Thinking Through The Repatriation Of African Art

Apollo editor Thomas Marks: “Restitution often feels like a disquieting concept for many Western museum-goers (myself included), for whom the values one invests in museums are unlikely to correlate with the political or intellectual projects that led to the formation of their collections.” (In other words, don’t punish museums now for what collectors did back then.) Even so, “90% of the material cultural legacy of sub-Saharan Africa remains preserved and housed outside of the African continent.” — Apollo

A Little Chinese Arthouse Film Sets New Box Office Records — Because Its Marketers Tricked The (Now-Angry) Public

Filmmaker Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, described by a correspondent as a “dreamy pseudo-noir,” grossed nearly $38 million on its first day, nearly unheard of for an art flick in China. How? That first day was Dec. 31, and the producers marketed the film (no relation to the Eugene O’Neill play) as the perfect romantic date flick for New Year’s Eve. The overnight reaction on social media was not pretty. — Variety

Using Dungeons And Dragons To Teach High Schoolers English Lit

“Instead of assigning the same old essays about Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales, [Sarah Roman] wove classroom assignments into an epic adventure for her students to play their way through. By the end of the semester, Roman said her students remembered more about the lessons and had developed relationships with the texts that they wouldn’t have gotten from a standard assignment. — WNYC (New York City)

Jack Zunz, 94, Engineer Who Made Sydney Opera House Happen

When preparing for construction of architect Jørn Utzon’s design, the Opera House’s original lead engineer could not get his structural calculations for the now-famous roof to work out, and he quit; Zunz took over and used then-new computer modeling techniques to solve the engineering puzzle. And when, during the cost-overrun-plagued construction, Utzon got tired of fighting with politicians and walked away from the project, Zunz saw it through to the end. — The Guardian

In A Record-Breaking Week, ‘Hamilton’ Smashes Another Broadway Record

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s juggernaut grossed more than $4 million last week alone, a first for any musical. “The period between Christmas and New Year’s always brings boffo business to Broadway, but even so, the week ending Dec. 30 was the best-attended (378,910 seats filled) and highest-grossing ($57.8 million) in Broadway history. An astonishing 28 shows grossed over $1 million” — including, most unusually, five straight plays. — The New York Times

The Water’s Rising, The Buildings Are Decaying, And The Inhabitants Are Leaving — Can Venice Still Be Saved?

Salvatore Settis, former Director of the Getty Research Institute and author of If Venice Dies, says maybe, if authorities start following policies they’ve shown no real interest in. (Meanwhile, the directors of an artificial intelligence project called the Venice Time Machine take the opportunity to plug their work.) — Apollo

Al-Qaeda Was Finally Chased Out Of This Yemeni City, But Its Hip-Hop Dancers Are Still Forbidden To Dance

When the port city of Mukalla was finally liberated from Al-Qaeda, “[these] five Yemeni hip-hop dancers thought their problems had ended. … But last month Yemeni security forces briefly detained the five members of the WaxOn band, broke their equipment and only released the dancers after they had signed a document saying they would stop dancing hip-hop in public.” — Reuters

Major Cultural Figures In China’s Xinjiang Province Are Disappearing Into Uyghur Prison Camps

“Since April 2017, an estimated one million of Xinjiang’s 11 million Uyghur population” — including most of its Uyghur artists and writers — “have disappeared into what the government calls ‘re-education’ camps, without recourse or documentation, where they are reportedly tortured into denouncing Islam and their Uyghur identity, and accepting Communist Party rule and Han Chinese dominance.” — The Art Newspaper