Arts news

• Albania’s Capital Has Become A Hotbed Of Offbeat New Architecture

  18-02-2025 20:58 via dezeen.com
  “The boom is being spearheaded by Tirana’s mayor, Erion Veliaj … and Albanian prime minister and fellow Socialist Edi Rama. They have made architecture and urban design a key part of the strategy to boost Tirana’s international reputation as Albania seeks to attract more tourists and sustain economic growth.” – Dezeen
  
  Read more

• When Obsession With The Great Book Makes Writing One Impossible

  18-02-2025 20:44 via artsjournal.com
  The bibliophobia of the title, Chihaya assures us, only “occasionally manifests as an acute, literal fear of books.” More often, it “develops as a generalized anxiety about reading in patients who have previously experienced profound — perhaps too profound — attachments to books and literature.” – Washington Post
  
  Read more

• School Censors Play, Students Write Anti-Censorship Play And Win State Award

  18-02-2025 20:15 via kqed.org
  
  School play gets canceled for “inappropriate content”. In response students write [REDACTED], their own anti-censorship play skewering the school district, sells out performances, and ultimately takes gold at the Lenaea High School Theatre Festival. – KQED
  
  Read more

• The Lengths Claude Lanzmann Had To Go To In Order To Make “Shoah”

  18-02-2025 20:04 via theguardian.com
  
  The 9½-hour length of the finished documentary is daunting enough, but Lanzmann culled it from 220 hours of footage. His grant from one government was withdrawn because he worked so slowly, he had perpetual difficulty getting other funding, and he had to go undercover to get Nazis on camera. – The Guardian
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• All fores! Miranda July among artists to create feminist mini-golf course in Melbourne

  18-02-2025 20:00
  Swingers, which aims to celebrate the sport’s feminist history, will take over the Flinders Street station ballroom as part of the 2025 Rising festivalGet our weekend culture and lifestyle emailThe acclaimed author and film-maker Miranda July is among a group of artists who are building a mini-golf course in Melbourne to celebrate the sport’s little-known feminist history.Swingers: The Art of Mini Golf will take over the Flinders Street station ballroom, an abandoned space above the
  
  Read more

• Multi-Generation Musicians. What Accounts For Them?

  18-02-2025 19:44 via artsjournal.com
  If genes and grit are not entirely responsible for the persistence of professional musical families across generations, what else matters? There are several possibilities. – Nightingale Sonata
  
  Read more

• Report: America’s Choruses Are Doing Well

  18-02-2025 19:31 via artsjournal.com
  Organizations across disciplines operated at a small deficit for the first time in five years in 2023. Choruses, by contrast, were still operating at a surplus on average. In 2019, about two thirds of the choruses reported surpluses, while in 2023 roughly half still reported surpluses. – SMU Cultural Data
  
  Read more

• Opera America’s State Of Opera Report

  18-02-2025 19:15 via artsjournal.com
  The key findings of the Annual Field Report are drawn from the fiscal year 2023 data submitted by OPERA America’s Professional Company Members (PCMs) in the annual Professional Opera Survey administered by SMU Data Arts. – Opera America
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• Mel Bochner, Conceptual Artist Who Played With Language And Imagery, Is Dead At 84

  18-02-2025 19:01 via artnews.com
  
  “Bochner was one of the key artists associated with the Conceptualist movement during the 1960s and ’70s. In legendary pieces that hardly looked much like art at all, he offered measurements, numbers, words, and others’ photocopied drawings within galleries. There was often little to admire, and that was intentional.” – ARTnews
  
  Read more

• Behold The Evolution of “Extreme” Marching Band

  18-02-2025 18:44 via artsjournal.com
  Marching band is more than a pastime. It’s an extreme sport. The real reason the students rehearse so hard isn’t to play well at football games. It’s to prepare for a series of fiercely competitive marching-band contests in the fall, culminating in the Grand National Championships, in Indianapolis. – The New Yorker
  
  Read more

• What Eventbrite User Data Say About Audience Behavior Trends

  18-02-2025 18:31 via artsjournal.com
  Eight in 10 event-goers are planning to attend either the same number of events, or more, compared to last year.Gen Zs, in particular, are looking to add more live experiences to their calendars. – ArtsHub
  
  Read more

• Contemplating The Mortality Of All Things

  18-02-2025 18:15 via artsjournal.com
  Only recently has the human collective begun accepting the fact it is itself mortal. We now appreciate that events unfolded for aeons before us and that our species can disappear, never to return. One day, the cosmos will persist without human witness, nor any inherent tendency to manifest things we cherish. – Aeon
  
  Read more

• Midcentury Modern: There’s A Group Of Audience-Friendly American Opera The Met Should Be Producing

  18-02-2025 18:06 via nytimes.com
  
  Joshua Barone makes the case for such works as Samuel Barber’s Vanessa, Kurt Weill and Langston Hughes’s Street Scene, Marc Blitzstein’s Regina, Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah, and Douglas Moore’s The Ballad of Baby Doe. – The New York Times
  
  Read more

• Parents Jailed For Starving 17-Year-Old Child For Ballet Lessons

  18-02-2025 17:44 via artsjournal.com
  She weighed just 60 pounds (27.3 kilograms) – about the same size as a 9-year-old. Last month her parents, an Australian couple in their mid-40s, were sentenced to prison in Perth’s District Court of Western Australia for neglecting their only child, even as they ferried her to and from piano and ballet lessons. – CNN
  
  Read more

• Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s Indigenous Advisors Quit En Masse

  18-02-2025 17:31 via artsjournal.com
  The advisory circle, formed in 2018, was intended to make Canada’s oldest ballet company “a more equitable, diverse and inclusive organization,” the ballet’s website says. But that goal was at odds with the advisory circle’s experience with the ballet’s management and board of directors, said Morrison, the advisory circle’s co-founder. – CBC
  
  Read more

• After Six Weeks In London’s West End, “The Years” Is Still Seeing Audience Members Pass Out

  18-02-2025 17:03 via nytimes.com
  
  “While fainting theatergoers are nothing new — several passed out over the onstage torture in Sarah Kane’s Cleansed at the National Theater almost a decade ago — the sheer number keeling over at The Years stands out.” – The New York Times
  
  Read more

• Abortion Play “The Years” May Be An Example Of Trigger Warnings Making Things Worse

  18-02-2025 16:35 via theguardian.com
  The Anne Ernaux adaptation currently running in London’s West End has been making headlines for the fact that audience members keep fainting during a particularly bloody abortion scene. That didn’t happen when productions of the play had no trigger warnings. And the more warnings, the more faintings. – The Guardian
  
  Read more

• One Of Britain’s Top Indie Publishers Expands Into U.S.

  18-02-2025 16:02 via publishersweekly.com
  “Faber, the storied U.K. independent publisher, has launched a new division, Faber US, in the United States. The move comes a decade after Faber first nodded to plans to enter the American market and months after fellow British publishing fixture Bloomsbury rolled out a new U.S.-based sales team.” – Publishers Weekly
  
  Read more

• Their studios burned. Their art was destroyed. A new exhibit of the remaining works of 100 LA artists devastated by fire

  18-02-2025 16:00
  One Hundred Percent, a ‘non-hierarchical’ volunteer effort, features nearly 100 artists, with works ranging $50 to $50,000When Jeffrey Sugishita visited the burned-down husk of the house where he had been living, flames were still smoldering inside. For about 30 minutes, Sugishita wandered the wreckage, looking at the empty space where his room had been.“What’s burnt is burnt,” the 26-year-old artist said. “I told myself: ‘I’m going to make somethi
  
  Read more

• Their studios burned. Their art was destroyed. A new exhibit of more than 80 LA artists devastated by fire

  18-02-2025 16:00
  Los Angeles’s artistic community reflects on disaster in One Hundred Percent, a ‘non-hierarchical’ volunteer effortWhen Jeffrey Sugishita visited the burned-down husk of the house where he had been living, flames were still smoldering inside. For about 30 minutes, Sugishita wandered the wreckage, looking at the empty space where his room had been.“What’s burnt is burnt,” the 26-year-old artist said. “I told myself: ‘I’m going to make somethin
  
  Read more

• Conductor Edward Gardner Apologizes For Describing Naples Opera Chorus As “Mafia Families”

  18-02-2025 15:30 via bbc.com
  
  “The principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra was threatened with a defamation action for his comments about chorus members at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples. … Gardner said: ‘The chorus is made up of two rival Mafia families — who after one performance put each other in (the emergency room).” – BBC
  
  Read more

• Why Does It Matter That Trump Fired The Kennedy Center’s Board And Made Himself Chairman?

  18-02-2025 15:04 via theconversation.com
  
  An explainer covering why the Federal government is involved with the Kennedy Center in the first place, how its board differs from other nonprofit boards, what exactly the Kennedy Center board chair does, and the potential consequences of the Trump administration’s action. – The Conversation
  
  Read more

• La Scala Ballet Has A New Director. It’s His Third Time In The Job.

  18-02-2025 14:31 via gramilano.com
  Frédéric Olivieri will begin his latest term as Director of La Scala’s ballet company on March 1. He first led the company 2002-2007, after having been chief ballet master. He then spent 10 years at the helm of the company’s school before serving as the company’s director 2017-2020. – Gramilano (Milan)
  
  Read more

• Sudan’s Heritage In Danger As Civil War Rages On

  18-02-2025 14:06 via theartnewspaper.com
  
  “The war itself has been under-reported as other conflicts have taken the global centre stage; even less attention has been paid to its devastating toll on Sudan’s heritage. But experts paint a grim picture: at least six museums and multiple historic sites have suffered looting or damage.” – The Art Newspaper
  
  Read more

• Nonprofit Arts Success in a Changing Environment, Tip 1: Stop Terrorizing Your People

  18-02-2025 14:00 via artsjournal.com
  The first tip: for a nonprofit organization to work, everyone has to care about why they’re there; otherwise, there’s no need for them to stay.
  Despite what despots say, terrorizing your employees is not a great motivator when you run a charity, especially an arts organization.Over the next few years, your nonprofit arts organization will be tasked with trying to succeed in a local and national environment not terribly interested in your work. Certainly not your art. It is with that
  
  Read more

• Runaway snakes and scooting pups: surreal street photography – in pictures

  18-02-2025 08:00
  The latest issue of Eyeshot magazine celebrates the serendipity of everyday life – where construction site sunbathers and hovering cemetery angels defy logicContinue reading...
  
  Read more

• Australian art has long depicted outlaws, Khaled Sabsabi’s critics should remember. Let’s start with Ned Kelly | Ella Barclay

  18-02-2025 03:01
  Sidney Nolan’s paintings of a notorious bushranger are national treasures. Great art should spark debateDespite the perceived outrage at Khaled Sabsabi’s depiction of Hassan Nasrallah in his 2007 work You, Australian art has long made subjects of outlaws and questionable figures. And it is all the richer for it.On Thursday the shadow arts minister and self-described defender of free speech Claire Chandler asked Senator Penny Wong:Why is the Albanese government allowing a person who h
  
  Read more

• Charlottesville Symphony Society seeks Executive Director

  18-02-2025 01:01 via artsjournal.com
  The Charlottesville Symphony Society invites applications and nominations for the position of Executive Director, available in the late spring of 2025. Janet Kaltenbach, who has served as Executive Director for more than 16 years, has announced that she will step down from the role at the end of the 2024/2025 season. Her legacy is a strong and dynamic organization currently celebrating its 50th anniversary.The Charlottesville Symphony Society
  https://cvillesymphony.org/The Charlottesville Sympho
  
  Read more

Follow @ArtsUK1 on Twitter!