Category: today’s top story

“The Hirshhorn Museum’s Seasonal Inflatable Structure known as the ‘Bubble’ never got off the ground, but many who spent years debating the project say it took up all the oxygen in the room. … Debate about the project became a proxy for a larger existential debate about the museum’s core mission and its role in the art world.”

“One of the Royal Ballet’s biggest stars is to join a rival company run by her close friend Tamara Rojo. In a shock move, Alina Cojocaru, 32, is to become a lead principal with English National Ballet – starting just three months after her unexpected resignation from Covent Garden.”

“We are told that the lack of a formal education, mostly in literature, leads to numerous pernicious personal conditions, such as the inability to think critically, to write clearly, to empathize with other people, to be curious about other people and places, to engage with great literature after graduation, to recognize truth, beauty and goodness. These solemn anxieties are grand, lofty, civic-minded, admirably virtuous and virtuously admirable. They are also a sentimental fantasy.”

“Rowling now stands to make a lot of money from this new book, and so do the publishers. One interesting aspect of the whole story is how Little, Brown essentially colluded in keeping a secret that caused it, at least until now, to forgo possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.”

“The Getty has been caught in the middle of the dispute — and could be on the hook to absorb the entire financial responsibility for the show, a total investment of about $990,000.”

“In a strongly worded letter obtained by The Washington Post, Constance Caplan painted a picture of a board, a museum and the larger Smithsonian Institution roiled by a lack of transparency, trust, vision and good faith.”

“It’s not often a newspaper writer makes the news rounds, but when Jori Finkel, the former arts reporter at the Los Angeles Times, was laid off last week, it didn’t go over well with the arts community, resulting in a Change.org petition set up by the Hammer Museum director Ann Philbin.”

“Anatoly Iksanov, 61, had managed the nation’s most celebrated ballet company since 2000. His tenure was marked by remarkable changes — primarily the grandiose restoration of the Bolshoi’s historic building in downtown Moscow — and multiple scandals. Under Iksanov’s watch the theater endured artistic conflicts and investigations into embezzlement and violent crime.”

“A doctor diagnosed the condition as a pulmonary embolism that resulted from a deep venous thrombosis.”

“The Russian news media on Tuesday widely reported that the director of the Bolshoi Theater, Anatoly Iksanov, is being replaced in the wake of a series of public scandals, starting with a shocking January acid attack on the ballet company’s artistic director.”