The popular instrumentalist will end her three-decade concert career in the summer of 2020, at which point she’ll be 55. In her announcement, she ran through her considerable list of accomplishments before concluding, “I’ve decided it’s time to find a little more space in my life for some of my many other interests!” — The Strad
Museum Of Black Civilizations In Dakar Is Major Advance In Movement To Repatriate African Art
“The museum hopes to represent all black civilizations, but the fact that it is based in Dakar is not mere coincidence. Art lives and breathes in Dakar. With its founding father and the brain-child behind this grand museum – Léopold Sédar Senghor – having been a poet, cultural theorist and leading pan-Africanist thinker, it makes sense that Dakar would be the home of this museum.” — Quartz
Meshulam Riklis, Not Just Mr. Pia Zadora, Dead At 95
He’s best known to the public as the mogul widely considered to have bought a Golden Globe award for his actress-singer wife (whom he met when she was 19 and he was 49). But before that, he was the original leveraged-buyout corporate raider and co-founded Carnival Cruise Lines. Later, he produced a women’s pro wrestling TV series and became one of Las Vegas’s top casino-hotel and entertainment moguls — until he went bankrupt and fled home to Israel. — The Hollywood Reporter
A Virtual-Reality ‘Hamlet’
The metro Boston-based Commonwealth Shakespeare Company has partnered with Google’s AR/VR Lens project to create Hamlet 360: Thy Father’s Spirit, in which the viewer watches the action from the notional point of view of the ghost of Hamlet’s father. — American Theatre
New Streaming Service For Arthouse Films To Launch This Spring
With FilmStruck having closed and Criterion’s planned service limited to the titles admitted to its Collection, serious cinephiles who stream were feeling a bit bereft. “Enter OVID, a recently announced partnership [whose members]… control the rights to thousands of different documentary, arthouse, independent, and international titles.” — Hyperallergic
Why Johns Hopkins Is Buying The Newseum Building
“The purchase is an opportunity to position the university, literally, to better contribute its expertise to national- and international-policy discussions. … It is also a power move for a university that ping-pongs in and out of the top-10 rankings — one that may lead more students to salivate over the school, and improve its status.” — The Atlantic
Art Critic Mary Louise Schumacher Laid Off From Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
After 18 years as the paper’s art and architecture critic, Schumacher has taken a buyout; her position is being eliminated. The Journal Sentinel is a Gannett newspaper, and Schumacher is presumably one of the roughly 400 staffers whose layoffs by the chain were revealed earlier this month. — ARTnews
Conductor Daniele Rustioni Takes Reins At Ulster Orchestra
The 35-year-old Italian, currently chief conductor of the Orchestra della Toscana in Florence and the Opéra National de Lyon, succeeds Rafael Payaré, who leaves in July for his new job as music director of the San Diego Symphony. — Belfast Telegraph
Long-Speculated-About Trunk Reveals 5000 Pages Of Verdi Musical Notes
Locked inside the trunk were drafts and sketches for 12 operas written over nearly half a century, from “Luisa Miller” to “Falstaff,” as well as for works like the Requiem and “Four Sacred Pieces.” They have been cataloged and digitized and will be made accessible to scholars. – The New York Times
Helen Sung And Dana Gioia: A Fine Joint Effort
Helen Sung: Sung With Words (Stricker Street Records)
In this poetry and jazz collection Helen Sung further validates her position as one of the most accomplished pianists In the New York jazz community. — Doug Ramsey
A Writer’s Take On Literary Festivals
“For years I have not participated in collective activities, especially if they force me to move from one continent to another. … The round table was a disaster, since the other two participants, very young, started a binge yesterday evening that has lasted throughout the day, and presented themselves in a deplorable state. As they are mystery authors, they feel obliged to show a degree of alcoholism that they may not have.” – El País (Spain)
The Fight Over Repatriating African Skulls From European Museums
And not just skulls, but also entire skeletons: “For centuries, African bones have lay in boxes all across Europe, placed under microscopes or displayed in some attempt to better understand the role of humans through scientific endeavours.” – VICE Canada
An Actor From Mexico Has Been Denied Visas To Come To The U.S. For Oscars Publicity
Director Alfonso Cuarón and Netflix sent letters to assure authorities that actor Jorge Antonio Guerrero Martínez, who played Fermín in the movie Roma, wasn’t going to the U.S. to work but rather to give interviews – but the letters went unread. “I tried giving it to the consul. They grabbed the paper and literally just returned my passport through the teller window. … If they don’t want to read it, then it’s going to be very difficult.” – Los Angeles Times
Lamia al-Gailani Werr, Archaeologist Who Helped Rescue Iraqi Art, Has Died At 80
Werr, an expert on Mesopotamian stone seals, helped assess the damage to the Iraqi National Museum and its art, and also helped “catalog the objects that remained, found storage facilities for them and acted as an intermediary between the museum staff and occupying forces.” – The New York Times
The Newseum Is About To Be Homeless
It was a bad – even terrible – week for journalism, with layoffs left and right and center. Then Johns Hopkins bought the D.C. building that houses the Newseum. – NPR
That Shredded Banksy Will Rotate Through Galleries In A German Museum
Despite the fact that the shredding didn’t work as planned, the buyer agreed to purchase it – and now it’s going to the Stuttgart Staatsgalerie. But “Banksy being Banksy, it would not do for the work to simply hang on the wall where anyone can see it! … The museum plans to continually move the location of the Banksy work throughout the Old Masters and Modern masterworks collection.” – Hyperallergic
Hot New Startup: ‘LinkedIn For Opera Artists’
Seriously. The Danish start-up is meant for artists to be able to take some control over their careers, no matter what their agents do. “Truelinked will feature digital profiles of artists that can be searched by companies and opera houses.” – The Stage (UK)
Florence Knoll Bassett, Who Designed American Offices Into Modernity, Has Died At 101
Knoll Bassett was “a pioneering designer and entrepreneur who created the modern look and feel of America’s postwar corporate office with sleek furniture, artistic textiles and an uncluttered, free-flowing workplace environment.” – The New York Times
In A Surprise Move, Penguin Random House Shutters Prestigious Imprint Spiegel And Grau
The imprint, founded by Cindy Spiegel and Julie Grau, had one of its most successful years in 2018, but even if it hadn’t, the imprint had a prestigious run of best-selling nonfiction. What gives? “Penguin Random House, which houses around 275 imprints worldwide and generates some $4 billion annually, has begun to look for ways to streamline its publishing lines.” – The New York Times
The Wages Of Onscreen Interracial Friendship
Has the U.S. learned nothing since Driving Miss Daisy? Well … the Academy likes Spike Lee a tad bit more now, 30 years later. – The New York Times
The Self-Worship Of Directors Who Make Themselves Their Own Stars
This will come as a real shocker, but a lot of these people are men such as Clint Eastwood. Eastwood wrote and directed The Mule, and … well: “All those closeups of himself looking incorrigible, or lapping up the adoration of others, or getting down to business with women young enough to be his great-granddaughters – these were staged and approved by him. Perhaps he even asked for extra takes. Better safe than sorry.” – The Guardian (UK)
What Was Virginia Woolf Like As A Child?
Young Virginia Stephen’s quick and fierce tongue, her nickname of Goat, and her ability to pierce her siblings’ consciousness with deeper thoughts and questions than they had – all seem to presage Virginia Woolf the Writer. And then there was the depression. – LitHub
Buzzfeed Lays Off Entire National News Desk, National Security Unit
BuzzFeed’s national news and national security teams broke some major stories on the Trump administration, Russia’s use of social media to shift public opinions in the United States, and other important subjects. – Variety
Alan Walker’s New Chopin Bio – This Year’s Best New Book On Music?
Tim Page: “This is now the best biography of Chopin — meticulous, scholarly and well-told. Whatever the composer’s shortcomings as a person, his music grows only more moving. – Washington Post
Unsealed Docs: Facebook Created Kids Game That Caused Them To Spend Millions
“Facebook created a system that allowed children to spend tens of millions of dollars through their parents’ credit cards and Paypal accounts on games and other goods without their parents’ knowledge and, despite concerns raised by game developers and solutions suggested by internal analysts, did nothing to fix the issue, according to a trove of documents unsealed from a 2012 class action lawsuit.” – Variety