willem Dafoe (a founding member of the Wooster Group) in his message: “Our challenge as theatre-makers is to avoid the corruption of theatre solely as a commercial enterprise dedicated to entertain as distraction.” - American Theatre
"Developers discovered the cultural value of place-making. Corporations embraced art as branding. Cultural nonprofits and academic institutions increasingly adopted the vocabulary of community engagement while operating within the same economic structures driving displacement.” What now? - Hyperallergic
It’s foundational: "Over the past three decades, music originating from Black genres has generated £24.5bn of the UK music industry’s £30bn recorded music market.” - The Guardian (UK)
“Angelus Novus is renowned not just in its own right, but for what its most famous owner made of it. … It was purchased in Munich in 1921 by the German-Jewish writer Walter Benjamin, a titanic figure in 20th-century letters.” Now, ironically, it’s represented by “an authorized facsimile.” - The New York Times
“To imagine a hospital administrator agreeing to this sort of project in a post-Titicut world speaks to the devastating impact of Wiseman’s work; anyone who had seen anything like it before surely would’ve said, You can see yourself out.” - Paris Review
Maybe it was this: “The platform’s operational costs proved unsustainable, with each 10-second video costing OpenAI approximately $130 in compute expenses. With millions of users creating content daily, these costs escalated to $15 million per day.” - Geeky Gadgets
“It's the kind of television writing that you can see in the blueprints of everyone’s favorite shows nowadays. There’s a reason why Whedon was once admired for his craft. The long term, episode by episode plotting is just exquisite.” But there’s also a reason the remake failed. - Aftermath
Nominations for the Ivor Novello songwriting awards: “reveal the gender disparity in British and Irish music: there are more than twice as many male nominees (40) than female (19), with two non-binary artists making up the 61 songwriters and composers recognised.” - The Guardian (UK)
Italian authorities said Thursday they had seized €20 million of assets in Tuscany, including property, vineyards. and artworks, allegedly bought with money embezzled from Andress. The onetime Bond girl, now 90, had filed a complaint alleging a “progressive and significant depletion of her assets” by her financial managers. - AFP (Yahoo!)
Once firms get consumers used to being sorted, profiled, and priced differently, the practice starts to feel inevitable. But it is not. It is a choice about what kind of business practices we expect. Personalized algorithmic pricing pulls together affordability, privacy, competition, consumer protection, and data extraction all at once. - The Walrus
It’s been widely assumed that the 8th-century manuscript was copied and illuminated at St. Columba’s monastery on Scotland’s island of Iona — this despite the fact that there's no archaeological evidence that Iona had a place or materials for such a major project. Evidence has, however, been found at another Scottish site. - Artnet
Ignoring cultural property protections runs counter to a lesson many military forces, including the United States, have come to recognize: that safeguarding cultural heritage is not only a legal obligation, but also strategically smart. - The Conversation
One thing that has really struck me is that ordinary Americans are far less interested in fighting about history than it might seem. - The New York Times
