Good Morning,
The Philadelphia Fringe is now the largest in the country by venue count — 350-plus shows in 100-plus spaces (Philadelphia Magazine). The model runs on one premise: nobody has to prove anything to get in.
South Carolina is testing the opposite premise. Its arts commission funded all but two of the nearly 180 applicants its own panel approved, then asked the Greenville Gay Men’s Chorus and Proud Mary Theatre Company for extra evidence of “artistic merit” (The Post and Courier). A merit test applied to only two applicants is… concerning. Lonnie Bunch, who ran the Smithsonian through the campaign to purge “improper ideology” from its museums, is retiring (The Washington Post). And David Rubenstein, fired as Kennedy Center chair, bought the Joel Shapiro sculpture the Center carted off last week and is loaning it to the National Gallery (The New York Times). Removed art doesn’t have to vanish. It can relocate.
The day’s other gatekeeping fight is corporate. Court documents describe Anthropic’s “Project Panama,” an effort to “destructively scan all the books in the world” for training data (The New Yorker); now authors say publishers are claiming too big a slice of the settlement (TechCrunch). The books were pulped for a machine and the humans are fighting over the scraps.
The Met auditioned boa constrictors for Così fan tutte and cast a sun-glow boa named Princess (AP).
All of our stories below.
