“Rising from $5,000 to up to $10,000, the increase … represents the first change in this funding stream in some 20 years. The funding comes from the Department of Cultural Affairs and is distributed to each borough’s arts councils, which act as regrant partners and dole out grants to individual artists annually.” - ARTnews
The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation clearly doesn’t think so: not only has it listed the Soho building he bought in 1966, it has already sold the house on Florida’s Captiva Island where he spent his final decades. (A resort developer bought that property for $45 million.) - The New York Times
The Bronzeville Legacy Collective says it has already raised $75 million toward its goal: a campus with museums dedicated to the gospel music, blues legend Muddy Waters, and Emmett Till; a center for Black dance; a theater with a resident company; a recreational trail; and an arts and culture center. - WBEZ (Chicago)
“Under the new contract, every Whitney employee will receive a wage increase of at least 14.75% over four years. Workers with the lowest salaries will receive larger raises, ranging from 5% to 23% in the first year.” The settlement came in time to avoid disruption of the museum’s major Roy Lichtenstein retrospective. - ARTnews
Harmonium of Texas — made up largely of musicians from the long-defunct San Antonio Symphony and the now-probably-defunct San Antonio Philharmonic, and co-founded by former SA Phil music director Jeffrey Kahane — gave its first performance on Friday, three days after what’s left of the Philharmonic sued Harmonium. - San Antonio Express-News (Yahoo!)
“Possessed of huge drive, vast wealth and immense personal charm, Archer bounced back from disaster and, more than once, rebuilt a shattered life. But for all his talents, he will be remembered as a man affected by a defective moral compass, whose public humiliation was entirely self-inflicted.” - BBC (MSN)
The gift will allow the symphony to resume the season, which runs through June 2027, and to retain staff, Mark Tillinger, Nashville Symphony’s president and chief executive, said in a news release on Sunday. - The New York Times
“People just stay very playful for a longer period of time. And it’s cross-brand. You know, it might be Teddy bears. It might be Lego bricks. It might be Transformers. It might be Barbie dolls.” - The New Yorker
What are those commas doing there, anyway? By modern usage, they should mark off a non-restrictive clause, but they don’t. Nor are they marking items in a series or natural pauses in speech. - The New Yorker
The consequences have reverberated across the country. Higher instrument prices are a particular threat to lower-income districts where enrollment and budgets are shrinking. - The New York Times
That is ... not going well (though romance readers are still gaga for M/M, W/W, and M/W hockey tales from more traditional channels). Fans "see the stories as cheap pandering that fails to engage with female and LGBTQ hockey fans’ concerns about homophobia and toxic masculinity in the sport." - Wired
"In the coming weeks, NAZA will continue its rollout to theaters across the U.S., and this week it hit No. 1 at the Italian box office, surpassing Avengers: Endgame." - Vulture
Physical media are really making a comeback in the era of streaming services removing series and movies at (seemingly) random, book censorship, and AI music. - The Guardian (UK)
In addition to established understandings of intrinsic esthetic and historic values of heritage, new emphasis on development reconceptualizes heritage as a resource that can generate economic development, tourism, employment and social cohesion. - The Conversation
As Substack has become a more respectable platform and mainstream academics have begun to join in some numbers, they have encountered a strange simulacrum of fields they thought they knew intimately. Cultural and symbolic capital seem to work differently here. - Paroxysms
