Houston Ballet Mops Up

Repairs are well underway at the Center for Dance, and the Academy should be back to a full schedule of classes by Sept. 11. The subfloors from both the small studio and the dance lab on the first floor have been removed, as well as two feet of drywall. A new pump and electrical panel for the water system is currently being installed.

Santa Monica Museum Re-emerges In Downtown LA With A Plan

Described by founder Elsa Longhauser as a kunsthalle, the ICA LA is a small, non-collecting museum, whose origins lie in the now defunct Santa Monica Museum of Art (SMMoA). After a lengthy rent dispute with its landlord, the SMMoA closed in 2015, and Longhauser, the museum’s executive director, took time to regroup before rebranding the museum as the ICA LA. “We’re not really changing the model,” Longhauser told Hyperallergic at a press preview yesterday, “we’ve just expanded. Moving from Santa Monica to Downtown gave us the opportunity to rethink, revise, and contemplate what we want to do.”

Does Theatre Need Its Own Rotten Tomatoes?

“The bottom line is that, in theatre, as in movies and restaurants, aggregation is just a new way of looking at opinions. Yes, it’s all reductive – even the opinions can be as well, in relation to work they assess – but instead of getting aggravated with these sites, theatre producers should just focus on creating great work, as I believe most do, instead of trying to kill the messenger, as their Hollywood brethren wish they could.”

What Explains Hollywood’s Summer Swoon? Structural Decline! (Sound Familiar?)

“To explain the bad news, movie executives are trying out fresh excuses (blame … Rotten Tomatoes?), while journalists are rehashing familiar criticisms (people are bored with sequels!). Both of these explanations are wrong. The subtler truth is that the domestic movie market is in a slow, decades-long structural decline.”

Poets Once Had Patrons. Institutions Replaced Them. It Hasn’t Gone Well

“In place of the vanished aristocratic patrons came a set of interlinked bureaucratic institutions: the federal government, philanthropic foundations, and universities. All three served a similar role of protecting modernism and modernists from an unregulated free market that was assumed to be uninterested in, if not actively hostile to, the survival of the arts, and poetry in particular.”

Abrupt Departure Of Art Gallery Of Ontario’s Top Curator Signals A Crossroads

Andrew Hunter’s mission was to make the AGO relevant to the world outside its doors in a deep and real way. For maybe the first time in its history, it is. The gallery’s task now, with two key positions now vacant — Hunter’s, and the role of chief curator — is to decide whether to maintain course, or chart a new direction. It does the latter at its peril.