Armed with snobbish hipster fury and signage that read “God Hates Renoir,” “ReNOir,” and “We’re Not Iconoclasts, Renoir Just Sucks At Painting,” the group briefly received considerable media attention—though none from the institutions it was heckling. - Artnet
The audio streaming company is developing tools that would allow subscribers to speed up, mash up and otherwise edit songs from their favorite artists, according to people familiar with the discussions. - The Wall Street Journal
A common vacation itinerary includes three or four days at Disney World and one or two days at Universal. If Universal can now persuade families to spend one more day at its parks instead of at Disney, it could nab hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue. - The Wall Street Journal
The generative-AI boom, despite promises to bridge languages and cultures, may only further entrench the dominance of English in life on and off the web. - The Atlantic
If Broadway feels more expensive than ever before, that’s because it is. Despite crowds that haven’t rebounded to pre-COVID levels, the average ticket price for a Broadway show reached an all time high: $128 in the most recent full season. - Gothamist
In 1942, a young man at war wrote a defense of the liberal arts to his family, and to his favorite professor - letters that have inspired his relatives to understand how central ideas are to democracy. - The Atlantic
The series E-Moves is 25 years old now, and one of its "intended effects has been to take choreographers who work mainly ‘downtown,’ in white-dominated dance institutions, and bring them ‘uptown’ to Harlem." - The New York Times
“The goal of Smut, says Scollard, is to 'champion work that might find it difficult to get published elsewhere – maybe a bit risqué or provocative. But the main basis is that we want to work with queer artists.'" - Irish Times
"For almost five years, Parisians looked into a sad emptiness when they walked past Notre-Dame and looked up. The void reminded them of a national trauma” of April 15, 2019. - Der Spiegel (Germany)
"With their offbeat B-movie feel, these stories are ‘managing to mess with this dichotomy between the good representation and the bad representation,’” one expert says of such movies as Bottoms, Love Lies Bleeding, and Drive-Away Dolls. - The New York Times
Library workers aren’t happy. "The City is denying Seattleites 1,500 hours of learning, checking out books, applying for jobs, talking with neighbors, sheltering from bad weather, and, though librarians should not be de facto social workers, perhaps overdose prevention, workers said." - The Stranger (Seattle)
Or so says SNL’s Bowen Yang. "You look at a Hopper painting , and it’s like people being in rooms regarding the arrangement of the city, which is people in close proximity who are still isolated on some level." - The New York Times
That’s because Scottish filmmakers, writers, and artists are feeling vulnerable "following the closure of a film project, a book festival and an art magazine within days of each other." - The Observer (UK)
