This Week’s Highlights:
Artists this week were busy with the past — and the political forces around them were busy editing it. Davóne Tines’s operatic adaptation of Langston Hughes’s 1931 monologue The Black Clown condenses 300 years of Black American experience into 18 stanzas (Philadelphia Inquirer). Washington National Opera, freshly severed from the Kennedy Center, announced a season featuring a world premiere about Georgia O’Keeffe (The New York Times). And visual artists, in response to AI, are reviving the labor-intensive techniques of the Old Masters (Artnet).
At the same time, the canon is being narrowed by force. Knoxville schools pulled Alex Haley’s Pulitzer-winning Roots from libraries (WATE). Georgia sentenced the renowned bass Paata Burchuladze to seven years in prison for organizing an election-day protest (OperaWire). Pianist Jayson Gillham is suing the Melbourne Symphony for canceling his recital after he dedicated a piece to journalists killed in Gaza (ABC). National pavilions closed across the Venice Biennale to protest Israel’s inclusion (The Guardian).
A quieter finding to close on: participating in the arts is now associated with measurably slower biological aging (The Guardian). The work does something.
All this week’s stories below, organized by topic.
