With each day bringing new troubles and concerns, how should we proceed? Ideally, with boldness, though that quality seems to be in short supply, especially in the arts world. What a far cry from 2016 when, within hours of the shock Election Day result, Toni Morrison’s quote that “this is precisely the time when artists go to work. -...
Over a 50-year career, the Malian writer-director did much to establish sub-Saharan African film as an internationally recognized industry in terms of art as well as commerce. He was the first Black African filmmaker to win a feature film award at Cannes: a Special Jury Prize in 1987 for Yeelen. - AP
The Culture Secretary is expected to use a speech in Stratford-upon-Avon, birthplace of William Shakespeare, to announce a new £270 million Arts Everywhere Fund to help organisations in urgent need of financial support. - The Independent
It plays like a David Mamet drama, complete with an inciting incident, characters bringing years of baggage to every scene and a surprising climax. Its cast includes a president carrying a grudge, a board of megawealthy executives unaccustomed to being fired, A-list celebrities and drag queens dragged into the fray. - The Wall Street Journal (MSN)
The evolution of cooperation has been of interest to biologists, philosophers and anthropologists for centuries. If natural selection favours self-interest, why would we cooperate at an apparent cost to ourselves? - Aeon
"They constitute an unusual cohort, bucking the bad news of the American theater by having made it past emerging to emerged. Granted, pretty much all of them did so with the help of other industries. … These nontheater jobs are how playwrights make real money and get health insurance." - The New York Times
Police seized 71 paintings, including fake Rembrandts, Picassos, Warhols, and Banksys, some completed and others half-finished, along with a plethora of painting materials, forged certificates of authenticity, and bogus catalogues. Authorities say evidence suggests that an art restorer is at the center of the racket. - The Guardian
"(A Federal judge) ordered Watson and his company to pay over $36 million in restitution and nearly $60 million in forfeiture … for his involvement in a fraud scheme in which he conspired to impersonate a YouTube executive and repeatedly lied to investors about the now-defunct media company’s finances." - Courthouse News Service
The Center gets only 16% of its budget from Federal money, and that's for maintenance, repairs and operation of the building, which the government owns. The now-fired CEO and board chairman were very successful fundraisers, and the chairman a major donor. Will anyone be making up for that? - The New York Times
The state’s Performing Arts Equitable Payroll Fund, which helps organizations meet new pay and benefit requirements, launches this year with a $12.5 million budget. The California Arts Council has suffered only half the originally proposed cut, and San Francisco city arts spending has held steady. - San Francisco Classical Voice
Next season the company will experiment with scheduling consecutive performances of the same opera with different casts, this to save money by not moving sets in and out of the theater. There will be more performances of the most popular repertory staples and fewer performances of contemporary works on weekends. - AP
Not long after midnight in Cusco, once the Incas' imperial capital, a man "apparently intoxicated and out of his mind" used a metal object to attack what's known as the 12-Angle Stone, part of the former Inca Roca's Palace which was subsequently incorporated into the colonial-era Archbishop's Palace. - ARTnews
"'You are welcome,' beams a neon sign above the biscuity brick entrance. Theatres, like vampires, gravitate to dark spaces, but inside the impression is of light: high ceilings, generous windows, terraces overlooking the Olympic Park. … There’s even a window behind the auditorium, so technicians don’t beaver in the shadows." - The Standard (London)
Trump has already hit language very strongly, and not just because of his own idiosyncratic manner of speech. As the Times has noted, his administration has developed a confounding but effective bizarro-world stylebook, in which phrases like “free speech” are deployed to quash exactly that. - New York Magazine (MSN)
During apartheid, in addition to being Athol Fugard's leading actor, he co-wrote and co-starred in the seminal plays Sizwe Bandi Is Dead and The Island. Since majority rule began in 1994, Kani has written what's now a trilogy looking at the triumphs and troubles of post-apartheid South Africa. - The Washington Post (MSN)
