This Week’s Highlights:
The question of which artists get heard collided hard with the institutions that decide this week. The Venice Biennale jury said it won’t consider nations whose leaders face ICC charges for top prizes — putting Russia and Israel out of contention (ARTnews). The EU then cut Biennale funding over Russia’s inclusion at all (AP). Hundreds of musicians demanded a Eurovision boycott over Israel’s participation (Times of Israel). Algeria sentenced its Goncourt-winning novelist to three years in prison for writing about the country’s civil war (AP). Cultural legitimacy is now a foreign-policy instrument.
Beneath that, our arts institutional core is being stressed. Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater is closing after 42 years (TheaterMania). London’s Bridge Theatre is exploring a sale (The Stage). The Saudis pulled out of their $200 million Met Opera deal (The New York Times). Berlin Modern’s opening slipped to 2030 (ARTnews). Meanwhile LACMA’s reinvented Geffen Galleries opened to mixed but searching reviews (Los Angeles Times), and V&A East gave the museum-as-laboratory another try (Artnet).
Michael Tilson Thomas died at 81 (Washington Post) — the kind of regional-anchor conductor and broadcast educator the field rarely produces now.
All this week’s stories below, organized by topic.
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