"People are starving, people are freezing, people are dying. We are in a climate catastrophe. And all you are afraid of is tomato soup," one said, referencing last week's climate action of tomato soup on a Van Gogh painting. - NBC News
His agent: "He had three serious wounds in his neck. One hand is incapacitated because the nerves in his arm were cut. And he has about 15 more wounds in his chest and torso. So, it was a brutal attack." - The Guardian (UK)
Schjeldahl was a poet, art lover and sometime artist before he became an art critic. The Fourth of July parties he and wife Brooke Alderson threw were legendary. As a critic, "He was first and foremost a visual pleasure seeker, on the prowl for new thrills." - The New York Times
The overwhelming majority of the output of these AI language models is grammatically correct. And yet, there are no grammar templates or rules hardwired into them – they rely on linguistic experience alone, messy as it may be. - The Conversation
The internet has always had an expansive capacity to reach some pretty strange and inexplicable places, but with the ever-evolving nature of social media, its strangeness is more readily available than ever before. - ArtsHub
"'I know this woman!' she kept thinking. 'Angered by my inability to summon suitable language,' she writes, 'I threw my pencil on the floor, sucked my teeth in disgust.' Sth. 'So that's what I wrote' she says, and it became the novel's first line." - T — The New York Times Style Magazine
Our current problem isn’t an insufficient amount of Black representation in literature but a surfeit of it. And in many cases that means simply another marketing opportunity, a way to sell familiar images of Blackness to as broad an audience as possible. - The New York Times
"Conductor Yuriy Kerpatenko declined to take part in a concert 'intended by the occupiers to demonstrate the so-called ‘improvement of peaceful life’ in Kherson,'" according to Kiev's culture ministry. - The Guardian (UK)
Or rather, on the glass protecting it. "'What is worth more, art or life?' said one of the activists. ... 'Is it worth more than food? More than justice? Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet and people?'" - The Guardian (UK)
Zachary Woolfe: "Any judgment on a hall's acoustics is highly provisional after just a few visits. ... But a mighty improvement is already obvious. ... (And) a theater in which it once felt like miles from the back row to the timpanis now verges on intimacy." - The New York Times
Wesley Morris: "The gutter is where our popular culture began, and the gaminess lurking there is our truest guise. ... Trash is a persistent, consumptive force that'll set up shop in any eager host. And its shamelessness went and found a new home, in American politics." - The New York Times Magazine
The institution of an orchestra was built for another time. In an age of attacks against institutions, perhaps it's necessary to tweak how the institution works. - The American Scholar
"It's the eternal problem where you make a deep, instinctual connection with something ... but then you move through it, you put it out there, ... and then we go through this process where somehow the person that it's moved through has to make sense of it." - The New York Times Magazine
In terms of the music-making, Justin Davidson observes, Blanchett and filmmaker Todd Field do very well. But Lydia Tár's awful behavior? She could've gotten away with much of it decades ago, but not now. And, alas, no female conductor has yet had the opportunity for anything like Tár's career. - Vulture
Lansbury was the winner of five Tony Awards for her starring performances on the New York stage, from “Mame” in 1966 to “Blithe Spirit” in 2009, when she was 83, a testament to her extraordinary stamina. Yet she appeared on Broadway only from time to time over a seven-decade career. - The New York Times
Rivka Galchen looks into the development of acoustical engineering as a craft (which goes all the way back to Chichén Itzá and Hagia Sophia) and how Christopher Blair and Paul Scarbrough of the firm Akustiks approached the challenge of a venue that had seemed acoustically cursed. - The New Yorker
Lina Gónzalez-Granados was 5 "when she joined a 'tuna' — a musical group traditionally made up of college students who ... stand in a semi-circle wielding Spanish guitars of various sizes and shapes and singing ballads." That was her first lesson in the physical nature of music. - Los Angeles Times
Turns out that, as long suspected, Girl with a Flute is not by Vermeer. "Thanks to new combinations of scientific analysis, art historical insight and informed looking, a vexing, long-standing problem has been resolved." - Washington Post
For one thing, "New York has yet to see tourism fully rebound, and attendance at many performing arts organizations has lagged. The reconfigured hall is seen as an opportunity to try to lure old concertgoers back, and to bring new audiences in." - The New York Times
"It is a white-owned and white-run institution with a self-described mission to 'preserve, protect and perpetuate' one of the nation's greatest Black cultural legacies. ... A place where all the knotty questions of race and culture ... that face New Orleans and all of America are on blaring display." - The New York Times Magazine
