This Week’s Highlights:
The Kennedy Center closed its doors this week, its board voting to shut down indefinitely after a presidential phone call and weeks of pressure to put his name on the building (The New Republic). Philip Kennicott made the point that deserves attention: this was arguably the country’s most authentically populist arts center, caricatured as elitist by the man starving it (Washington Post). The Wall Street Journal’s remedy for such capture — privatize — runs into Josh Goldblum’s harder observation: donors underwrite celebration, not complication (Josh Goldblum). Every funder edits. The question is which edits you can live with.
The week’s other story is labor. Philadelphia Orchestra musicians will earn $200,000 a year under a tentative deal (Philadelphia Inquirer) while San Francisco Opera’s orchestra struck for a week over how much opera the company intends to make (San Francisco Chronicle), and staff at the Whitney, the Brooklyn Museum and the Folk Art Museum voted to strike over pay below what a single adult needs to live in New York (ARTnews). Museum-worker-organizing in action.
A UK survey (conducted by a London orchestra) reported that interest in orchestral music is at a six-year high, led by the young (Gramophone).
And writers are going to extraordinary lengths to prove their work is human says the The Wall Street Journal. The audience is asking for presence and provenance, and proving it is getting harder.
All this week’s stories below, organized by topic.
