Arts news

• Trump Executive Order Aims To Stamp Out “Improper Ideology” At Smithsonian

  28-03-2025 15:03 via axios.com
  “President Trump signed an executive order Thursday aimed at reshaping the Smithsonian Institution and removing what he deems ‘improper ideology’ from its museums, education and research centers and the National Zoo.” – Axios
  
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• Who’s Left To Tell You What’s Good?

  01-09-2026 02:06 via artsjournal.com
  Good Morning,Judgment is having a day. A critic makes the case that a review’s job isn’t to relay one listener’s experience but to offer something “extra-human” — a perspective the concert itself can’t supply (San Francisco Classical Voice). Read that next to the discovery that academic papers are citing experts who don’t exist, names that language models reliably invent when asked to produce authorities in a field (404 Media).
  A second look at the
  
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• Summer Movie Box Office Is On The Verge Of An All-Time Record

  31-08-2026 20:31 via deadline.com
  
  Currently, per Rentrak, the North American box office for the first Friday in May through EOD today stands at $4.598 billion, officially the second-highest summer ever behind 2013. If this summer is going to beat 2013’s all-time high, it has $158M to gross. – Deadline
  
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• What I Learned From China’s Robot Games

  31-08-2026 19:44 via writing.yaschamounk.com
  
  For the first hour or so, I found the Robot Games enthralling. What can robots already do, and where do they still fall short? Which robot will manage to crawl under an obstacle, and which will pitifully get stuck? But after a while, I suddenly realized that I had grown deeply bored. – Yascha Mounk
  
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• Why Would We Fear AI Music?

  31-08-2026 19:31 via newyorker.com
  
  It would be an understatement to say that the growing prominence of A.I. music is generating backlash—sometimes it seems this music generates nothing but backlash. – The New Yorker
  
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• What Happens When American Universities Try To Shrink Their Way To Profitability

  31-08-2026 19:15 via dissentmagazine.org
  
  What’s happening to the New School is an increasingly common story across all of higher education, hit by a perfect storm of financial and political pressures. Well-paid bosses, touting fiscal crises, seek to fire their way to profitability. – Dissent
  
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• Myles & Waldman Stalwart Performance Poets Together Again

  31-08-2026 18:55 via artsjournal.com
  <a href="https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/2026/08/myles-waldman-stalwart-performance-poets-together-again.html" title="Myles & WaldmanStalwart Performance Poets Together Again“
  
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• What Do We Want From Reviews? Judgment.

  31-08-2026 18:44 via substack.com
  
  An effective review offers what the concert can’t: an extra-human perspective. By “extra-human,” I mean going beyond the experience of any one person, beyond the perspective of the reviewer and beyond the specific concert itself. – San Francisco Classical Voice
  
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• Meet Curtis’ Youngest New Student. She’s Seven

  31-08-2026 18:33 via msn.com
  This year Curtis will have 13 musicians entering school under the age of 18. But even at a place known for prodigies, Olivia is unusual. She is believed to be the youngest student to study at Curtis since 1950, when 6-year-old violinist Diana Halprin matriculated. – Philadelphia Inquirer (MSN)
  
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• “Six” To Close On Broadway After Five-Year Run

  31-08-2026 18:15 via hollywoodreporter.com
  
  Attendance and grosses have fallen from the show’s early highs, with the show playing to 50- to 60-percent capacity this spring, but the production has seen a relatively long, healthy run on Broadway, as the 40th longest running show in its history. – The Hollywood Reporter
  
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• The Fake Experts That AI Keeps Citing

  31-08-2026 17:44 via 404media.co
  
  The authors don’t actually exist, but are instead names that large language models repeatedly produce when tasked with generating experts in certain fields. – 404 Media
  
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• Palestinian Artist Sliman Mansour, 79

  31-08-2026 17:31 via washingtonpost.com
  In works that were by turns personal and political — vividly realistic and unsettlingly surreal — he captured and uplifted Palestinian life and history, creating art that served as a form of preservation as well as resistance. – Washington Post
  
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• Report: Women In UK Arts Say Discrimination Is Rampant

  31-08-2026 17:15 via theguardian.com
  Nearly all (95%) women working in the arts thought gender inequality persisted, while three-quarters (75%) reported experiencing unconscious bias or sexism, according to a survey of 76 arts professionals. – The Guardian
  
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• Another Study Of Violinists Sheds More Doubt On The 10,000-Hours-Of-Practice Idea

  31-08-2026 16:34 via scienceblog.com
  
  “The ‘10,000-hour rule’ is one of the most repeated ideas in popular writing about skill and success: put in 10,000 hours of practice, the story goes, and elite performance follows. … A 2019 study … redid the underlying comparison and found practice hours didn’t cleanly separate the best violinists from merely good ones.” – Science Blog
  
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• Met Museum Calls Off John Galliano Costume Institute Show

  31-08-2026 16:10 via apnews.com
  
  “The Metropolitan Museum of Art is canceling its planned exhibit honoring British designer John Galliano, which had led to severe backlash in the Jewish community and beyond because of the designer’s past antisemitic and racist statements.” – AP
  
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• Miss Piggy Is An Icon Of Feminism And Our Last Fabulous Movie Star

  31-08-2026 15:47 via msn.com
  “She is part of a lineage that has gone dormant: larger-than-life, carefully curated personas bolstered by their market value at the box office and by how their sheer artistry shapes the texts that end up on the silver screen. These are women like Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Mae West.” – Vulture (MSN)
  
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• How An Aging Actor With Dementia Does Samuel Beckett

  31-08-2026 15:28 via msn.com
  One might argue that Beckett is the perfect playwright for an actor with that condition to perform — especially when the play is Krapp’s Last Tape, which Peter Marinker is preparing to do this week. Here’s how he, along with the director and crew at London’s Cockpit Theatre, are making it work. – BBC (MSN)
  
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• What — Or Who — Persuades You To Buy That Particular Book?

  31-08-2026 15:16 via theguardian.com
  “The reality is that our reading choices are directed and massaged at every turn. … And who are the persuaders? They’re the booksellers, the supermarket stock buyers, the publishing houses and their ranks of marketers and publicists. And, more recently, persuasion often comes from (social media). How is all this changing publishing?” – The Guardian
  
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• Tiit Helimets Takes The Reins At Sacramento Ballet

  31-08-2026 15:03 via pointemagazine.com
  
  The 49-year-old native of Estonia danced with San Francisco Ballet for 18 years, retiring as a principal in 2023. He spent over a decade applying for artistic director positions; now that he has one, he’s excited about almost every aspect of it, even the fundraising. – Pointe Magazine
  
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• Lindsay Clancy Admits She Strangled Her Children. Social Media Sleuths Won’t Stop Accusing Her Ex-Husband.

  31-08-2026 14:49 via variety.com
  
  The only issue at the former obstetric nurse’s trial is whether she deliberately planned the killings (as prosecutors argue) or (as she claims) was in the grip of postpartum psychosis. Yet there’s a crop of true-crime fans on TikTok and other platforms who insist that Patrick Clancy is really the murderer. – Variety
  
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• Like It Or Not, Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms Changed Visual Art

  31-08-2026 14:32 via yahoo.com
  “She made more than 20 variants of her mirrored chambers, which use light, sculpture and reflection to create a kind of 360-degree celestial infinity. They have traveled around the world and reached enormous popularity, forever changing the types of exhibits that are staged and the way the public engages with them.” – CNN (Yahoo!)
  
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• Yayoi Kusama Also Had A Career As A Serious Author

  31-08-2026 14:15 via news.artnet.com
  “(She) produc(ed) 12 novels, four volumes of poetry, one collection of short stories, and an autobiography between 1977 and 2002. … Kusama’s novels are dark, violent, and, in many cases, clearly informed by her decade in New York, no matter how emphatically she entreated readers to interpret them otherwise.” – Artnet
  
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• Rotterdam’s Major Art Museum Caught Up In Alleged Municipal Corruption Scheme

  31-08-2026 14:01 via artnews.com
  
  “Two municipal employees in the Dutch city of Rotterdam have been dismissed following an investigation into alleged corruption involving construction contracts. They include work connected to asbestos removal at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, one of the country’s most important museums.” – ARTnews
  
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• L.A. Phil To Offer $10 Hollywood Bowl Tickets To Low-Income Locals

  31-08-2026 13:46 via yahoo.com
  “The organization announced this week that it will offer Los Angeles County residents with active Medi-Cal or EBT cards $10 tickets to L.A. Phil performances at the Hollywood Bowl starting with the 2027 season.” – Los Angeles Times (Yahoo!)
  
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• Paramount Says It’ll Release 30 Movies A Year Post-Merger. Is That Even Possible?

  27-08-2026 15:01 via yahoo.com
  “Among creatives who spoke to TheWrap in the past week, skepticism still abounds that the studio could make good on such a lofty goal. ‘In the old days at Warner Bros. they released almost that many movies, but I don’t know if the marketplace can bear that,’ said one veteran producer.” – TheWrap (MSN)
  
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• LACMA Hit With Class-Action Lawsuit Over Data Breach

  27-08-2026 14:36 via artnews.com
  
  “A former employee of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has filed a class action complaint against the institution over a 2025 data breach that he claims has compromised sensitive visitor and employee information, including Social Security numbers.” – ARTnews
  
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• Artist Yayoi Kusama Has Died At 97

  27-08-2026 14:00 via msn.com
  “Tenacious, obsessive and, in the eyes of her critics, relentlessly self-promoting, she became a pop-culture fixture, making brightly colored, instantly recognizable paintings, sculptures and installations that were exhibited at major museums and made her one of the world’s top-selling contemporary artists.” – The Washington Post (MSN)
  
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• Artists Bring a Narrative to Life: We the People

  26-08-2026 22:25 via artsjournal.com
  We wanted to celebrate our nation, because 2026 is our 250th birthday, and also, it feels necessary in this moment. But how would we do it in a moment when celebrating living in the USA feels political, feels fraught with potential pitfalls? What could we do to bring people together across perceived differences? What would […]
  
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• Culture: The Real Costs of Being Real

  26-08-2026 22:01 via artsjournal.com
  It’s getting difficult to trust what (or who) is real in the age of AI.
  
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• Actor Tim Curry, Star Of “Rocky Horror” And “It,” Has Died At 80

  26-08-2026 21:02 via variety.com
  
  “Though Curry would forever be the face that launched a thousand Time Warp dances …, he (was) far more than a one-trick pony over a career that spanned more than a half-century.” His roles ranged from Pennywise the Clown (Stephen King’s It) to Mozart (Amadeus ,Olivier and Tony nominations) to King Arthur (Spamalot). – Variety
  
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