Good Morning,
Today’s most interesting stories aren’t about what culture is making. They’re about the containers it’s making it in. Investigative newsrooms are turning spying scandals and vote-rigging exposés into video games (Nieman Lab) — three billion gamers is a bigger room than any homepage. Hollywood is contracting everywhere except microdramas, the vertical 90-second serials headed for $1.5 billion in US revenue this year (Reuters). And The Onion’s takeover of InfoWars, which could have stayed a one-note gag, now out-draws Alex Jones himself (TheWrap).
Regional theaters can finally produce Les Misérables now that the last tour has closed, and they are not waiting around (The New York Times). The Bolshoi is on the losing side of the same mechanism: a fraud investigation over Grigorovich’s choreographic legacy puts 11 productions, Nutcracker and Swan Lake among them, in doubt (Gramilano). Dance/USA’s incoming director skips the euphemisms entirely: the existing structure “is not sustainable” (Dance Magazine).
Meanwhile the Rijksmuseum has put 840,000 works online, free to download and edit (Open Culture), and Getty curators are grading art emojis across operating systems (The New York Times). Ah, the frontiers of connoisseurship…
All of today’s stories below.
