“Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav‘s compensation tied to the company’s pending merger with Paramount was rejected by an eye-opening 82% of shareholders.” Unfortunately, that vote is non-binding. - Deadline
“The ‘challenge grant’ requires $1 million to be used per year for three years, on the condition that the network retains its PBS membership and that the foundation matches every dollar with contributions from other donors.” The state network’s board voted in December to separate from PBS, then backtracked after pushback. - Arkansas Advocate
“The European Commission has informed the Biennale foundation of the (€2 million/$2.3 million) funding cut over three years, and the Biennale has 30 days to defend its decision to include Russia for the first time since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine.” - AP
Under the arrangement, the Saudi government would have provided the Met with $200 million in badly needed funding in exchange for the company performing a three-week season at the Royal Diriyah Opera House just outside Riyadh each February for the next three years. - The New York Times
“Sara Mearns was missing her cues. She couldn’t hear what her dance partner was saying from across the studio. She was late for her entrances because the music sounded too soft. … Now, ‘I feel like it’s a whole new chapter of my life,’ Mearns, 40, said in an interview.” - AP
But with the boom came backlash: the suspicion that biennales were above all an excuse for a tote-bag-wearing international art crowd to descend on a city for a few weeks, leaving behind a large carbon footprint but little meaningful engagement with the local population. - The Guardian
Shareholders of Warner Bros. Discovery voted to sell the company to David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance for $31 a share in cash at a special virtual meeting Wednesday morning. The approval was a key hurdle in advancing the deal. - Deadline
“One of the questions I always have is whether Willy is having flashbacks, or if he has some kind of dementia. … Miller said very clearly that they’re not flashbacks — Willie is not revisiting his past, but the past and the present absolutely exist simultaneously. He called them concurrences.” - TheaterMania
Tech companies with billion-dollar valuations are extracting value from copyrighted music on the internet and selling it as a service: making music-making easier and, they claim, more democratic. But creatives have always found ways to democratize and innovate music and art, long before tech companies tried to bite their flow. - Music Radar
The discovery of this “problem-finding” creative process was a seminal moment in creativity research. In the decades since, countless researchers have shown that many of the most meaningful forms of real-world creativity and invention depend less on solving well-defined problems than on figuring out what the problem is in the first place. - Psychology Today
This year’s list is organized by the “No Music for Genocide” initiative, which also calls on anti-Israel artists to have their music geo-blocked inside Israel. - Times of Israel
His contract, which was to expire in summer 2027, has been extended through the 2031-32 season, and the Venezuelan-born conductor’s title is now Music and Artistic Director. (He is also music director of the San Diego Symphony.) - Gramophone
Named Ace, the robotic system developed by Sony AI, won three out of five matches against elite players, but lost the two it played against professionals, clawing back only one game in the seven contests. - The Guardian
“I believe AI can simultaneously solve the problem of not knowing what to read and the difficulty of maintaining consistent reading habits.” Subscription-based reading platform Millie’s Library is taking things a step further by integrating a conversational AI chatbot into its platform. - Korea Joongang Daily
