Although we’re still starved of the bottom end of the list and, disappointingly yet tellingly, any box-office data for its theatrical releases, we can start to see what is and isn’t working for the platform. – Irish Times
2017 Tax Law Cost Artists Because They Lost Expense Deductions. Now They Want It Changed
In the past, many actors would list these expenses as miscellaneous itemized deductions on their taxes. But the 2017 tax reform law eliminated that provision, affecting thousands of performing artists who had used those deductions for work-related expenses. Now unions representing Hollywood performers are pushing Congress to fix the problem. – Los Angeles Times
The middlewoman of modern art
Edith Halpert’s career as a pioneering gallery owner who specialized in modern American art is memorialized in a new exhibition at New York’s Jewish Museum. – Terry Teachout
The twenty-five record albums that changed my life (7)
I can’t imagine how a record of concerted works by Berg and Bartók made its way into the classical bin at the musical instrument store in Smalltown, U.S.A. Granted, Isaac Stern and Leonard Bernstein, the album’s conductor, were as famous in 1969 as it was then possible for American classical musicians to be. But Berg and Bartók wrote modern music. – Terry Teachout.
Increases In Productivity Mean We Don’t Have To Work So Hard. And Yet We Do. Why?
“If today’s advanced economies have reached (or even exceeded) the point of productivity that Keynes predicted, why are 30- to 40-hour weeks still standard in the workplace? And why doesn’t it feel like much has changed? This is a question about both human nature – our ever-increasing expectations of a good life – as well as how work is structured across societies.” – Aeon
US Department Of Education Allowed Student Aid To Art Institutes That Lost Accreditation
“We’ve known for a long time that the Art Institutes lied to students about losing accreditation. Now, we know that the Department of Education misled them, too,” said Eric Rothschild, an attorney at the National Student Legal Defense Network who is representing the students. – Washington Post
Casting of SF Opera’s ‘Figaro’ lays bare the racial fault lines in opera
The Marriage of Figaro, Mozart’s buoyant operatic comedy, is built on an infrastructure of political discontent. Although it sheathes its claws in time for a happy ending, this is an opera whose treatment of political inequality and sexual predation can feel strikingly relevant. Is it also an opera about race relations? Could it be? – San Francisco Chronicle