Due to the recission of Corporation for Public Broadcasting funds by the Trump administration and Congress, WQED is facing a $2.5 million budget shortfall and has laid off 19 employees, mostly in marketing, membership, and production. - Axios
When director Joanna Burton revealed last week that she’s going to ICA in Philadelphia, she said she’d stay at MOCA through late October. On Wednesday, however, MOCA announced that it has appointed an interim director, Ann Goldstein, and a source said that Burton’s last day is this Friday. - Los Angeles Times (Yahoo!)
“A federal judge says Russian soprano Anna Netrebko can move forward with her case claiming national origin discrimination by the Metropolitan Opera, which dropped her after she refused to repudiate President Vladimir Putin over Russia’s campaign against Ukraine.” - AP
Chief Justice John Roberts is, ex officio, the Smithsonian Institution’s chancellor (the equivalent of board chairman). When Trump up and decided to fire National Portrait Gallery director Kim Sajet, Roberts led the board to state publicly that only they can hire and fire Smithsonian museum directors. - ARTnews
At his first appearance at San Diego’s Comic-Con International, the legendary filmmaker and museum cofounder offered a glimpse into what he called “a temple to the people’s art.” - Artnet
“What (Yoann) Bourgeois plays with are the invisible physical forces that surround us – gravity, tension, suspension – and the interaction between those forces, the performers’ bodies and symbolic ideas.” - The Guardian
The network understands that contributions from major donors – such as the Hewlett Foundation, which gave NPR a two-year, $1.2 million grant in 2024 – will go a long way to make up for the federal cuts. - Inside Radio
“In short, the vision is to create a thriving and inclusive creative ecosystem in western Sydney that celebrates its diverse communities, drives cultural innovation and delivers social and economic value for everyone,” Arts Minister John Graham will say. - Sydney Morning Herald
People are now using AI to create “grief bots,” which are simulations of deceased loved ones that the living can converse with. There has even been a case where an AI-rendered video of a deceased victim has appeared to deliver a court statement asking for the maximum sentence for the person who took their life. - The Conversation
“I decided to put the central, existential question to (my students) directly: was it still necessary or valuable to learn to write? The choice would be theirs. We would look at the evidence, and at the end of the semester, they would decide by vote whether A.I. could replace me.” - Literary Hub
Some Republicans would no doubt be happy if PBS and NPR went away entirely, as they are upset by the networks’ left-wing bias. They should be rooting for their success instead. It would be proof that, contrary to constant scaremongering from interest groups, cutting federal spending doesn’t end in disaster for citizens. - Washington Post
"I’m not interested in participating in consensus culture. The way I understand art to function and the function that it carries out in culture is about provoking something that’s harder to understand.” - The Guardian
The images, bookended by posts cheering the administration’s deportation campaign, have been widely shared by conservatives and sparked alarm among the artists, their families and some historians, who see their use as part of an effort to rewrite the past with an exclusionary view of American history. - Washington Post
Because, writes Bilge Ebiri, “everywhere we look, numbers reign supreme. Metrics determine our life and work in ways that were inconceivable ten or 15 years ago. … The movies aren’t warning us about seeing ourselves as numbers so much as they are reflecting the sad simple fact that we already do.” - Vulture (MSN)
One simple reason his songs endure is that, for all that they are written for their words, it’s hard to stop humming their tunes. His brilliance as a pianist kept him from becoming repetitive, particularly because he had such a remarkable talent for musical pastiche. - The New Yorker
