This Week’s Highlights:
For a generation the ambition was the building. This week it read more like the liability. London’s Royal Ballet and Opera says it needs £60 million just to keep Covent Garden’s stage from failing (The Times). Raleigh’s contemporary art museum is selling its building and hopes to keep operating without one (The News and Observer). And Justin Davidson’s verdict on the hyperflexible palaces of the last decade — the Shed, the Perelman, walls that move at the touch of a button — is that the revolution “feels anticlimactic and overpriced” (Curbed).
Against that, a movie palace outside Los Angeles that hadn’t shown a first-run film in 35 years became the top-grossing theatre in the country for Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey (The Hollywood Reporter) — on the strength of one thing almost nobody else can do. Specificity is beating flexibility. So is affordability: the West End is booming on production costs a fifth to a third of Broadway’s (The Wall Street Journal), and San Diego is launching an arts pass covering more than 40 organizations (The San Diego Union-Tribune).
Elsewhere the authentication problem has deepened. A Cambridge study found readers rated AI-written stories highest — when they believed a human had written them (The Bookseller). Days later a $2 million novel deal collapsed because the agents could “no longer authenticate how the manuscript fully evolved from origin to completion” (The Guardian).
All this week’s stories below, organized by topic.
