Good Morning,
Two opera pieces landed on ArtsJournal today, pointed in opposite directions. In Opera America, an argument that the form will die unless it can wrest itself back from Big Tech — “irreplaceable” has to be made explicit when AI generates infinite aesthetic stuff at zero cost. The New York Sun counters that the death of opera has been greatly exaggerated, citing successful adaptation. Both can be true. The question is what kind of adaptation, and toward what.
Governments are pressing on artistic speech this week. Germany’s culture ministry phoned novelist Matthias Jügler to demand his historical sources for a popular novella about the GDR’s stolen children (The Guardian). US librarians are still triaging book bans amid culture-war funding cuts (Salon). And news publishers are now blocking the Wayback Machine to stop AI scraping — incinerating an irreplaceable archive in the process (Nieman Lab).
Elsewhere: a $100 million judgment in the long-running Robert Indiana mess (NYT), the WGA ratifies its new four-year contract (Hollywood Reporter), and Mark Swed argues that Michael Tilson Thomas was, deep down, the embodiment of L.A., not San Francisco (LA Times).
All of our stories below.
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