Good Morning,
For decades, Julio Escámez’s monumental mural in Chile was thought destroyed — Pinochet ordered it eliminated after the coup. Then conservators discovered it had only been painted over, and now it’s coming back into the light (Artnet). Worth remembering on a day when the wannabe censors are busy: both houses of Congress now have bills that would enable nationwide book bans in public schools (Publishers Weekly), and German broadcaster ZDF pulled an anti-fascist song by Igor Levit and Danger Dan — not on government orders, but out of caution (The Hollywood Reporter).
Meanwhile, follow the money and you get a snapshot of Hollywood’s values: Netflix disclosed it paid $587 million — cash — for Ben Affleck’s AI visual-effects startup (The Hollywood Reporter), while Disney is cutting several hundred creative jobs, with Pixar among the hardest hit (Deadline).
And a New York Times reporter joined ABT’s “Swan Lake” as a supernumerary, filing a dispatch from inside the sweat-and-velvet musk of the Met stage (The New York Times).
All of our stories below.
