The controversy around France’s deal with India may appear more ambiguous to a Western audience. Is it France’s concern if the YYBNM decides to portray a skewed history of India that privileges Hindu culture and a Hindutva ideology, even if its role is limited to “specific areas of technical collaboration." - ARTnews
“The Iliad is the poem of death. Death stalks its lines, blood soaks it. Countless young men appear in the poem only to be cut down. … But at the heart of the Odyssey there is life, and survival. This survival isn’t pretty, or comforting, or dignified.” - The Guardian
“We can read the Odyssey today with a sense of déjà vu: we feel we know these narratives, we have met these characters, we recognize these themes. Yet the epic of Odysseus’s return is, in many ways, as unfathomably strange to us as the one-eyed giant Cyclops was to its hero.” - Literary Hub
“Organizations impacted include Opera Orlando, the Orlando Ballet, and the Orlando Science Center, to name a few. The canceled grants total $200,000 dollars and were earmarked for arts and cultural organizations that provided programming and outreach for patrons with disabilities … (and for) grassroots organizations.” - Central Florida Public Media
“The number of plays and musicals staged by the UK's main subsidised theatres last year was down by almost a third compared with 10 years earlier, BBC research suggests. In 2024, the 40 best-funded theatre companies that make their own productions opened 229 original productions, compared with 332 in 2014.” - BBC
“Russia has stolen more than 1.7 million pieces of Ukrainian cultural heritage since its full-scale invasion began, according to the Ukrainian Minister of Culture and Strategic Communications Mykola Tochytskyi,” and has been selling many of those items on the black market. - ARTnews
“Iain Mackay, artistic director of the school, said studios were focusing on strength-based training for both sexes as ballet moved away from the ‘slim’ female fixture of the classical ballet repertoire. ‘Audiences want dancers they can relate to,’ Mackay said, when asked whether this included plus-sized ballerinas on main stages.” - The Times (UK)
“’Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’ he wrote on Truth Social. ‘Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!’” - BBC
“The slow collapse of the postwar avant-garde’s underlying tenets (no figuration! no storytelling! no obvious skill!) has allowed many to admit that Wyeth was onto something specific and powerful …, (and) I find it tends to overwhelm most reservations. What he was onto, in short, was mortality.” - The Washington Post (MSN)
For the past several decades, Greg Sikora has tuned and voiced pianos for the biggest musical artists to play this region, from Frank Sinatra to Lady Gaga and everyone in between. He also served as the chief concert piano technician for the Philadelphia Orchestra for many years. - Philadelphia Inquirer (MSN)
“In this excerpt, adapted from Seller’s memoir, Theater Kid (out on May 6 from Simon & Schuster), the producer lays out the musical’s long road from dispiriting workshop to its simultaneously triumphant and tragic first preview performance.” - Vulture
Our brains are these amazingly predictive organs trying to constantly explain the world, because that’s our way to survive. We have to have a reliable model of reality so that we can know what to expect—for example, when there’s going to be a confrontation with someone we’re in a relationship with. - Nautilus
One can only imagine what the value of music would look like if copyright protections were to disappear altogether. It would not be a stretch to imagine that its value would fall close to zero, along with the value of other commercialized cultural products, and the value of labor carried out by artists and other creators. - Music Business...
“Six,” which runs a sleek 85 minutes as an unruly concert where performers are explicitly competing for the audience’s sympathy, might ultimately be less interesting for its girl-power reframing of history than for its reconsideration of some of musical theater’s basic structural assumptions. - San Francisco Chronicle
“Recent reports of celebrity pushback against the profession, intimacy coordinators say, have created skewed narratives that breed misconceptions about their role and impact on sets. The most prominent criticism frames intimacy coordinators as a disruption to the artistic process.” - Vulture (MSN)
