I’ve encountered so many people who have expressed a desire to go to the ballet more frequently, but find themselves held back for various reasons: expense (though there are saving methods here that we can discuss another time), intimidation, lack of planning, lack of information, lack of confidence in an unfamiliar environment. The good news is that most of these friction points are easily overcome, and I am here to help.

Although I grew up studying ballet intensively and got a minor in dance at Barnard—which meant I was running around the city from 18 going to performances—I did have a lull period wherein I hardly found myself at dance shows. From my early twenties until about 27, I attended maybe one or two ballets a year, if that. I went back to my first class at Joffrey just before the pandemic hit New York. Then, in the fall of 2021, I saw Isabella Boylston in Giselle. And I remembered why, growing up, I’d spent so many hours in the studio, poured over Pointe magazine, and trawled the forums of dance.net, reading accounts of other users’ summer intensives like the aspirational content they were.

I take class on occasion, but my identity now is more firmly that of a critic than of a dancer. That means that I watch a lot of dance. Just this year, I’ve attended 36 dance performances; last year, my total was 54. The year before that, what now seems like a paltry (to me) 26.

Obviously, I feel strongly about this art form. I am also ardently against gatekeeping it—which is kind of the whole point of me writing this newsletter. I want more people to care about dance (and other arts) the way that I do. But I understand the hesitation some may have about getting into it. Hence: my guide to seeming like someone who goes to the ballet—which will, in effect, turn you into someone who does.

1. Pick your program

There is a strong chance, depending on where you live, that the majority of ballet performances near you are not full-length ballets. Meaning: You’re not going to be able to see Swan Lake anytime you want. Most ballet companies in the U.S. put on a handful of full-evening works a year, but more frequent are programs featuring anywhere from three to five different pieces. These tend to be non-narrative works, though they can be classical (like the 35-minute, 1908 ballet Les Sylphides) or contemporary (just about any Justin Peck piece). At times, they can have a semblance of story (like George Balanchine’s Apollo or Alexei Ratmansky’s recent The Naked King), though other times, they capture more of a sentiment (as with Christopher Wheeldon’s After the Rain) or a sense of form (think: Jerome Robbins’s Glass Pieces).

All this is to say that your options are likely more varied than you may think. If you’re looking for a good entry point, though, a full-length ballet (Sleeping Beauty, Romeo & Juliet, Giselle, etc.) is a solid start. Especially if you’re new to watching dance, a story can help ground you in your viewing experience.

2. Know the players

Sports fans understand that what happens on the field or court is far from the whole picture. Having background information about an athlete’s record, the stakes, and the history of their performance or their team adds to the experience of watching their performance. The same is true for dance.

Dance people (like me) don’t just see performances to see the show. They see them to see specific dancers. This is why I end up at multiple performances of the same pieces each summer during American Ballet Theatre’s residency at the Metropolitan Opera House. I’m invested in the individual “players.”

Following dancers on social media can make you more interested in their performance (the same way following an entrepreneur might make you more interested in whatever they’re selling). Of course, it also gives you a glimpse at their artistry.

Worth investigating, too, is a dancer’s history with a role. Maybe they’re debuting it for the first time, or maybe it’s the role for which they’re most celebrated. Maybe a member of the corps de ballet (the group of dancers who make up the majority of any company and perform ensemble roles) is dancing a soloist or even a principal part. That ups the stakes, too.

The more you get to know different dancers, the more fun it is to watch them as they continue on their careers and take on new parts. And as you pay attention to specific dancers, you develop your sense of taste as you become able to recognize the elements of a performance that most resonate with you (maybe you adore one dancer because they’re particularly emotive, while another excites you because of their athleticism).

3. Do your cursory research

I’m not saying you should know everything about a ballet before you see it. But it can help you to relax and have more context to what you’re seeing. If there’s a narrative, you’ll want to read the synopsis (until you have a firm grasp on understanding ballet pantomime). You can find this online, though it’s usually in the program, too. Look up choreographers, and you can get a sense of their body of work. A Balanchine piece will feel fundamentally different from a work recreated after a late 19th-century piece by Lev Ivanov or Marius Petipa, once you start to recognize their style. Is the choreographer alive or dead? What style were they trained in? All of these things make for excellent rabbitholes.

You might also enjoy listening to the score of a ballet before you see it to gain some familiarity with it—though that’s up to you. The discovery of a new favorite during a show is also a treat.

4. Practice good theater etiquette

You can go to a show alone. I encourage it, even. You should dress nice, though you don’t need to wear a ballgown. (Though if a show is in an opera house—in New York, that would be the Metropolitan Opera House, rather than the neighboring David H. Koch Theater—you are welcome to get fancy). Be mindful that you’ll be sitting for long stretches of time. Shapewear gets incredibly uncomfortable by the second act. Arrive with at least 30 minutes to spare, and know that, more likely than not, you will not be allowed to bring food or drink into the theater. You can, sometimes, pre-order a refreshment for intermission—which is a good call, given how long lines for the bar can get. Better drink fast, though. Turn your phone off or, at least, opt for a trusty combination of Do Not Disturb and airplane mode. Under no circumstances should you take your phone out, film, or take photos during the program. I’m so serious. No talking during the performance, though a quick whisper to your neighbor between pieces is okay if you must. You should be clapping, though. Sit all the way back into your chair—leaning forward obscures the view for the people behind you. Be courteous to your neighbors and stand up if they need to get past you to reach their seat. You can clap during the dancing, too—you might notice others do it during a particularly impressive moment—but you never want to be the only person clapping. The one time you can take photos (still discreetly and quickly) is during final bows. Don’t use flash! Tag the dancers in any photos you post to share your appreciation. And be prepared for bows to take quite a while; there may even be a second round of bows for the principals in front of the curtain. Stay until the lights come up. You won’t be able to linger long in the theater afterwards, so make sure you get any photos you wanted before the show or during intermission. I’m not above an outfit pic. Wait until you’re several blocks from the theater if you have to make any negative comments. You never know who could be in your immediate vicinity. Don’t be rude.

5. Tell your friends

One of the most important things you can do as a person who now goes to the ballet is bring other people to the ballet. We aren’t just about building individual connossieurship here. We are building community.

Now, a quick news drop:

I was very lucky to see Rosalía’s Lux tour two weeks ago, and I would be remiss not to commend her on the level of thought and intention behind the artistically minded choreography and design. The show featured a live orchestra (the Heritage Orchestra, a UK-based group which performs non-classical works) led by the very charismatic Yudania Gómez Heredia, who is based in Nürnberg and is a composer and organist in addition to being a conductor.

More controversial is Rosalía’s decision to perform on pointe in the beginning of the show—though unlike all the popstars and models doing ballet before her, this much is clear: she’s actually been studying ballet. You can tell by her lovely port de bras (her carriage of the arms) and by her ability to get over the box of her shoes. The French choreographic trio (La)Horde, who serve as artistic directors of Ballet National de Marseille, are behind much of the movement design of the concert and told the New York Times that pointe shoes were Rosalía’s own idea. Her teacher, who Rosalía shouted out at an early show, is Tatiana Yerakhavets, who became a prima ballerina at the Bolshoi Theatre of Belarus in 1991 and is now based in Barcelona, where she is the director of her own school. Yerakhavets herself was a student of Irina Savelyeva and Vera Shvetsova, two direct students of Agrippina Vaganova, the Russian dancer who developed the Vaganova method of ballet, which is studied worldwide. There is only one remaining direct pupil of Vaganova: 93-year-old Irina Kolpakova, who joined American Ballet Theatre as a coach in 1989. She was recently honored after a performance of Swan Lake.

Truly hats off to Rosalía—this is how you pay respect to an art form.

New Mozart just dropped, courtesy of the the National Library of France. The director of the Mozart Library at the International Mozarteum Foundation called the works for flute and harp the “most important Mozart discovery in decades.” Take a listen here.

Gustavo Dudamel, the Venezuelan soon-to-be official music director of the New York Philharmonic, is fundraising for his home country after two devastating earthquakes. You can donate here—funds will go to the United Nations Development Programme.

Not only has the pope recently extolled the virtues of writing, he is also supporting art conservation efforts: the Vatican just broke ground on a five-year restoration of the Raphael Loggia, a corridor in the Apostolic Palace. It has not been touched in 500 years. The more than $14 million effort is financed by the Stephen A. Schwartzman Foundation, which is using a portion of that budget to digitize images of Raphael’s work so the greater public can appreciate it and to endow a training program for art restorers, ABC reports.

Gustav Mahler’s granddaughter says she’s trying to get a memorial to the composer made in Vienna. She also mentioned to The Times that filmmakers are reaching out to her to try to find lost scores of her grandmother, Alma Schindler, who gave up her dreams of composing when she married Mahler. “There is a whole big rethink about Alma going on,” she says. More to investigate here…

David Sedaris is not only a paying user of Duolingo—but he pays for the AI-powered highest tier of the app, Duolingo Max. He writes about his coverations with the purple-haired, Daria-esque character Lily in The Guardian.

It seems like Europe is over protesting Russian soprano Anna Netrebko. (The Met’s Peter Gelb is holding firm, though).

A good question, presented by The Atlantic: Did Marcel Duchamp ruin art?

That’s all for now. I’ll be back soon with my cultural digest for Q2 of 2026. And who knows—maybe some more how-to guides on how to become a better patron of the arts. Ciao! ▲

In explaining my whereabouts, I found myself presented with a question which I am frequently prompted: what’s on right now that’s good?

American Ballet Theatre’s summer season starts this week, I said, and while, as usual, I’m still figuring out my game plan (I have tickets to four shows, but inevitably I’ll attend more), this is one of the best summer rituals the city has to offer. It’s not just the allure of the big story ballets—Swan Lake, Eugene Onegin, Don Quixote, and Silvia—but rather the possibilities that the summer season has to offer. Will anyone get a promotion?

I have my predictions (which may be more informed wishful thinking): Jake Roxander, who got a relatively last-minute Don Q show thanks to Isabella Boylston’s maternity leave, seems long overdue for a push to principal. Michael de la Nuez, who debuted his first principal role last summer, performing Siegfried in Gillian Murphy’s second-to-last Swan Lake, is similarly cast as Basilio. With Cory Stearns retiring after 22 years, it seems like there is, at the very least, a slot open for his ascent to soloist. SunMi Park, performing Odette/Odile for the first time, could very well become a principal, especially after Cassandra Trenary’s departure last year to the Vienna State Ballet. And Zimmi Coker, playing Olga in Onegin, should be on the path to soloist.

Can you see how this is like sports to me?

I’ll admit that I joined the Knicks bandwagon last Monday, but I feel that’s my right as I approach year 14 in the city. I easily felt the appeal of joining in the excitement; especially with a compelling backstory (the first victory in more than 50 years!) it’s easy to get attached to, or at least excited about, the outcome.

I think a lot more people would care about ballet if they had this kind of context—the background of the comings and goings, the insight into who is most overdue for a promotion and the assumptions of what could be holding them back. If you heard the screams that Jake Roxander gets when he pulls off an impossible-seeming jump sequence into a perfect pirouette, you’d feel electrified, too.

It does take repeat exposure to develop these kinds of personal preferences, but it’s easier than you think to develop opinions once you get into it. With a little extra information, any perfomance gets more exciting. You also gain the benefit of having what feels like insider information. I felt incredibly smug last week seeing Cero Magazine’s gorgeous feature on ABT’s Chloe Misseldine and NYCB’s Mira Nadon—two dancers who I’ve been promoting to everyone in my general proximity for the last year or two.

Much has been said and written about the death of the arts because of the death of the connosieur, but I wonder if it might help us to think about these things more in the way that sports fans think about their teams—the trades, the controversies, the stakes. If sports betting existed for dance (and if I had the risk tolerance for gambling), I think I’d make a killing (or, you know, lose it all).

In today’s edition you’ll find:

• The Washington National Opera’s lawsuit against the Kennedy Center

• The art world shows up for the World Cup

• The danger of “pop creep”

• New attacks on the Bauhaus

• The Danish city enjoying a major museum moment (it’s not Copenhagen)

• Pay-what-you-wish performances at Lincoln Center

And 11 more things to know about art and culture today.

Read more

Set to an original score by Mikael Karlsson and Michael P Atkinson—which is so cinematic and layered I didn’t immediately register that the New York City Ballet Orchestra was playing it live—“Mary” is a bold and inventive entry into the genre of the story ballet, featuring double casting (the younger Elizabeth played, at my performance, by the monumental and stately Harvey Littlefield), ample gags (a pair of stilts; a large fake dog), saucy pas de deuxs, and death, arriving as a lime-green jester. Kayla-Maree Tarantolo, in this role, is slippery and cheeky—I think from time to time of the koroks from The Legend of Zelda—but in an adagio she’s almost bafflingly moving. The titular Mary (Roseanna Leney) is svelte and commanding: Cyd Charisse as the Queen of Scotland.

I’ll admit I came to the show with some reservations. “Seems like nobody wants to do a story ballet these days,” I’ll say, and then scorn the lackluster attempts that today’s choreographers have to offer. Laplane, with co-creator James Bonas, created something quite remarkable: inventive in both its movement and its storytelling, a surprising yet delicate balance of concrete and theoretical. There are moments at which the ballet slips into corny literalism—such as when the words “Catholic witch,” among others, appear scrawled above Mary, who is accused of killing her husband. But far more frequent are the instances of sheer delight, when I smiled at the stage from the back row of the orchestra. I loved the younger Mary’s entrance on stilts, making a tall dancer even more grandiose, I loved the beetly mannerisms of her spies, I loved the shadowplay of Mary and her ladies turning into a vicious spider. I loved—let me repeat—every time the Jester entered the stage, clownish yet sinister below the surface.

The thing about a story ballet is that its story can’t be too complex, lest the dancing lean too heavily on pantomime or props. A common affliction, too, in contemporary ballet is this: an inviolate need to be edgy, which takes technique from its pride of place.

The creators of “Mary, Queen of Scots,” stripped back the life and story of Mary Stuart in order to make her legible for the audience, but also to achieve a different aim—portraying a history not through the unraveling of a timeline of facts, but creating an emotional essence that distills what this story means to the culture which deemed it important enough to tell in this medium.

It’s through art that such intangibles take shape and are preserved through something as impermanent as our own bodies, passed down as history continues to unravel, its meaning shifting imperceptibly by day, until the bigger story is told on a stage where we might find something that strikes us deep to our core.

In today’s newsletter you’ll find:

• The composer scoring the NBA finals

• How to fix your attention span enough to pick up some Henry James

• Two new museum exhibits for the woo-woo crowd

• What’s actually working for the Royal Opera and Ballet

And 20+ more news items in the world of art and culture.

Read more

There are almost too many things I tell myself I have to do—there are my weekly Spanish lessons and daily workouts and each week any number of performances that I feel I need to see to stay connected to the art world, to understand what’s going on and to have my perspective continually molded. Also, a social life to maintain and continually expand.

I spend too much time scrolling and find myself caught in the same ongoing conversations interspliced with the topic du jour (tradwives, peptides, building in public). There is an overwhelming atmosphere, in many parts of the internet in which I exist, of cupidity. Even offline, last week, I went to a panel—of course attended by the very-online—in which nearly ever audience question had to do with taste, and how one comes about acquiring it. Is it that hard, I think, to go out into the world yourself? To find things and decide for yourself?

I feel a bit like turning a touch inward lately, but this isn’t a sign of dejection, frustration, or any anti-social inclination; I’m just more interested in what I might uncover with a little more time on my own.

Well well well: Trump’s name must be removed from the Kennedy Center, a federal judge ruled last week, and the institution has two weeks to get it off the building and the website. Why? Because the Kennedy Center was created through an act of Congress, and as such, “only Congress can change it,” U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper wrote in his decision, the Washington Post reported. He also halted the Center’s current plan to close for two years amid renovations, but the board is still free to vote on a closure, should it deem it necessary.

Unsurprisingly, Trump railed against Cooper on Truth Social and said that he’s backing away from the Center, and has “no interest in continuing what could only be a hopeless journey.”

This does leave the Center in limbo, as Trump remains chairman, and the board members are all Trump loyalists who plan to fight the court’s decision on the removal of Trump’s name. The Center is in need of renovations, and executive director Matt Floca (who was formerly the facilities director and recently replaced the embattled Richard Grenell) expressed concern that removal of Trump’s name could make it harder for the Kennedy Center to get much-needed donations (which doesn’t sound accurate, given its new stature as a political battleground), The Atlantic reported. All this is to say: this story is far from over, and in the meantime, the musicians of the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra—like principal clarinetist David Jones, who the New York Times recently profiled—are facing cut paychecks and a very uncertain future.

Everyone’s thinking about taste these days. Especially the president, who is fixated on his so-called beautification projects, like painting the reflecting pool blue (time will tell if the algae returns, as it did after the Obama administration’s attempt to curb the issue) and proposing a triumphal arch, to mention nothing of the White House’s forthcoming ballroom. Experts—preservationists, designers, and historians—are more often than not opposed to Trump’s aesthetic inclinations. Why?

For one, the National Mall itself is supposed to be place for contemplation. The Cultural Landscape Foundation, which is suing the Trump administration for the reflecting pool paint job, Washingtonian reported earlier this month, says that the blue (compared to the original gray) is “more appropriate to a resort or theme park.” Landscape architect Laurie Olin told the Atlantic, that, “[t]he blue should be the goddamn sky. Not the bottom of the pool.”

As for the arch, Tyler Green wrote in the Atlantic—it goes entirely against the U.S.’s history of using arches to promote “U.S. republicanism,” a political belief that emphasizes autonomy, civics, and the right to choose one’s own leaders. In New York, for instance, Washington Square Arch commemorates the inauguration of George Washington, and the Grand Army Plaza arch commemorates Civil War veterans.

The much-maligned secretary of the Smithsonian, Lonnie G. Bunch III is hard at work organizing “American Aspirations,” which he says is “probably the last” exhibit he will curate, he told the NYT. It honors the U.S. Semiquincentennial and opens tomorrow.

The Louvre heist is getting both a book and a movie. Journalists Jean-Michel Décugis, Jérémie Pham-Lê, and Nicholas-Charles Torrent reference previously unseen reports, court documents, and other details in their book, Main basse sur le Louvre: Les secrets du casse (The Louvre Heist: Secrets behind the robbery), which is out now in French. Le Monde has an excerpt in English. French filmmaker Romain Gavras is adapting it for the screen.

A bunch of new appointments in the world of classical music. The Los Angeles Philharmonic finally has its replacement for Gustavo Dudamel. Daniel Harding, a Brit, will take up the baton for in the 2027-2028 season. Very sweet: he celebrated his new appointment with a trip to In-N-Out with LA Phil president and CEO Kim Noltemy and Hollywood Bowl president Meghan Umber, listened to students play jazz at the Beckman YOLA Center, and caught a Dodgers game with Dudamel, both of them dressed in custom jerseys, the Los Angeles Times reported. Of particular note is Harding’s side career: he is a part-time pilot for Air France.

Harding, 50, started training for his pilot’s license a decade ago. The conductor, who made his debut with the London Symphony Orchestra at 18, was always fascinated with aviation and started working toward the goal after a divorce. He’s able to balance the two because of how scheduling usually works for conductors. “The music schedule will always come first, because it is usually decided years in advance, whereas pilots’ schedules come very late,” he told The Times in 2022. “I just have to make sure that when I am planning concerts I leave enough time to honor my commitment to Air France and their safety requirements. It’s all about safety.”

The Seattle Symphony also named its new president and CEO. Jeremy Rothman, the current chief artistic officer of the Philadelphia Orchestra, will take the position vacated a year ago by Krishna Thiagarajan. He has a big task ahead of him, as the Seattle Symphony’s home base, Benaroya Hall, is about to finish a $20 million renovation project. Rothman told the Seattle Times that he is particularly focused on making sure audience members of all ages and backgrounds feel welcome at the symphony and “demystifying” performances.

Also reopening is the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), which was closed for eight months while undergoing a renovation. Jova Lynne and Marie Madison-Patton, the co-directors of the museum, are recognizing the museum’s 20th anniversary this year by reaffirming the institution’s emphasis on “the wholeness of the artist,” as someone who can also have a full-time job, be a caregiver, or contend with other factors that add to their identity. Fittingly, the MOCAD’s renovation includes a new space for the community, a Learning Center, and a cafe that opens out onto the street, ArtNews reported.

Los Angeles’s Getty Center just shared early details of its forthcoming renovation, which was announced in April. The nine-figure renovation will include a green space and stairway designed by Gehry Partners, a new tram designed by the ski lift manufacturer Doppelmayr, and a welcome hall by Why Architecture (which was behind the Met’s celebrated new Michael C. Rockefeller wing). The Getty will close for the renovations next March and reopen ahead of the 2028 Summer Games, The Art Newspaper reported.

How dangerous is art? Two new books investigate. Depraved: The Story of Dangerous Art by art philosopher Daisy Dixon investigates how art has changed its viewers’ minds over time, arguing that it can “seduce us into doing the most abominable things.” Ai Wei Wei’s On Censorship investigates how we should treat art given this potential. Both authors are aligned: censorship is bad, but we would do well to reexamine how we study and understand art, the Financial Times reports.

I don’t think I realized that France also has pieces of the Parthenon? In any case, a new law that the country’s Parliament passed in May, “paves the way for the return of looted antiquities that have been housed in French public collections,” Le Monde reports, though it has a cutoff of 1815 (as in, the law applies to acquisitions that occurred after this date) and archeological finds obtained through legal division or scientifically focused exchanges are exempt. The Louvre’s Parthenon fragments were obtained in 1792, while the second was purchased at auction in 1818. The latter, and some others could be eligible for restitution, though the Louvre will have to give its approval first—should Greece request them.

Russia’s war on Ukraine continues to take a toll on the country’s cultural institutions. CBC reported that a missile and drone attack decimated more than 40% of the National Chornobyl Museum collection, while Kyiv’s National Art Museum, Kyiv Opera Theater, the National Philharmonic of Ukraine were also “badly damaged.”

I’d be remiss to not mention that UNESCO has confirmed damage to two museums, 128 buildings of historical and/or artistic interest, and three depositories of movable cultural property in Gaza since October 7, 2023. The Associated Press also confirmed that U.S. and Israeli airstrikes recently damaged at least four cultural and heritage sites, including Tehran’s Qajar-era Golestan Palace, which dates back to the 16th century.

Below the paywall: The near-future of the British Library, a new residency open to artists and writers, an exciting ballet promotion, Miffy goes to Japan, a “laptopera,” classical music on OnlyFans, and more…

Read more

It was my first time going to Baryshnikov Arts, which is practically nestled up to the Westside Highway. When I got into the theater, I shared a moment of bemusement with my fellow concertgoers—where on the fold-out bench-chairs, were the seat numbers, anyhow? (Answer: almost imperceptibly on the back). “I guess we are sharing a seat,” an older gentleman to my left said, as he pulled down the oblong bench that comprised seats 4 and 5.

I’ve attended plenty of classical concerts wherein the only thing I have to look at is the musician or musicians onstage, but this was perfectly oriented for the state in which I found myself. As Yang played her way through compositions by Reena Esmail and Lee Weisert, eventually a piece she composed herself, and Philip Glass’s “Etude No. 11”—the only work in the program I could identify—the visualizations by Xuan metamorphosed behind her. I was reminded of ye olde iTunes visualizer (compliment). I allowed my face to relax and followed what happened; it was mostly abstract, though at a few sparse moments, text appeared calling up themes such as loneliness and the impossibility of artificial intelligence to feel (such is contemporary life).

I like to go to performances alone because they are an opportunity to forget myself as much as I can, and sit as closely as possible to another person’s creation. As with meditation, there are instances in which the insistence of your brain is too powerful, and thoughts of yourself rise to the surface, in which case you can be grateful for your setting: it is dark, and should you need to wipe some tears away, anyone who notices will simply assume that you are moved.

Plenty of people through the years have told me that they want to go to the ballet, opera, etc. but they don’t because they are afraid to go alone. I can understand the self consciousness that arises from finding yourself in an unfamiliar location, unsure of the local conventions and worried about standing out. In New York, I have grown perhaps too comfortable in the theaters I frequent—I recall a recent time I wore jeans to the ballet because Lincoln Center is quite literally my third space, only to find myself surrounded by others in gowns, dressed for the young patrons gala after the performance (I also heard many of these people asking where the bathroom was—a signal that this was, very likely, their first time at venue. For many, the special occasion is an understandable draw). But all this is to say that I’ve occasionally felt shy on my solo travels to Europe, stepping into an unknown opera house for the first time and navigating to my seat. I can understand the mindset.

But what people miss is that, as wonderful as it is to share a show with friends—people with whom you can discuss what you’ve seen or heard during intermission and afterwards—it can also be a veritable respite for you alone. No one at the show is paying attention to you (unless you are on your phone, in which case I am fixing an evil eye on you that could have consequences for your entire bloodline).

I can understand the fear to go to a birthday party where you know no one but the birthday-haver alone (but I also think that doing this is good for your health and socialization). Still, just as there are stakes for not going to a party (you could have met the love of your life—?!) there too are stakes for missing a performance out of fear of going alone. For never again will it be performed exactly as it was that night—maybe never even performed again at all—and the only people who will have experienced as it was, right then, are the people in the room. When you go, then, you aren’t really alone, after all. And how wonderful to find that solitude in community: that you can be by yourself but plucked out of the mires of your psyche and cast into a tide that carries you, and everyone else, all the way to a new shore.

“Hell no, I won’t go!” is basically the gist of what Peter Gelb, 72, told the New York Times regarding a comment he previously made to the Associated Press about retiring when his contract with the Met Opera ends in 2030. Should the board have him, he’ll stay on as general manager. “Some people have egos that are so satisfied that they don’t need work. I need work. My life would be empty without work,” he said, a statement that sounds tiring to me until I remember that I have made a career of giving myself homework and spend my weekends typing.

The Met is not having an easy time of things. Sure, it had a big, sold-out production of Tristan und Isolde and a buzzy run of the Finnish school-shooting opera Innocence (which I thought was excellent), but also, its potential deal with Saudi Arabia, which would have given it a serious lifeline in terms of cash while also bringing it into politically contentious waters, fell through. Gelb told the NYT that the Met ideally needs a check of $1 billion for its endowment. I think this is an incredibly opportunity for all the OpenAI employees who are about to become ridiculously rich post-IPO to purchase their way into having cultural cachet. (Lest we forget Jensen Huang made a multi-year commitment of $5 million to the San Francisco Opera. That amount may be peanuts for the founder of Nvidia, but it is transformational for the opera house).

Maybe there’s also a billionaire who wants to try their hand at conducting—after all, they’re already buying their way into leading the symphony. We’ll see if anyone shells out the cash to say that they own the Chagall murals in the lobby, too.

The Met does have cool things in the works. Although El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego didn’t get great reviews, I love that Isabel Leonard, who plays Frida Kahlo, did a bit of guerilla marketing for the show, performing in Green-Wood Cemetery and a posh Mexican restaurant. Yuval Sharon, who directed Tristan, is also working on his much-anticipated production of the Ring cycle. We will see what else comes next!

Annabell Selldorf just keeps winning. Her firm, Selldorf Architects, was selected along with Studios Architecture Paris, to design the Louvre’s very expensive and very necessary renovation project, which will create a new entrance for the museum and give the Mona Lisa its own space. You may recall that Selldorf’s firm is also behind the Frick’s recent renovation, as well as that of London’s National Gallery.

The Venice Biennale is well underway, and not without some controversy. More than 70 artists have withdrawn from consideration for this year’s awards, which, in the absence of a jury—which resigned amid controversy, as it expressed that Israel and Russia would not be considered for awards because of their leader’s charge of war crimes by the ICC—are basically the people’s choice awards, selected by attendees.

The Art Not Genocide Alliance also staged what they say is the largest demonstration in the history of the Biennale, as it brought together thousands of demonstrators who protested Israel’s participation and the violence in Gaza. Many national pavilions, including those of France, Ukraine, Great Britain, Turkey, Korea, Poland, and Ecuador, shut down either fully or partially for coordinated 24-hour strike, ArtNews reported.

You have two last opportunities to see Tiler Peck’s new ballet, “Symphonie Espagnole,” which has a staggering cast of 40 dancers. This is her biggest commission to date. You can see it at Lincoln Center on Wednesday or Thursday.

The San Francisco Symphony has selected its next maestro. Elim Chan, 39, will become the first woman to lead the orchestra as its music director, replacing Esa-Pekka Salonen, who left last year. This is also the first time, the San Francisco Examiner notes, that the SF Symphony, the San Francisco Opera, and the San Francisco Ballet are all led artistically by women (with Carrie-Ann Matheson at the SFO and Tamara Rojo at SFB).

Will Chan have better luck than Gelb when it comes to fundraising? Maybe if she can win over the tech elite (surely Jensen has another $5 million a year to spare). By all accounts, people seem excited about her, and she has big goals: “I want to make us cool,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle. She officially starts with the 2027-2028 season, though she is in New York this week conducting the New York Philharmonic, playing Prokofiev’s “Cinderella.” I may try to rush…unless any sweeties at the Phil can hook me up?

Anyway…we still don’t know what’s going on with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Nicole Kidman definintely helped Christie’s make a record-breaking sale of a Brancusi sculpture, Danaïde, for $107.6 million. It is the second-most valuable sculpture ever sold at auction. A week before the sale, Christie’s released a video of Kidman dancing around the sculpture. We come to this place for magic etc. The auction house also sold a Pollock for $181.2 million—the most expensive work by the artist, The Times reported.

If you want to see the Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum it’s going to cost you £33 for peak times. Tickets go on sale July 1.

Restitution reaches Spain as the Prado Museum has begun giving back 166 identified artworks from its collection, which were looted under Franco’s rule during the Spanish Civil War, the Art Newspaper reported.

Megan Fairchild, who just retired from New York City Ballet after 24 years, has the best plan for what’s next: moving to France with her European husband and her three kids. She’ll be working with the George Balanchine Trust to help stage Balanchine’s work in the country, the Financial Times reports. ▲

I am familiar with the slowness of progress. Growing up studying ballet intensively, you can only understand how to be a little bit better every day, rather than leaping—jeté-ing, maybe—from one milestone to the next. Art requires practice and comfort with the gap between where you are and where you’d like to be next. It requires sitting with the discomfort that comes with recognizing your taste and comparing it, with harrowing realization, with your abilities. It necessitates showing up anyway.

It seems to me that a lot of people divorce themselves from the arts because they do require this degree of patience, not only to perform oneself, but to appreciate them. It is only through time and some level of study or exploration that one begins to make sense of what’s in front of them. You can surely enjoy Coppélia or La Bohème or a Strauss waltz without knowledge of ballet, opera, or classical music, just as you can admire a painting by Monet or Manet without having taken Art History 101. I don’t necessarily want to say that your enjoyment, specifically, will grow with a greater level of context, but it will give you new angles and perspectives from which you can consider and reconsider such works. To some extent, it can feel like having to earn it.

And that can be understandably tedious—to have to put in some level of “work” to eke pleasure out of something which heretofore may seem illegible, when easier delights are always within reach, behind the screen, of course, but also in other venues: a sports game* or comedy show or, I don’t know, a Broadway adaptation of a Disney movie. (*I will admit, though, as someone whose fantasy football team, the Prima Donnas, came in second-to-last in the league, that there is greater enjoyment in the game when you know what is going on.)

The pleasure comes from the realization—often sudden or at least unanticipated—that your repeated exposure to something brings depth and dimension to your experience of it. For better or worse, it’s not a process that can be speed-run (there are no growth hacks for one’s cultural comprehension) nor is it one that can be cheated. It only comes with age.

That said, you do have to make a choice: to take a step farther, and, potentially, ease into something that’s a touch out of your debt. I’ve come around to 32 feeling like not that much has changed in my life, but this is also true: before I was 31, I was not a professionally published dance critic. Now, I review several shows a month.

You can just do things—and to move into a place where you haven’t been before, you have no choice but to do them. The discomfort (and so often, in my case, self-doubt and intimidation) that comes with trying something new is the price of growth.

The biggest news in the art world is that the jury for the Venice Biennale has collectively resigned after backlash to its decision to prohibit artists from Russia and Israel, whose leaders are accused of war crimes by the ICC, from winning any of the art fair’s Golden Lion awards. Instead, the public will vote on “Visitor Lions,” for which all participating artists will be eligible. The voting period will run for the length of the entire Biennale, which opens Saturday and closes November 22.

Read more

I am never more of a cop than when I am sitting in the audience of a theater, and I see, to my great chagrin, the glow of a phone screen as a fellow patron continues texting, scrolling Instagram, checking the time, or—worst of all—taking photos of the performance as it goes. You will be hard-pressed to find a theater worldwide that allows such behavior, but nevertheless, these breeches of etiquette exist, and, I fear, they diminish the experience for everyone exposed to their occurrence.

We all know this argument (“phones bad,” etc.). It isn’t all that different from the stance people take when arguing against having phones out at a concert or a wedding—you, of course, should be fully present in the moment. But when I am watching a ballet, an opera, or a concert of classical music, I feel there is another layer to it. And that is the fact that, despite any interest or even love that you have for the art form on display, during an hours-long production, there may come a time when you find your mind wandering. Sitting with that feeling, and continuing to experience the performance in front of you, is kind of like training your brain to grow your attention span, rather than giving in to the impulse to switch to an activity that feels more active (taking a photo, looking at something else).

There is no shortage of studies that show that things like listening to classical music and watching a dance performance impact the brain and its response—sharpening focus and sometimes even improving memory in response to such stimuli. But this isn’t really what I’m talking about. The goal of art consumption is not a biological or cognitive advantage.

What I really mean is that sitting with art, even at times when you might feel pulled to disengage, gives you an opportunity to discover something new, which you might have missed had you not been paying attention; things that might not have made sense or connected on the first go-around suddenly click into place.

Last night, I went to my first show of New York City Ballet’s spring season and found myself drifting—despite my avowed love for this art form—during Alexei Ratmansky’s “Voices,” a 2020 piece that, I feel, tries to do so many things at once with the attempt of making some illegible point about feminism…maybe?…that it ends up saying nothing at all. The work is impenetrable to me.

But in enduring, you find something you have to say about even the things that you wish were over. You may recognize how much you like the agility of the choreography itself, but that it’s the discordant piano overlay that feels distracting. Or that the occasional tricks pulled by the male dancers draw you back in, even if you can’t quite place their role or purpose within the ballet. Sitting through something that you fail to connect with helps you to understand what it is that you like, and by better pinpointing the particular angles of what makes a work of art successful—in your own personal view—you start to develop that currently buzzy sensibility: Taste.

Taste ultimately is not about an outright rejection of “bad art” and “good art,” but the ability to discern for oneself, what you connect with and why. It’s an articulation far more than a judgment call, and it’s a skill set that you hone through exposure to a wide variety of stimuli. Paying attention is just the start. The reward is what you learn about yourself.

So put that phone away, please!

We could have seen this coming: the Metropolitan Opera’s $200 million deal with the kingdom of Saudi Arabia has fallen through, the New York Times reported. Met general manager Peter Gelb said that the Saudis blamed the dissolution of the deal on “damage to the country’s economy caused by the war in Iran and the blockading of oil passing through the Strait of Hormuz.” Gelb told the NYT that he is trying to make a similar deal with other countries, though he declined to specify which ones.

Given the many protests about this deal—and about where the Met is getting its money from, generally—I think it’s probably for the best that it just didn’t work out. But that also means that the Met still has to come up with cash somehow, lest it cull its production schedule even more than it already has; next season will feature 17 operas, while a decade ago it put on 25 per season.

Anyhow, the Met is still doing cool things. Consider its upcoming production of El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego, which opens in mid-May and corresponds with a companion exhibit at the MoMA, “The Last Dream: Frida and Diego,” which is on view through September 12 and was designed by Jon Bausor, the stage set designer and costume co-designer for the opera. More of this!

Also buzzy in the opera world is Luca Guadagnino’s decision to put on The Death of Klinghoffer, a controversial John Adams opera which first premiered in 1991, just a few years after its real-life events took place. The opera, which has an English libretto, is about the 1985 hijacking of the passenger ship Achille Lauro by the Palestinian Liberation front, and the murder of the wheelchair-bound, Jewish-American passenger Leon Klinghoffer. The opera has been subject to protests and accusations of promoting antisemitism, terrorism, and also of stereotyping Arabs.

Adams has denied these claims and defended the opera, pointing to the issue of freeform of speech. He has also previously stated that some critics seem not to take certain lines from the libretto in context: “There are some anti-Semitic slogans in the opera, but they are clearly flagged as coming out of the mouth of a particularly brutal hijacker. No one could view this and not identify those words as reflecting his deranged vision,” he said in 2014, after the Met canceled a broadcast of the opera due to protests.

Others defend the opera. The late Ruth Badger Ginsburg was reportedly in the audience of the opera on opening night and gave it a standing ovation. The writer Susan Schied told JSTOR in 2014, “I don’t see the opera as making a political statement, but rather undertaking a deep and nuanced exploration of human motivation and behavior.” NYT critic Joshua Barone has said that the opera is “virtually impossible to produce in the United States.”

Guadagnino brought it to Italy instead, at the Maggio Musicale Fioretino, where it just wrapped today. The Guardian gave it five stars. The Times called it a masterpiece.

The Dutch National Opera also just put on a complex work. Die Passagierin is a “forgotten 20th century masterwork,” told from the perspective of a German woman who served as a Nazi camp guard at the women’s barracks at Auschwitz. It’s the rare Holocaust story told from the perspective of a perpetrator, Forward reports, composed by Mieczysław Weinberg in 1968, though it did not premiere until 2006(!), 10 years after his death.

“Trying to make a perpetrator into someone you can comprehend also makes them human,” Laura Roling, the production dramaturg at the Dutch National Opera told Forward. “It defies very clear black-and-white, good-and-evil boundaries. If you can say perpetrators were inhuman, they were monsters, that’s it. But we know that in reality they were human beings, who also did the most inhuman things. So it’s important to ask: How could they live with themselves afterwards?”

Also of note are the great reviews of Innocence, the opera by the late Kaija Saariaho, which tells the story of the aftermath of a school shooting. Barone called it “an early contender for one of this century’s great operas.” I am seeing it on Wednesday and will report back.

If you’re like me, your feed has been full of design people in Italy for Salome del Mobile Milano, the world’s leading design fair. But next week attention will shift to Venice for the opening of “In Minor Keys,” the 61st International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale.

There has been much anticipation—or contention, more accurately—about the participation of Russia and Israel in the exhibition. While many protested that the countries be banned from the event (as the International Criminal Court has alleged war crimes against their leaders), the jury has made a decision that those countries will simply be ineligible for the exhibitions top prizes, because of the ongoing investigations by the ICC, ArtNet reported. While some artists and curators have similarly called for the United States to banned from the event, its participation is not impacted because it is not under investigation by the ICC (at the moment).

For many, this isn’t enough. The European Union, for one is protesting Russia’s participation by withdrawing €2 million in funding (impacting the 2028 edition) for the event. Belu-Simion Fainaru, who is representing Israel, called the decision by the jury an act of discrimination based on national origin.

Some big news out of Venice on the opera front: Beatrice Venezi, the much-contested music director of Teatro La Fenice (who has connections to Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government), has been terminated from “all future contracts” at the opera house, OperaWire reported. Following the news, the audience at the theater’s closing production of Lohengrin reportedly applauded.

Performance art is so back. Ai Wei Wei will reenact his 81-day detention by the Chinese Ministry of Public Service as a part of his exhibition, “Button Up!” at Aviva Studios in Manchester, England. The performance, “Sewing a Button,” will last 24 hours, in a recreation of the artist’s cell. Visitors can book both two-hour slots and 24-hour tickets for the performance, which starts on July 3, ArtNews reports.

As much as we all enjoyed the jokes about the Louvre thieves (I myself was one of many who dressed up like one of the robbers for Halloween), we need to get real about one thing: stealing from museums is…how do you say…bad? In an interview with the New York Times, leftist streamer Hasan Piker and writer Jia Tolentino agreed that stealing from the Louvre would be “cool.” Of course, they got way more press coverage for talking about stealing from Whole Foods, but let’s be clear about one thing: stealing art from museums, which put works on display for the access of the broader public, is uhhhh not a good thing! Feels like conflating social democracy with looting irreplaceable objects is probably bad for the promotion of social democracy.

I saw someone on X, where I begrudgingly linger, arguing that stealing from museums is not a bad thing because “museums already have so much stuff,” essentially, so they could just put out a different painting to replace a lost one, which is a take so obtuse that I’m not going to even bother going and finding who tried to make the argument in the first place.

We only have to look at the history of the Louvre itself to understand why stealing from such an institution would be a net bad for society: the institution, which was originally a palace, became a museum during the French Revolution. That meant that all the treasures that the monarchy collected would now be on view to the broader population. When art is stolen, it is often never seen again—sold through shady means to the uber-wealthy who keep it in private quarters. This isn’t a Robin Hood situation, and it’s certainly not the flex that Piker seems to think it is.

Art Basel wants more people to go to Switzerland. As such, it has introduced a new initiative, asking galleries to withhold at least one work minimum from their PDF previews for clients. Participation is optional, but so far, around 75 percent of participating galleries have agreed to it, ArtNews reports.

Gen Z is getting into classical music, Forbes reports, as orchestras worldwide are seeing an increased number of attendees under the age of 35. The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra seems to be one of the most successful in intentionally courting the younger crowd. The orchestra offers a happy hour series, which includes shorter run times and post-concert DJ sets, as well as mashup concerts, such as “Beethoven X Beyoncé.”

What’s most interesting to me is that the orchestra also seems to be very aware of the importance of marketing to this crowd. It recently launched a podcast, Noted, and is also leaning into an influencer strategy.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art—which you may recall was briefly the Philadelphia Art Museum, for just a moment in time—has moved the bronze Rocky Balboa statue atop its steps, inside. It now appears as a part of its exhibition, “Rising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments,” Reuters reported. Some people are unhappy about it, saying that the steps are “part of the statue.”

I guess they got over the whole Revolutionary War thing. The BBC announced that the annual BBC Proms—its eight-week-long concert series, which starts in July—will have a partial focus on American music, in celebration of America 250. BBC Proms controller Sam Jackson was quick to de-politicize the choice: “We would be doing this no matter who was the president of the United States of America. I feel very strongly that we mustn’t allow the geopolitical situation to stifle great music or to stop us telling stories about America’s composers of the past and present.” ▲

I was struck by the way the dancers draped their bodies over one another, overcome with longing that—when physically present with the object of one’s affection—can only be expressed through leonine nuzzling. The image, too, of O’Neill hovering horizontally as Marchand spins her in a kiss lingered. Still, somehow even more pervasive in my memory was the score: the adagio from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major (K. 488).

It was the way it started—soft and tentative, before billowing out in an unyielding close, the flutes piping in and the strings adding a rocking texture just below the surface, which bubbles up for just a moment. I couldn’t get it out of my head.

I’ve been listening to more of Mozart’s piano concertos; he wrote 27, and with great variety. Even the movement which follows the adagio in No. 23—the allegro assai—feels shockingly jubilant juxtaposed with its predecessor.

In Mozart, more than Beethoven or Bach, I find these moments that feel like buried treasure. They aren’t the works that are most easily identifiable by name, but in so many, I can recognize melodies I’ve heard before. Surely I’d encountered the allegro of Concerto No. 20 in some cinematic swell of drama. And there, in No. 4, a dreaming twinkling that feels impossibly timeless.

Many classical musicians—much like many great artists through history—can feel, now, to us, like more ideas than historical figures. One calls to mind a marble bust. But although Amadeus (1984) is fiction, it’s true that Mozart was a goofy (some might say childish) boy genius who died too young. In the Mozart House in Salzburg, I saw recreations of shooting targets he ordered to be designed, with such level of inane trolling:

“The targets, if it is not too late, I should like to have as follows: a small person with fair hair shown bending over and revealing his bare arse. From his mouth come the words, ‘Bon appétit for the feast.’ The other man should be in boots and with spurs, wearing a red jacket and a wonderful wig in the latest fashion. He should be of medium height and positioned in such a way that he is licking the other man’s arse. From his mouth come the words, ‘Oh, there’s nothing to beat it? That’s how I want it please.’”

This…from the very mind who wrote his own requiem on his deathbed 14 years later, and the piano concerto which has haunted me these past few months.

All this is to say that there are joys and pleasures to be found by acquainting oneself with things that may seem impenetrable or easily glossed over with the tap of a shuffle button. Your curiosity will yield rewards.

The seemingly endless wave of museum renovations continues—now, with LACMA’s new $724 expansion, the David Geffen Galleries, which will finally debut after about two decades of fundraising, planning, pausing, and building. The 347,500-square foot space opens to the public on May 4 (also my birthday).

Not only is the building itself swirling and wavelike—so too is its curatorial approach, which groups artwork loosely geographically, according to the bodies of water closest to where the art originates, e.g. Mediterranean, Atlantic, Pacific. It is, the New York Times reports, a “non-hierarchical space.”

The water metaphors abound: Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors member Holly J. Mitchell told the NYT that the museum’s revamp represents a “sea change, a culture shift at an interesting time in our nation’s history—the physical structure of older museums being oppressive.”

I think that quote, while quippy, may give just a touch too much credit to architecture alone, but I’m all for museums reinvestigating their curatorial processes (though this can go poorly, as we saw in the case of the Brooklyn Museum’s 2024 rehang, which may have gone a step too far in positioning modern-day perspectives over historical context and artistic analysis).

Regardless, the Peter Zumthor-designed building is genuinely stunning, and—like many recent museum projects—takes into consideration how people will actually come together within its walls. The Geffen Galleries double the museum’s previous gallery space and also include “kid-friendly” objects, a coffee house, restaurant, wine bar, bookstore, and theater.

Not to be outdone, London’s National Gallery announced that the Japanese design firm Kengo Kuma and Associates (with BDP and MICA) has won the competition to design a new wing, as a part of its £750 million expansion, the “largest and most significant” transformation in its 200-year history. Called Project Domani, the plan intends to drive community engagement and increase opportunities for global partnerships.

The painting-exclusive museum, up until now, has displayed work dated up till 1900, will extend its historic collection into the 21st century, making it one of the only places in the world where visitors can “view the entire history of painting in the Western tradition.”

That’s not to say that everything is going great. While the National Gallery has raised £375 million for the renovation, in addition to receiving a £75 million donation to the National Gallery Trust (which will help it expand its collection and develop an endowment), the museum has an £8.2 million deficit, The Guardian points out, which could lead to job cuts, fewer exhibits, and higher ticket costs.

I mean, the U.K.’s culture ministers are already considering charging tourists ticket fees for its national museums, which are currently free for all and have been since 2001, The Guardian reported in March. This is already fairly common practice elsewhere; non-EU citizens pay more to get into the Louvre, Egyptian visitors to the new Grand Egyptian Museum can get in for far less than tourists, and Japan is currently debating applying the practice to its national museums.

There is much debate about this—especially given the general sentiment around the British Museum’s treasure trove (why should a Brit be able to see the Elgin Marbles, but a visiting Greek citizen not have the opportunity to lay their eyes on the missing Caryatid for free)? Some prefer alternative means of boosting museum revenue, like granting these institutions a cut of a hotel tax.

Subscribe now

Although the Los Angeles Philharmonic is saying farewell to conductor Gustavo Dudamel as he heads over to the NY Phil, it still has plenty of excitement for Angelenos ahead. Thirty-year-old Anna Handler, who most recently worked as assistant conductor at the currently embattled Boston Symphony Orchestra, has been named the LA Phil’s next conductor-in-residence. She’ll hold this position for the next three seasons.

She sounds genuinely exciting, and much like conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen (who now serves as the Phil’s creative director), has a deep interest in technology, which could open the doors for all kinds of innovation.

Her dream, really, is to make her beloved artform more exciting for the masses: she wants to create a “build a Disney World for classical music,” she told the Los Angeles Times.

A majority of artistic directors at the largest ballet companies in the U.S. are men, finds the Dance Data Project in its annual global leadership report. This is relatively unchanged from the previous two years. The pipeline to gender equity is also starting to look a bit concerning, as the data shows associate and artistic directors—feeder positions for the top role—are also increasingly going to men.

A couple live broadcasts for you to keep an eye on: The Royal Ballet’s Giselle will be in select theaters on April 12 and 13. You can find a screening near you here.

Nederlands Dans Theater—one of the most exciting companies in the world—is also releasing a filmed version of the piece it debuted last year with Sharon Eyal Dance, “Into the Hairy.” I saw this piece last summer at NDT’s home theater in The Hague, and it was one of my favorite things I saw all year. Readers of Mezzanine Society can view the livestreamwith a special discount.

And if you, like me, missed Yuval Sharon’s much-hyped Tristan und Isolde at the Met, there’s good news: it will be broadcast through PBS’s Great Performances in September.

Below the paywall: A surprise (and quiet) departure at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the essay circling the art world, the man getting Americans to donate to the Louvre, the buzzy pianist with a great wardrobe to match, a ballet you’ll want to book at Lincoln Center this summer, and more.

Read more

I’ve made attempts through the ages to keep up with a monthly log of books read, but I’ve found the task—on top of my regular weekly-ish sends, freelance dance reviews, and aforementioned job—difficult to maintain. Instead, for your pleasure or apathy, I present a casual documentation of the arts I experienced in the first quarter of the year.

Dance

I saw 14 dance performances in Q1—six of which were by New York City Ballet and three of which were American Ballet Theatre.

The full list: Baye & Asa and Sun Kim Dance at Works & Process at the Guggenheim (review here), Daniil Simkin’s Sons of Echo at the Joyce (review here), New York City Ballet’s Balachine + Ratmansky (Serenade, Prodigal Son), Art of the Pas de Deux presentation (review here), Masters at Work (Kammermusik No. 2, Le Tombeau de Couperin, Antique Epigraphs, Raymonda Variations), New Combinations (Walpurgisnacht Ballet, Flower Festival in Genzano, The Wind-Up, Opus 19/The Dreamer), Contemporary Choreography (Dig the Say, This Bitter Earth, The Naked King, Everywhere We Go), and The Sleeping Beauty, L.A. Dance Project’s Romeo & Juliet Suite (review here), American Ballet Theatre’s Othello (review here), Mozartiana, Nuages, Firebird, and Raymonda, New Jersey Ballet’s Icons of American Ballet (Serenade, In the Night, Nine Sinatra Suite), and Hubbard Street Dance’s Program 1 (Gnawa, Sweet Gwen Suite, and Blue Soup).

Here are the highlights:

Serenade is always a delight to watch, and I got to see it with two standout ballerinas. Sara Mearns at New York City Ballet is pretty much made for this dreamy, waltzing role, and I was very taken by Denise Parungao at New Jersey Ballet, who was a standout across the whole program. You can watch a great version of the ballet from the 90s with Darci Kistler, Kyra Nichols, and Maria Calegari here (thank you John Clifford; you are forgiven for your at times manic persona on Instagram).

I found Justin Peck’s new ballet The Wind-Up to be entertaining, but not his most artful work. I much prefer his Sufjan Stevens-scored Everywhere We Go, even though dance critic Alistair Macaulay panned it when it went to London last year.

I didn’t really love Romeo & Juliet Suite, though it was nice to finally see my first show at the Park Ave Armory. I’m very excited to see Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s installation clinamen in the space over the summer.

ABT’s Firebird was so much wackier than I anticipated, but it was a fun one. I was surprised that I preferred Catherine Hurlin’s performance to Chloe Misseldine’s this time around (though Chloe’s Swan Lake over the summer is not to be missed; tickets go on sale Monday). I’ll be seeing Dance Theatre of Harlem’s version in a few weeks—that’s another must. City Ballet is putting on their version in the spring, too; you can expect a more mid-century version from them, with sets and costumes by Marc Chagall (the ad campaign for it last year was so good).

Hubbard Street was a joy to watch. You can still catch their remaining shows at the Joyce this weekend. Do it, if only to see Aszure Barton’s magnificent Blue Soup (2002).

Books

I read eight books: Sakina’s Kiss by Vivek Shanbhag*, A Domestic Animal by Francis King*, Flesh by David Szalay, The King of a Rainy Country by Brigid Brophy*, A Life’s Work by Rachel Cusk, The Propagandist by Cécile Desprairies, The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide, and The Stranger by Albert Camus.

*I read these books for McNally Jackson’s McNally Editions book club, which I run. Perhaps you’d like to join us in April? We are reading David Foster Wallace’s Something to Do With Paying Attention. Sign up here!

And now, some micro reviews:

Sakina’s Kiss by Vivek Shanbhag: What seems to be a crime novel unfolds into something much more complex (and more satisfying). While set in contemporary India (and published originally in Kannada), the political and gender dynamics in this novel are widely applicable. Narratively, this felt fresh—something with a bit of snap.

A Domestic Animal by Francis King: A frigid Englishman falls in love (or lust) with an Italian philosopher-slash-footballer. What could go wrong? Funny in parts, sad in others, and surprisingly embodied. If you like tales of obsession, this one’s for you.

Flesh by David Szalay: Read for my work book club (of which I am also in charge). Spent the first two-thirds wondering where it was going, and at the end, appreciated it on a thematic level, but found little to really enjoy in the prose. Thought I would enjoy it more, but I can respect it conceptually.

The King of a Rainy Country by Brigid Brophy: A real mid-century treat, featuring a frustrating situationship, a sapphic schoolgirl crush, American tourists, and a bittersweet end. Especially decadent on a prose level with actually funny dialogue.

A Life’s Work by Rachel Cusk: Being in your thirties is about reading books on motherhood and stressing out. An honest work, with enough levity to prevent it from being fatalistic.

The Propagandist by Cécile Desprairies: Few things I love more than literature set during WWII in Europe, and this novel—which is so heavily inspired by the author’s Nazi collaborator relatives that they sued her for libel (she won)—delivers.

The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide: Something simple and sweet read while in deep—and continuing—grief over my cat. It gave me what I needed: a bit of validation of the impact an animal companion can make.

The Stranger by Albert Camus: A classic I never read, but now devoured. Now, I’m halfway through The Meursault Investigation—the perfect companion piece. I didn’t even realize there is a new film adaptation out.

Art

I saw the Renoir drawings exhibit at the Morgan Library & Museum, on one of its After Hours events. It was a pleasant exhibit, though Renoir generally isn’t my favorite (my feelings aren’t as strong as those held by the person who runs this Instagram). I especially liked this cat painting. I do want to see the current Mozart exhibit; I did just visit the Mozart residence in Salzburg in November.

Music

I went to one performances of the New York City Philharmonic, though I had ambitions to attend more. The program I saw featured Chen Yi’s “Landscape Impression,” Schumann’s “Piano Concerto” (played by Yefim Bronfman), and Tchaikovsky’s “Symphony No. 2.” Xian Zhang conducted. The Schumann was the highlight, though you know I love Tchaikovsky. I regret missing “the wealth of nations” conducted by Gustavo Dudamel!

I also saw Fort Greene Symphony and Vladimir Rumyantsev perform Tchaikovksy’s first piano concerto (my all-time favorite) and Romeo & Juliet Overture. Both conducted by . I’ve seen Vladimir perform a few times (including with his fiancée, ABT principal Skylar Brandt—my review here), and he’s an expressive, exciting performer. I still think about his version of the “Rose Adagio” from The Sleeping Beauty after I saw him perform it over the summer.

That’s all for now. Back to our regular programming in a few days! ▲

Hubbard Street, I think, could be the most underrated dance company in the country. Its dancers are individually so different (in style, personality, even height) yet uniformly excellent in technique. I first saw them in New York City Center’s annual Fall for Dance Festival, where they were a clear standout. On Tuesday, they delivered again, with three piece—Gnawa by Nacho Duato (2005), Sweet Gwen Suite by Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon (2021), and Blue Soup by Aszure Barton (2002)—which demonstrated their artistic versatility and the adventurous breath of the company’s repertoire.

So often, when watching Hubbard Street, I marveled at how it seemed like the dancers were pulling off moves that no one had ever thought to do before. Innovation can exist in the ways we move our bodies, truly. I also had the thought, while watching the invigorating final number of the night, that Gap really ought to cast these dancers in its next commercial.

Almost as soon as that thought crossed my mind, I realized the uncomfortable prospect it suggested: why was it my impulse to figure that commercial viability could be an indicator of artistic success? Are earnest intersections of art and commerce possible to execute without the dilution of the former? Or can performance exist as art only without the specter of having something to sell, lest it become merely entertainment?

It’s my feeling these days that there could be some advantage for the arts to consider such commercial opportunities—and brands looking to stand out as arbiters of taste, the buzzword of the moment, would do well to consider how they could prop up the artists who are already doing cool work.

In absence of promising paths to funding and limited means of broad public exposure for these artists, a few commercial gigs could present a partial remedy—albeit not a full-on solution—to an ongoing challenge: getting more people to care. Consider it the top of the funnel.

Big drama continues in Boston as fans of the Boston Symphony Orchestra—and its members—struggle to process the dismissal of conductor and music director Andris Nelsons, who, by all accounts, was beloved. For his first appearance at the podium since the news broke earlier this month, members of the orchestra wore single red carnations as a show of solidarity for their Latvia-born boss, the Boston Globe reported. As we discussed below the paywall last time, Nelsons will continue in his role for another year and change; he’ll finish after the 2027 Tanglewood summer music festival.

Friends of the BSO who reached out to try to get some explanation for Nelsons’ dismissal were met with an opaque response, recognizing the “difficult time,” from the membership organization’s director, Peter Schlaht, Slipped Disc reported. It read, in part: “I’m sorry that I’m unable to share more context around the Board’s decision. I’m going to pass your comments along to our leadership team and would be happy to direct you to the appropriate contact at the BSO to share our board confidentiality policies in more detail.”

Well, there must have been enough pushback that the trustees of the BSO finally felt they had to address the issue. In an open letter, the trustees cited a number of issues—none of them all too surprising—with the orchestra. Those include declining audience sizes (down 20 percent since the pandemic), rising operating costs, and a general need to “[reimagine] how orchestral music reaches broader audiences, [deepen] our roots as a civic institution across Boston and the Berkshires, and [invest] in Symphony Hall and Tanglewood…” the Berkshire Eagle reported.

It’s not clear how Nelsons’ dismissal will help the orchestra achieve those latter goals, especially because a beloved conductor can play a huge role in generating excitement about an orchestra—just look at how amped everyone is for Gustavo Dudamel in New York. Even the leaders of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra have spoken out about the dismissal and shared their concern for the fact that musicians were not consulted about the decision, Slipped Disc reported. I guess we’ll see…!

In any case, people are already speculating about who could replace Nelsons. Boston Classical Review pointed to Dima Slobodeniouk as a contender, given his frequent appearances with the BSO, as well as Susanna Mälkki, another Finn who serves as chief conductor emeritus at the Helsinki Philharmonic and is generally in-demand worldwide (she’s also conducting the highly anticipated Kaija Saariaho opera Innocence at the Met next month).

Finally, an opera about economics—is Bloomberg’s incredible headline for senior writer Stacey Vanek Smith’s piece about David Lang’s oratorio (meaning, an orchestra work that also features singers), the wealth of nations, which the New York Philharmonic debuted last week, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel. It is, in fact, inspired by Adam Smith’s 1776 treatise, and featured the writing of Smith, as well as that of other American writers—including Frederick Douglass and Edith Wharton. The piece, Vanek Smith writes, is “like going on a journey into the heart of the economy.” The New York Times said that Lang “has a gift for finding epiphanic poetry in texts that may seem mundane or downright boring.”

Lang was inspired by Handel’s Messiah when it came to structuring his oratorio. That work, in a different form, came to Ohio last weekend with Cleveland Ballet’s Messiah by choreographer Robert Weiss (founding director of the company), an “ambitious production” that Cleveland.com notes involved a full orchestra, singers, the dancers, and more than 120 costumes.

“Visually, the ballet often resembles a moving painting, with large ensemble sections filling the stage and multiple layers of action unfolding at once. Each of the 42 segments offers something different—shifts in color, lighting and choreographic style ensure the production never settles into a single tone,” writes Paris Wolfe. Here’s another thing we love to see: tickets began at just $36, and the company also offered pay-what-you-wish tickets for a final rehearsal.

Some more interesting happenings at regional ballet companies: Fort Wayne Ballet in Texas put on a performance featuring the choreography of its dancers. Dancer’s Choice ran at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art this weekend.

Students at Pacific Northwest Ballet also had the unique opportunity to debut a new ballet. Momotaro, which opened last weekend, is an adaptation of a Japanese folktale, described as being “one part Wizard of Oz, one part Tom Thumb.” The show, by resident choreographer Jessica Lang, is just an hour long and geared toward families. This is her first full-length narrative ballet, and it’s a personal one—the idea to tell this story came from Lang’s husband and frequent collaborator, former Alvin Ailey dancer Kanji Segawa, who is from Kanagawa, Japan, the Seattle Times reported.

The Seattle Ballet has been gradually expanding its family matinee repertoire—a smart move for ticket sales and the company’s longevity. Start em young!

How are you supposed to eat before a five-hour opera? Dan Walden said with “a hearty Italian dinner and a glass and a half or so of good red wine.” (who just wrote a great post on said opera) noted, “the best way to prepare for Tristan is to be balefully in love with someone who would never give you the time of day.”

Still, the New York Times shared how several theater-goers prepared—physically—for Yuval Sharon’s virtually sold-out production of Tristan und Isolde at the Met. Answers included: yerba maté, contraband candies, gelato, and espresso martinis (which Eater recently discovered are on tap at the Grand Tier). I must point out that they are like, $25, and not as large as they are at Cafe Fiorello across the street. Do with that information what you will.

Did you know that David Hockney made opera sets, too? Soon you’ll be able to see them at the Tate Modern in a massive exhibition on the artist, set to open in the fall of 2027, The Guardian reported. Earlier next year, the Tate will also put on its first solo exhibit of Monet’s works, opening in February 2027.

Hockney, 88, also recently did an interview with The Times, in which he spoke about abstract painting (there’s “too much of it” right now), the Bayeux Tapestry (which he likened stylistically to “a Chinese or Japanese scroll”), and what the filmmaker Jean Renoir said to him upon the news of Picasso’s death (“What a very un-Picasso thing to do.”). He also apparently sang a full aria to interviewer Andrew Marr!

Below the paywall: More updates from British museums, the Greek play we can’t get enough of, the men of the Royal Ballet, a big legal change that could make it easier for families to recover art that was lost or looted during the Holocaust, and more.

Read more

I’m not here to deny what Chalamet said. Obviously, we know his comments are not literally true—plenty of people care about ballet and opera!—but of course these art forms, economically, aren’t having the easiest time. That’s why the Met Opera is waiting to see if its contentious deal with Saudi Arabia will or will not go through, and, at one point, tried to court Elon Musk as a donor. We can surely talk about bloated salaries of executives and comparatively meager pay of artists—a big driver of unionization efforts across dance companies, in particular, over the past few years—but still the fact remains that funding has dropped over the past couple decades as mainstream understanding of, and appreciation of, the these arts has, too.

There is a good reason the New York Times last year asked if there could ever be another Mikhail Baryshnikov. They weren’t talking about if someone could reach the heights of Baryshnikov’s inimitable talent (there are a few working dancers today who could potentially do so). They were asking if there might be another time that a ballet dancer could rise to his level of high-brow superstardom, sans brand deals or speaking gigs. “Baryshnikov arrived at a very specific time,” Jason Diamond wrote. “Between the period when people like Leonard Bernstein or Maria Callas could be household names and novelists were regular guests on the country’s biggest talk shows and the era when the nation became obsessed with very new kinds of celebrity.”

Callas, Vanity Fair pointed out in its argument about this current discourse, made comments about the decreased public interest in opera in the 1960s. But also, now, we have Gustavo Dudamel, who has just taken up the mantel at the New York Philharmonic, playing Coachella—he’s the Leonard Bernstein of today, Alec Baldwin said at a NYP fundraiser late last year. The recently retired Misty Copeland, too, has name recognition beyond the stretches of the theater. Having her own Barbie helps.

With these examples, I wonder if we may come to a realization: that interest in the classical arts has not waned because they have lost any artistic merit, but that the means and vehicles they have to reach the broader public in a fractured media ecosystem (which is struggling, too!) make it vastly more difficult for them to reach the mainstream. I have to think this is why, when I pitched a women’s magazine a profile of the up-and-coming American Ballet Theatre dancer and emerging choreographer Madison Brown—who I am certain is on track for a promotion in the next year—I was told that she just wasn’t a big enough name. She has more than 70k followers on Instagram. This past week, she performed a principal role in Othello after being in the company for less than two years.

This much is clear: the classical arts have a go-to-market problem.

When we talk about the accessibility of the arts, we are talking about things like ticket prices. But what do we make of Opera Philadelphia selling out its season after adopting a pay-what-you-wish model? What about the difficulty of getting a seat at the Public’s Shakespeare in the Park, given its immense popularity? What about the fact, even, that the Metropolitan Opera—amid its current struggles—has added another performance of its much-anticipated Tristan und Isolde? Or that Nutcracker sales generate nine figures of revenue globally each December?

Plenty of arts institutions have solid marketing campaigns. Just look at Quinn B. Wharton’s videos for ABT, or the fact that pretty much every opera house worldwide hopped on the Timothée discourse as a means of self promotion. Lots of dancers and opera singers have major social media followings of their own. But what remains hard is getting people who might not otherwise follow these folks to find them in the first place.

In the algorithmically driven internet, a Brooklyn resident might get an ad for Fort Greene Orchestra’s latest performance—smartly marketed as the “world’s most romantic concert”—but that’s probably only if you’ve attended some other arts event or engaged with any arts accounts. I am constantly served campaigns for various performance arts. But are they reaching the people who, for instance, love the halftime show at Liberty games, but have never actually attended a dance performance?

I don’t have an exact answer to this, but my feeling is that they’re not. What the classical arts need, really, is more top-of-funnel opportunities: to be exposed to people who might enjoy them without really knowing they’d enjoy them.

Plenty of institutions already have offerings that have this intention. Think of orchestral concerts that feature hits from Harry Potter or Star Wars. Opera houses across the country, too, are investing in new works that they think could do better with young audiences: look at the success of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay at the Met or The Monkey King at the San Francisco Opera. For the ballet, The Nutcracker is as top of funnel as you can get, but also, New York City Ballet’s $54-ticket Art Series—featuring a post-show DJ and free drinks—is a great example of how accessible pricing and a sense of specialness can actually sell out a theater.

Still, that’s not enough. As Teatro alla Flopera astutely pointed out, arts organizations need to make it as easy as possible for people to attend. Discount codes that appear in fleeting Instagram ads are not sufficient. Neither are deals embedded deep in FAQs on websites that are difficult to navigate. People are willing to deal with the headache of Ticketmaster for Beyoncé or Taylor Swift; not for something that may very well be out of their comfort zone.

It’s not true that people aren’t paying for live performances. Just think of the ticket sales of those pop stars, or any others. People are less willing to pay, though, for things that are unfamiliar—and that’s what makes it so hard to get new people in the door to the symphony, the opera house, and the ballet. You can see many shows at the Met for, like, $30. The price is often a barrier, but not always.

Subscribe now

It takes a particular kind of person—maybe that’s you!—to willingly seek out and expose themself to art forms with which they have no history. I have music teacher parents, grew up going to local musicals, and trained in ballet intensively. I’m predisposed to do this. It would be unrealistic of me to expect that this kind of behavior is normal or common in the mainstream.

Yes, it would be great to see more mainstream exposure of the classical arts that might result in more people going to experience live performances. But I’m not sure Black Swan, Maria, or Tár necessarily translated to ticket sales. It’s worth reflecting on the fact that a movie star’s comment—which was careless, but fair in some ways—has sparked a discourse about the arts that has become a bigger story than anything happening in the arts themselves. Why aren’t people talking about the rise of ABT soloist Jake Roxander? Why is pianist Yuja Wang not getting fashion editorials? Why does 30-year-old opera superstar Aigul Akhmetshina not have even a quarter of the audience as Olympian Eileen Gu?

It’s because their platforms of live performance are forecast less easily to wide audience. But they don’t have to be, if arts institutions are willing to open up a little bit more.

As for the ticket costs: the high production cost of live performance plays a role here, but there are tactics that can help. Pay-what-you-wish performances, as evidenced by the aforementioned Opera Philadelphia, are proven effective at filling theaters without having a negative financial impact, since ticket sales aren’t the biggest percentage of an arts organization’s budget, either. It’s the donors who have the power, and if organizations are willing to court what protestors consider dirty money—consider the frequent complaints about the David H. Koch Theater’s name—they should be even more willing to consider smaller brand partnerships that could provide cash while also getting more people in the door. Consider: the occasional free drink (in the case of NYCB’s Art Series).

A huge difference in the culture of the performing arts in the U.S. versus Europe is the social aspect. In Amsterdam, free wine was passed out in the lobby of two dance performances I attended. In Munich, the lengthy intermission allowed my mom and I to enjoy a full cheese plate. That, plus our two glasses of wine, cost what I have paid for two mediocre Malbecs in plastic cups at the Met.

People want to gather. People want to experience things IRL. But arts institutions are not making their lobbies a natural third space for those who hover at the very edge of curiosity. There’s a huge opportunity for them—now, at the end of this discourse—to let more people in if they can understand the new tactics they must employ to reach this total addressable market. It doesn’t matter how good a product is if you can’t get it in front of the people who don’t even know that they want it.

Here’s the news you need to know in the world of art and culture.

The New York Philharmonic has announced its 2026-2027 season—the first led by incoming artistic and music director, Gustavo Dudamel. I do have to give the Phil a hand for this branding. Bold and exciting! Highlights include an appearance by Marina Abramović, guest stars Yo-Yo Ma, Lang Lang, Yuja Wang, Joshua Bell, and more, Get Out and Amadeus in concert, and several Young People’s Concerts.

After withdrawing from the Kennedy Center, Philip Glass will premiere his new symphony, “Lincoln,” with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood on July 5. The BSO is expanding its beloved summer music festival by an extra day in order to perform the work.

New Rembrandt just dropped. Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum confirmed the authenticity of a painting, which it just attributed to the Dutch artist. Vision of Zacharias in the Temple (1633) had disappeared from the public view after an individual purchased it in 1961, but it was recently turned over to the museum for analysis, Le Monde reported. It is now available for all to view it there.

The National Symphony Orchestra’s executive director, Jean Davidson, just quit. She told the New York Times she started looking for a new job “months ago,” given the Trump administration’s hand in the ongoing Kennedy Center turmoil, though she had intended to stay in her role till 2031 to celebrate the orchestra’s 100th anniversary. She’s headed to the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills.

I do feel for the longtime patrons of the Kennedy Center who, as the NYT reports, are mourning its imminent closure and wondering where they will now get their cultural fix. But there is a positive here: smaller venues and organizations, like the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and the D.C.-based Shakespeare Theater Company have seen an uptick in their ticket sales as people have boycotted Kennedy Center shows, or looked for alternatives as programs have canceled.

After 144 years, the central tower of Sagrada Familia—Antoni Gaudí’s Barcelona masterpiece, the tallest church in the world—has finished construction. The chief architect told The Guardian is was a “joyful day.”

Here’s another way opera companies are getting people interested: setting up shop in unexpected places. That’s the strategy of West Australian Opera’s Secret Opera project, which brings performances to locations like IKEA and shopping malls, The Guardian reports.

Eight more news items below the paywall, including a shakeup at a major U.S. orchestra.

Read more

My cat died suddenly, at home—a cardiac event that could not have been anticipated—a week after Valentine’s Day, and I’m thinking about why grief draws so many of us to create beautiful things.

The sadness in Tchaikovsky’s score comes in through his use of the celesta—a haunting instrument that also comes in at the very end of Shostakovich’s fourth—and his surge of strings in the widely admired pas de deux. It’s not a sad ballet, at least not until you think about what it represents: a departure, a transformation, a place to which you can never return.

Clara (or Marie) departs from the Land of the Sweets every time, but every year I come back to watch her do it again. It’s in this way that the magic stays alive. It could be that in creating something beautiful, the artist not only captures an object of loss, but gains control over it.

“Can the beautiful be sad? Is beauty inseparable from the ephemeral and hence from mourning?” Julia Kristeva writes in her 1992 meditation Black Sun. “Or else is the beautiful object the one that tirelessly returns following destruction and wars in order to bear witness that there is survival after death, that immortality is possible?” A beautiful object seems to be a creation so often born through death—figurative or literal—which exists because of devastation, rather than in spite of it. “…beauty,” Kristeva says, “emerges as the admirable face of loss, transforming it in order to make it live.”

I wish I could remember more from the college course I took my final semester on the poetry of mourning, but I was 21 and yet to be inured to the various shapes of grief I’d later encounter. I remember, though, “Lycidas” and “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”—elegies which have, in effect, served as indurate monuments.

How many works of art are unassuming effigies? “According to many accounts,” Peter M. Sacks writes in The English Elegy, “the origins of architecture, sculpture, and even dance are essentially funerary. So, too, traditional narratives point to loss as the mother of the following, more specifically poetic, inventions: Orpheus’s introduction of song, in mourning for the dead Linus, the blinded, love-torn Daphnis’s invention of pastoral poetry; Apollo’s frustrating derivation of the laurel, sign of poethood. The list could be longer, but it should at least include the invention of that most elegiac of instruments, the pipe or flute, by Pan, the patron god of pastoral and of elegy.”

When I am holding my cat’s body I feel we are a Pietà. This is perhaps a dramatic, even sacrilegious comparison that comes to mind but the long hours I’ve spent in art museums have provided me with this reference to graft to my shock and pain. It is helpful, sometimes, to have a model for suffering, which finds in its contours a few passages for light.

Comparison is something I seek when I ask Claude, in a moment of stark emotional isolation, if there are any works of literature about the sudden loss of a beloved cat. I am desperate to find someone who has put into words more beautiful than mine the grief I’ve only recently been bestowed. I don’t find much but instead think of Sigrid Nunez’s inversion of Carl Sandburg’s poem, “The cat came in on little fog feet,” in her novel What You Are Going Through, a novel about loss. Then, the opening passage of The Friend, another Nunez loss novel, describing women who cried so much they psychosomatically lost their vision. Then, the epigraph of that novel, from my other favorite author, Natalia Ginzburg: “You have to realize that you cannot hope to console yourself for your grief by writing.”

This is, of course, what I’m trying to do here. Instead, I know I must live with it, and find, in the beautiful things I actively seek, how the depth of this sadness permeates walls which may not have previously seemed porous. I am the one who is changed, transformed, and can no longer return, and I step into my new self with hesitation and tenderness.

Here’s what you need to know in the world of art and culture.

Louvre boss Laurence des Cars has officially resigned, and in her place Christophe Leribault has been appointed to the position. This is not the first time that Leribault has taken on de Cars’s role; in 2021, he took over her post at the Musée D’Orsay (which she left to become president of the Louvre). He’s an 18th-century art expert who was most recently the head of the Château du Versailles. Le Monde speculates that French president Emmanuel Macron, who personally selected Leribault for this role, views him as the country’s cultural fireman; after all, when he took up the helm at Versailles in 2024, his predecessor’s reign there had “raised concerns.” Good luck to him!

London’s Barbican is also losing a major figure as Devyani Saltzman, the center’s director of arts and participation, has been ousted, her role reportedly made redundant after she was hired just in February 2024. She told The Art Newspaper that her departure was “due to an organizational restructure.” Her role will not be refilled.

Over the summer she had unveiled a big, five-year plan for the Barbican, reimagining programming through “ideas-led seasons that find synergies across its many artforms.” The timing of her dismissal is interesting: it was just in December that the City of London Corporation approved the Barbican’s renovation plan, which will cost more than £191 million (funded primarily by the City Corporation) and close the center from the end of June 2028 to June 2029.

The Barbican’s new CEO, Abigail Pogson, also just started her role in January. More than 170 cultural figures, including the writer Salman Rushdie, have since signed a letter expressing concern about Saltzman’s departure. “The apparent removal of a South Asian woman cultural leader from a key artistic leadership role, so soon after her appointment…sends a troubling message to racially minoritized artists, producers and audiences who saw her appointment as a rare and hopeful sign that leadership might finally begin to reflect the city the Barbican serves,” the letter says, in part.

Here’s another reason to get mad at Robert Moses. The infamous urban planner—and Power Broker—is the reason many of sculptor Isamu Noguchi’s most ambitious dreams for public artworks in New York City never became realized. Among them, a city block-sized “monument to communal, open-ended play” called Play Mountain. Visitors to the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City can learn more about these quashed dreams in the exhibit “Noguchi’s New York,” which runs through September 13, the New York Times reports.

Timothée Chalamet…come on now. In a Variety interview with Matthew McConaughey, the actor said, “I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera or things where it’s like, ‘Hey! Keep this thing alive,’ even though no one cares about this anymore.” Ironically, Chalamet, whose mother was a trained ballerina, previously said that his knowledge of this art form was integral to his performance in Marty Supreme. “It just felt like a nice mixture: to try to have the spirit of a Mike Tyson or Michael Jordan, but the physicality of a George Balanchine or Mikhail Baryshnikov,” he told USA Today.

I get what Chalamet means, but it’s unfortunate wording for someone in a position of power—or at least fame—to knock two art forms that funding challenges and other barriers to entry. If anything, it’s a juvenile kind of comparison.

You know who does seemingly care about ballet?* That would be Trump-appointed Kennedy Center president Richard Grenell, who is pissed off that San Francisco Ballet pulled out of its spring Kennedy Center engagement, after a growing petition calling for the company to do so. “Professional artists should perform for everyone — not just for people they agree with politically,” he told the New York Times (*not really). American Ballet Theatre wrapped up its production of The Winter’s Tale at the Center in February, but several other dance companies, including the Martha Graham Dance Company and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, have canceled forthcoming shows. “SF Ballet looks forward to performing for Washington, D.C., audiences in the future,” the company’s board of trustees said in a statement.

Tristan und Isolde is the buzziest thing at the Met Opera now, thanks to Yuval Sharon—who you may recall recently departed the Detroit Opera—and his bold vision. I am missing this one (tickets were expensive and I did not have faith in my ability to handle a five-hour evening show…I yearn for a matinee) but we’ll have plenty of other opportunities to see his work; this is just the start of his five-year partnership with the Met. It’s a big bet by the opera house, which seems to have paid off: the NYT reported that three weeks before the show opens on Monday, most of the seven performances were sold out. You can also see its simulcast in select movie theaters on March 21.

Later this Met season, I am looking forward to (and need to secure my tickets for) Innocence, an opera by the late Kaija Saariaho, which focuses on the aftermath of a school shooting. It clocks in at an hour and 50 minutes long with no intermission and opens April 6. Tickets start at just $35.

The Met’s 2026/2027 season was also recently announced. Notable works include Jenůfa, a bold Czech opera that’s a co-production with London’s Royal Opera House, a new production of Macbeth by director Louisa Proske, and Lincoln in the Bardo, an opera based on George Saunders’s book by the same name, by composer Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek. I’m also really excited for Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Delila; this production will feature the buzzy mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina, known for her Carmen.

More news below the paywall:

Read more

“Solitude” is one of several Ratmansky ballets that he choreographed in response to—and continued anguish regarding—the Russia-Ukraine War. Ratmansky, a onetime artistic director of the Bolshoi, came to the U.S. in 2008, where he found a home at ABT and then New York City Ballet. His parents and many close family members remain in Ukraine; he is staunchly anti-Putin, so much so that the Bolshoi is illegally performing his works without credit or royalties. That war continues, and so too does Ratmansky’s artistic activism. But recently, he has a new target: Trump.

With nearly two decades spent living in the U.S., of course the celebrated choreographer, 57, would have plenty of thoughts about our political reality. His latest ballet—the 500th in New York City Ballet’s repertoire—is his most directly focused on this country. “The Naked King,” a one-act narrative ballet, is equally inspired by anti-Trump “No Kings” rallies and the opera that provides its score, Jean Françaix’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes Suite” (based on the Hans Christian Andersen tale of the same name).

The plot goes like this: a group of three swindlers offer a vain king clothing that is magnificent and “invisible to those who are either incompetent or stupid.” The king’s entourage, not wanting to appear so, encourage the king to accept them. This is how the king ends up naked, with everyone around him ignoring that reality until a young boy (a student from the School of American Ballet) blurts out: “The king is naked!”

It’s a ballet rich in physical comedy. The king (played on different nights by Andrew Veyette and Craig Salstein) is King George-esque, precious yet bumbling in his movements. He wears a fat suit. He is ignorant of the fact that his sunglasses-wearing queen is having an affair with one of his entourage right under his nose. He is, ultimately, a clown.

Does this make for an effective ballet? I’m not entirely sure. The king dances, albeit comedically, and the three swindlers have the virtuosity of Romeo and his friends in Kenneth MacMillan’s production of Romeo and Juliet. They are cat-like, or at least, Cats-like. The queen (Miriam Miller and Emily Kikta) is all leg and pout. With her sunglasses, she brings to mind Yzma of The Emperor’s New Groove; perhaps a silly coincidence. The dancing is layered and lovely as Ratmansky’s work so often is, but it’s the story and its rather obvious humor that carry it through. A far cry from “Solitude.”

It was the favorite piece of my companion for the night (a non-ballet-goer), and I suspect, by the uproarious applause, that of many others in the theater. It was the final night of NYCB’s Art Series, and the promenade was stuffed, in particular, with young people after the show, enjoying beers, bourbon, and Absolute Tabasco Lemonade (surprisingly decent).

The Art Series is one of the best things that New York City does each year; with tickets priced at $54 for the whole theater, the best seats sell quickly, but still, the markdown presents a huge opportunity for those who don’t typically go to the theater. I went to each night of the series. The theater was filled each time. There were so many boyfriends in tow.

Of course, this is marketing, to a degree. Lower the barrier of entry to the ballet, sweeten the deal with free (undoubtedly sponsored) drinks after the show, and throw in a DJ. You would not believe the line for $18 wine during the first of two intermissions. Even with the price cuts to tickets, I am fairly confident the company netted more from each of these evenings than it will for its late-in-the-season programming of Balanchine’s “Diamonds” and Robbins’s “Dances at a Gathering.” With the more accessibly priced fourth tier not open for that program, I’m uncertain even I will attend.

But back to the actual show. “The Naked King” is ultimately not a ballet that is altogether inspired or refined in my view, though it may do something more important. With its fairly lowbrow comedy, outlandish costumes, easy-to-follow narrative structure, and overt, direct political commentary, Ratmasky proves something to the audience members who may not be as brushed up on their dance history as those who could reference the anti-war ballet “The Green Table” (1932) or even any of his anti-Putin pieces: that ballet is relevant and that it has something to say about the rapidly changing world around us, despite any assumptions one could make about its stuffiness or highfalutin nature. It is, after all, an art—and art must have the capability to react and reflect.

New York City Ballet isn’t done trying new things. In its current production of Sleeping Beauty, the role of Carabosse—the evil fairy—has been taken on by a male-identifying dancer for the first time, Gia Kourlas reported for the New York Times. It’s a caricature-driven, dramatic role, not that unlike the role of the witch in the classical ballet La Sylphide. Coincidentally, when I saw Bayerisches Staatsballett’s production of this work in Munich in November, that role, too, was played by a male-identifying dancer; the program included a meditation on gender and ballet when it comes to these kinds of parts.

Taylor Stanley, a principal dancer who uses he/they pronouns, first advocated for this part in 2023 (and was told no). So they went directly to Peter Martins, NYCB’s former director who choreographed the company’s version of Sleeping Beauty. Martins gave his blessing. This role has been played by men at other companies, the NYT notes.

I feel very fortunate that I’ll be seeing Stanley when I go to Sleeping Beauty on Wednesday (as well as Mira Nadon’s debut as Aurora). It seems like he’s put a lot of thought into his interpretation of the role. As a queer, nonbinary person of color, Stanley identifies with Carabosse’s experience on the outskirts of society; she’s not like every other fairy. They say:

I’m drawing from my own experiences and feelings of otherness, of being marginalized. It’s knowing that worth and making sure that that’s a constant now in my life over the way that I am perceived. That is also maybe what Carabosse is teaching me: that really no one else’s opinion matters except for mine because I know that my power is within me.

Merde to Stanley on their next two performances in this role!

Pretty cool: Opera Philadelphia—which you may recall has a wildly successful pay-what-you-wish ticketing program—earlier this month premiered the first opera by Michael R. Jackson, the playwright behind the Tony-winning A Strange Loop. Even more interesting: Complications in Sue, which is based on a story by Justin Vivian Bond (who also stars in the show), will feature music by 10 different composers. The opera is ambitious, telling the story of a woman’s whole life across 10 scenes. Fashion designer Jonathan Anderson, who seems to have more hours a day than anyone else, is behind the costumes, the New York Times reports.

Sacre bleu!!! The Louvre just can’t get a break. Last week, two longtime employees were both taken into police custody as they were suspected of being in a major ticketing fraud and then the museum also flooded, damaging the a ceiling painted by Charles Meynier in 1819. There was no structural damage to the ceiling, Le Monde reports.

As cities grow more and more expensive, how can artists manage to survive? Here’s one solution: Artists in San Francisco are donating the properties they purchased decades ago—in now-gentrified, far more pricy neighborhoods—to community land trusts that allow them to be sold way below market rate to other artists, the New York Times reports. Other organizations in the Bay Area are buying buildings vacated by tech companies and turning them into affordable work spaces for artists.

Artists, after all, have a huge impact on the economic performance and overall desirability of a city. But too often, they’re priced out of the neighborhoods they played a huge role in building. “We have to look at artists as economic contributors,” says Ken Ikeda, CEO of the Community Arts Stabilization Trust, “because it’s been an uphill battle for us to shift the cultural perspective around how arts add value to a city.” This trend, he adds, is also building in Denver, Minneapolis, Austin, and other places across the U.S.

Read more

You might be startled to see just how many incredible ballets, operas, and symphonies are available to watch for free, if only you search the right thing. Just the other day, I watched Diana Vishneva and Sergei Polunin’s 2014 Giselle. I’ve returned often to the Paris Opera Ballet’s production of Jerome Robbins’ Glass Pieces. We are almost too fortunate to be able to watch Gillian Murphy and Angel Corella in a 2005 Swan Lake. (I agree heartily with a commenter who called it “the gold standard” for the ballet).

You could also invite friends to dress up and watch the Paris-Bastille Opera’s Carmen or La Scala’s Tristan und Isolde.

There are manifold reasons to experience these shows live, in the company of thousands of others—watching to see how a performer will pull off a particularly tricky turn, waiting for intermission to whisper your early takes, and, of course, nosily eyeing all the other patrons in the theater for fashion inspiration or assumption-making about their inner worlds. But what’s most important is having access to these arts regardless of your finances or location. It may very well be the case that the arts are more available to you thank you may realize.

More and more artists are pulling out of their Kennedy Center performances. Most recently, the composer Philip Glass (a favorite of this newsletter)—who just celebrated his 89th birthday—canceled the debut of his 15th symphony, “Lincoln,” which was scheduled for June. He said in a statement, per the Associated Press:

Symphony No. 15 is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, and the values of the Kennedy Center today are in direct conflict with the message of the Symphony. Therefore, I feel an obligation to withdraw this Symphony premiere from the Kennedy Center under its current leadership.

The Center’s vice president of public relations responded, “We have no place for politics in the arts, and those calling for boycotts based on politics are making the wrong decision,” which is as stupid and incorrect a statement as Sydney Sweeney recently telling Cosmopolitan that because she is “in the arts” she is “not a political person” and is “not here to speak on politics.” Babe, art is politics…

Anyway, soprano Renee Fleming, who previously served as the Center’s artistic adviser, withdrew from two May performances “due to a scheduling conflict,” and the Martha Graham Dance Company announced it would be skipping the Center on its centennial tour (though it didn’t give a direct reason why).

The Washington National Opera previously announced that it would be leaving the Center., and now we know where it’s going—George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium (for its March productions of Treemonisha and The Crucible).

On top of all this, Trump announced on Truth Social that the Kennedy Center will close on July 4 for a two-year-long renovation. So far, details are scant. I guess this does make it easier for artists and performing arts groups to opt out of the venue altogether…

The Dallas Opera and the San Diego Opera are enjoying some recent spoils: The latter just announced a landmark $4.5 million gift, which is split with the San Diego Symphony, while the Dallas Opera secured a $25 million challenge grant from the O’Donnell Foundation. This is huge: with an additional $29.5 million that the company raised on its own, this grant will help more than double the company’s endowment, which means it will have the funds for more ambitious projects. We’ll keep an eye on what happens here.

You know who is not doing so well? That would be the Metropolitan Opera, which just announced that it would enact layoffs, cut exec salaries, and postpone an upcoming new production, saving the company $15 million this fiscal year and $25 million the next. You may recall that the Met just entered a tentative $200 deal with Saudi Arabia a few months ago, for which it was heavily criticized (fair). While this deal was intended to be real lifeline for the company, Met director Peter Gelb’s decision to enact cuts now points to some hesitation (though he said he was confident that the tentative deal would successfully close, though “the Saudis have had to recalibrate their budgets because of their own economic concerns,” the New York Times reported).

The Met does have other plans to potentially shore up some cash: it could sell the naming rights to its theater and it could sell the two massive Chagall murals in its lobby (valued at $55 million), with the condition that they stay in place—a buyer would get a donation plaque promoting their philanthropic work.

Amid these financial struggles, the Met is also reportedly considering reviving its retired 2009 production of “Carmen,” after the ongoing dispute about Carrie Cracknell’s 2023 production, which protesters interrupted in November. As it turns out, in the fall, the Met recently made changes to this production (removing some set pieces and restaging a bit) that displeased the original production team so much that everyone but an assistant stage director asked that their names be dropped from the program. Gelb said the changes were financially driven and saved the Met $300,000.

I would be remiss to talk about the news without acknowledging the violence that ICE has inflicted, and continues to inflict, in Minneapolis. It’s heartening to see that several major arts institutions, including the Walker Art Center and Minneapolis Institute of Art participated in a general strike on January 23. A long list of galleries and museums across the U.S. also participated on the January 30 general strike.

Gustavo Dudamel, who may very well be considered the Leonard Bernstein of our time (at least according to NY Philharmonic supporter Alec Baldwin), is expanding his influence beyond Lincoln Center, even before he takes over as music and artistic director of that company in the fall. After a successful show at Radio City Music Hall, he announced last week that the orchestra would start playing operas at Carnegie Hall. It’s all a part of his mission to grow the reach of the company. “We are starting with Radio City, which is a place the Philharmonic hasn’t played,” he told the New York Times. “We are doing opera at Carnegie Hall. We are keeping and enriching the park concerts, but even more, we are trying to connect with the cultural life of different neighborhoods.”

More arts news below the paywall…

Read more

Then, after intermission, Noseda returned to the stage and cued the woodwinds. which erupted, along with the xylophone, into a cry. Soon, the strings joined in, thrumming in a percussive beat reminiscent of the overture of Rossini’s 1816 Il barbiere di Siviglia. From that point on, the hour-long symphony—Shostakovich’s fourth—transforms cinematically, dipping into valleys and blooming into brass-heavy peaks. Its end is evocative in its restraint, as the orchestra settles into a deep hum. It’s a kind of sonic fog, through which cuts the mystical sound of a celesta.

There’s something light here: is it a sense of hope emerging? Or is it the last bit of brightness before the dark prevails? The silence after this is as important to the score as what Shostakovich noted himself. Noseda’s arms linger in the air for several seconds before he allows them to float back down to his sides.

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) finished his fourth symphony in 1936, but did not present it to the world until 1961. It was shortly before its scheduled debut that Communist Party officials showed up to a rehearsal of the Leningrad Philharmonic, causing Shostakovich to cancel its performances. It only earlier that same year that Stalin openly decried his opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.

Shostakovich’s next symphony, which debuted in 1937, took a more conservative, less experimental approach. It won him back favor with the administration—though Shostakovich’s relationship with the Soviet government remained contentious and fear-driven until his death. “There can be no music without an ideology,” Shostakovich, at 25, told the New York Times in 1931.

When Shostakovich’s fourth symphony made its orchestral premiere in 1961, Soviet and Western critics considered it a success. Stalin had been dead for eight years.

Since the Trump administration 2.0 came into power last January, we’ve seen blatant infringements on the arts: the cancellation of existing NEA grants and repositioning of funding for America-first projects, the takeover of the Kennedy Center, growing executive branch pressure on the Smithsonian, the termination of federal support for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the elimination of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, and so on.

What works of art aren’t getting made because of this? Which are being shelved? These are questions for us to consider.

Now, the news.

In case you missed it, a musician went viral last week after not getting a job at the Knoxville Symphony despite winning a blind audition for the role of principal clarinetist. James Zimmerman shared his side of the story on X, saying that the reason he was refused the job was because of his “ousting from the Nashville Symphony six years ago for resisting DEI.” He says he is suing the Knoxville Symphony for “a year’s salary plus $25k for the 100 hours I spent practicing for the audition.”

Trump allies (including Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon) jumped on the story in support of Zimmerman. Of course, his reference to being fired from the Nashville Symphony for being “canceled” and “resisting DEI” should be examined more critically. Journalist Aaron Egger of The Bulwark broke down the full picture.

Notably, the reason Zimmerman was ousted from his prior job was because of interpersonal conflict with Black members of the orchestra, which escalated into Zimmerman sending a five-page email sources described as “manic,” which resulted in the Nashville Symphony hiring armed guards, placing Zimmerman on immediate leave, and firing him a week later. Seems like a valid reason to not pass the reference stage of a job interview process

Also in orchestral news is the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, which recently sent a cease-and-desist letter to violinist Esther Hwang, 30, who in December decided to break her NDA, which she signed as a part of a 2019 settlement regarding a sexual-assault complaint she filed against a senior member of the orchestra. The VSO’s settlement did not constitute an admission of liability, as its legal representative said at the time that the conduct did not occur in the workplace, the Vancouver Sun reported.

The same day that Hwang’s story—breaking her NDA in the Globe & Mail—was published, she also sent an extensive letter to the musicians of the VSO, which is now publicly available through oboist Katherine Needleman’s newsletter. “It is important for me to share my story because I do not want anyone else in this orchestra to experience what I went through,” Hwang wrote. “Speaking up is difficult, but I hope that by sharing my experience, it can bring awareness and meaningful change.”

The VSO’s board of directors and president and CEO Angela Elster responded with its own letter, saying that the orchestra is dropping its legal threat against Hwang and will no longer use NDAs in sexual assault cases unless desired by the complainant.

The Dance Theater of Harlem is fighting for the right to its history. Gothamist reported last week that the ballet company, which was founded in 1969, argued in civil court Monday that the heirs of its onetime photographer illegally donated 16 boxes of material to DTH’s former archivist and principal dancer, Judy Tyrus, and her nonprofit ChromaDiverse. As a result of an argument regarding Tyrus’s 2021 book Dance Theatre of Harlem: A History, A Movement, A Celebration, ChromaDiverse argued that DTH must stop its usage of all of these photographs—which means that it can’t use them for licensing (a not-insignificant source of revenue) or marketing. A court decision has not yet been announced.

Below the paywall: Museum unrest, the latest with the Kennedy Center, the ballet school facing major lawsuits, and more.

Read more

I could write a screed here, which I fear would end up sounding glib, about my inherent belief in the continued importance of arts in these uncertain times et cetera et cetera.

Instead I will say that I strongly believe that time spent taking in a live performance or beholding a painting in the flesh is never time wasted, and that doing so is one of the best methods to affirm a bit of hope within you or feel connected to the people around you—even the strangers sitting in front of you in a theater. I am still riding the high of Gillian Murphy’s final Swan Lake performance in July and how invigorated I felt to witness something spectacular with a sea of other people who, just like me, couldn’t really believe what they were seeing.

This newsletter will continue to be a place for us to follow the comings and goings in the world of arts and culture, centering, always, this core belief: that the arts are essential to our humanity and, as such, a vital part of our fast-changing world.

The Metropolitan Opera is courting its next generation(s) of patrons. Last year, it trimmed its Julie Taymor-directed, English-language version of Mozart’s The Magic Flute to a tight 90 minutes, no intermission, the New York Times reported. The opera—which traditionally runs around three hours—is the Met’s annual holiday-season appeal to kids, though it keeps evolving. Not only was this most recent production the shortest its ever been—it also included a 6-7 reference for all the Gen-Alpha attendees.

For the past decade, this strategy has worked. The Met told the NYT that in that time span, the production has averaged an 85 percent paid audience (just under the notable 87 percent it saw for its successful Kavalier & Clay run).

The Magic Flute isn’t explicitly billed as a production for kids (when I attended two years ago, I, having not paid all that much attention when buying cheap tickets, discovered only during the show that it was in English and had no intermission). But aside from these aims of artistic accessibility, there also lies this fact: it is staggeringly cheaper than New York City Ballet’s The Nutcracker next door. (Compare a family circle ticket around $30 to $40 to one around $120 to $150).

Of course, to bolster its audiences, the Met needs to court more than just Gen Alpha and their millennial and Gen X parents. That’s why it recently invited about 70 influencers, with the help of influencer marketing firm Relay, to enjoy a night at the opera, the New York Times also reported. Together, they have a combined audience of around 16 million people. Some influencers were paid, while others were simply invited to a show—with no content guidelines given or coverage required.

The most high profile of these influencers? Taryn Delanie Smith and Tiffani Singleton of the “We’re Your Girls” podcast, who filmed an episode in the opera house, got to wear costumes from Met productions, and who attended (and promoted) the Met’s much-anticipated New Year’s Eve premiere of its new production of Bellini’s I Puritani (which has gotten pretty great reviews, particularly for its star-quality singers).

The opera subreddit is skeptical of this move, but honestly, I think it’s right on the mark. The influencers’ content, the NYT notes, is “a far cry from a critic pointing out an ill-conceived plot line, an orchestra struggling to keep pace or a missed note.” That could sell seats.

By now, I am sure you have seen what the Trump administration has done to the performing arts venue formerly known as the Kennedy Center. (If not, it’s that it changed its name to the “Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts”).

Well, it turns out that the Center changed its board rules months ago in May, which now state that only trustees appointed by the president can vote on decisions—barring the input of congressional board members, the Washington Post reported exclusively. This could conflict with the Center’s charter, as an act of Congress did establish the Kennedy Center in 1958 with the National Cultural Center Act (signed by President Eisenhower). It does seem, however, like there is a lot of confusion among these board members about what voting rights they had before this change was even made. Basically, this story is far from over, especially as several members of Congress have vowed to use various legal measures to fight against this name change.

In the meantime…more and more performers are pulling out of their slated Kennedy Center shows. Drummer Chuck Redd canceled a Christmas Eve performance, the dance company Doug Varone and Dancers pulled out an April show, and the jazz group The Cookeres also withdrew from a New Year’s Eve performance. The banjoist Randy Barrett, who has a Kennedy Center show in January, however, told the Associated Press that he disagrees with these decisions, and that “our tribalized country needs more music and art, not less. It’s one of the few things that can bring us together.”

As we have previously discussed, attendance at the Center is down across the board. The Kennedy Center’s musicians weighed in on the state of things in their latest bulletin, Slipped Disc reported:

When we come together as a community in support of art and music, we choose connection. The energy of a full concert hall empowers artists and audiences alike—the audience isn’t just observing — they’re an essential partner that makes a performance come alive. Music has always been a force for unity and connection and we remain committed to that ideal.

We are grateful to our audience who continues to support the arts, who is present to relish the same fine music-making they have always valued, and who helps ensure the longevity of the arts institutions of the Kennedy Center.

All eyes are on the Tate as the museum searches for its next director, after longtime head Maria Balshaw will officially step down in the spring. The stakes for her replacement are pretty high: an anonymous employee, who was involved in a recent strike, told the Museums Association that the institution was facing an “existential crisis.” A Tate spokesperson told the outlet that this year, employees will see a three-percent pay increase for most roles, while directors will see a zero percent increase. Two our of three of the unions that represent workers at the Tate have accepted the pay increases, and negotiations are ongoing.

The Times’s chief art critic, Rachel Campbell-Johnston, proposes there is a bigger issue at hand: the Tate, she says, just can’t compete with the bigger museums in Europe and the U.S. in terms of its collection. And while Balshaw has had a number of wins—expanding the Tate’s membership to 150,000, staging some blockbuster shows, and standing firm in the resolution to not accept oil money (compared to the British Museum’s reliance on BP)—the four-museum institution is indisputably struggling.

People are also mad at the British Museum for its long-term loan program, through which it will loan artifacts with former British colonies for up to three years, Artnet reported. As we have discussed before, the British Museum has a lot more red tape and restrictions when it comes to loans compared to, say, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which in recent years has joined the push to repatriate looted art and artifacts.

The British Museum, of course, has such a reputation for looted items that it has dedicated a webpage to its “contested objects,” the most famous of which are the Parthenon Marbles and the Benin Bronzes.

Speaking with The Telegraph, British Museum director Nicholas Cullinan called the new loan program an act of “cultural diplomacy” and added: “When we lend objects from the British Museum’s collection, things that come from Britain, back to their source, it can be incredibly powerful, it can be incredibly enlightening.” In December, the museum loaned 80 artifacts to Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya.

In an op-ed published in Hyperallergic, academic Emiline Smith, whose research focuses on the trafficking of cultural and natural resources, decried the program, writing:

Long-term loans are not restitution. They do not acknowledge historical wrongdoing, nor do they restore agency to source communities. Instead, they reinforce a museum’s claim of ownership over objects it has no moral (and often legal) right to possess. Under this model, formerly colonized nations must ask permission to temporarily access their own heritage, accept conditions dictated by a British institution, and bear the financial and logistical burdens of care, while the museum retains ultimate control.

She added that, if the museum really cared about decolonization, “it would use its considerable influence to advocate for legislative change rather than clinging to outdated laws.”

Some better museum news: Guggenheim Bilbao scrapped its plans to build a satellite location in Spain’s protected Urdaibai biosphere reserve after a vote by the museum’s board of trustees, ArtNews reports. The project faced opposition, particularly from environmental groups, since the Guggenheim Foundation first began exploring the expansion in 2008.

Also, last month, Libya reopened its national museum, 14 years after the fall of dictator Muammar Gaddafi. The museum’s former head of antiquities, Mustafa Turjman, told The Guardian that he hoped the reopened collections would help inspire the country, which remains politically divided in two governments, eastern and western. “The most important thing is teaching the mind,” he said. “Teaching how to respect time and history, and how to respect others, and to be involved in the world.”

It will be very interesting to see where Yuval Sharon goes once he leaves the Detroit Opera, where he has served as artistic director since 2020, at the end of the 2026 season. The primary reason he’s cutting his contract short? The company just doesn’t have the funding for Sharon to realize his bold—and often avant-garde—artistic visions, the New York Times reported. Those of us in New York, however, have two productions to look forward to: Sharon’s Met debut in March with Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” and his take on the Ring cycle next year.

The NEA grants for “America250” are have been awarded and include recipients such as:

• The Montgomery Symphony Association (to “support the world premiere of a new orchestral work by composer Dr. Nkeiru Okoye honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.”)

• Flint Institute of Music (to “support a commissioned orchestral fanfare honoring Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette” by composer Jonathan Bailey Holland)

• Carolina Ballet (to “support costume costs for performances of George Balanchine’s Stars & Stripes”)

• Grand Canyon Chamber Music Festival (to “support the commission of new works of music honoring Chief Joseph, Sitting Bull, and Sacagawea”)

• Ballet North Texas (to “support a lecture, demonstration, and performance inspired by Maria Tallchief”)

• Dallas Black Dance Theatre (to “support a restaging of ‘Bodies as Site of Faith and Protest,’ set to the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech ‘We Shall Overcome,’ and choreographed by Tommie-Waheed Evans)

• and the American String Teachers Association (to “support newly commissioned works for youth choir and string orchestra to celebrate three American women heroes”), among others ▲

The Whitney Museum has selected the 56 artists and groups that will compose its 2025 Biennial, including the actor and writer Julio Torres, the New York Times reported. Curators Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer selected the group of artists, 60 percent of whom are millennials. Guerrero told the NYT that the show will explore themes “including infrastructure and kinship to understand how artists connect with the world and sometimes reject it, questioning the role that the United States has in global affairs.” You can see the full list of artists here.

The Louvre has closed as its workers have gone on strike, Le Monde reports. Staff are protesting working conditions, the state of which they’ve been very vocal about long preceding the infamous heist of its jewels. “We’re going to have a lot more strikers than usual,” Christian Galani of the CGT union told Le Monde Sunday evening. “Normally, it’s front-of-house and security staff. This time, there are scientists, documentarians, collections managers, even curators and colleagues in the workshops telling us they plan to go on strike.”

You have two opportunities to watch the Nutcracker without shelling out for live tickets. English National Ballet will stream its production on PBS Great Performances tonight (it will be streamable for free for 28 days after). You can also catch the Royal Ballet’s Nutcracker in select theaters December 21 and 22.

The Tate Museums’ director Maria Balshaw, who oversaw the Tate Modern and Tate Britain, is stepping down after nine years in her role, the New York Times reported.

The Guggenheim has a new award. Catherine Telford Keogh, a sculptor who uses found materials, is the first to win the $50,000 Jack Galef Visual Arts Award, which will be endowed biennially. She will use the money to support two projects: a solo show in Portland that “traces a history of instruments designed to measure, regulate, and discipline eating” and another that “examines contamination and microbial life in the Gowanus Canal,” ArtNews reported.

Across the pond, Nnena Kalu became the first neurodivergent artist to win the U.K.’s prestigious £25,000 Turner Prize. The Scottish abstract artist is autistic and has speech limitations which make art one of her primary modes of communication.

Many critics were surprised by the decision, as painter Mohammed Sami, who was shortlisted, seemed to be the frontrunner for the award, The Times reported.

London’s Barbican Centre, where I wept at the live-action My Neighbour Totoro by the Royal Shakespeare Company, will close in June 2028 for 12 months to complete a £451 million renovation, The Guardian reported.

Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum is expanding. It announced plans to open a satellite space in the southern Netherlands city of Eindhoven in the next six to eight years, ArtNews reported.

While Western museums have increasingly returned Benin bronzes to Nigeria in recent years, the country finds itself in an interesting situation: it doesn’t exactly have the right place to put them on display, the New York Times reported. This wasn’t always, the case, though. The sculptures were expected to go to Benin City’s recently opened Museum of West African Art, but Nigeria’s president transferred ownership of the bronzes in 2023 to Ewuare II, the country’s current oba (king), who comes from the royal family from which the precious objects were originally looted. Ewuare II wants to build a royal museum to put them on display, but for that, funds must be raised. For now, the bronzes are on view (and in storage) around the country, including the Benin City National Museum.

How is the conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra contending with…everything? Just fine for now it seems. Gianandrea Noseda told The Times that the orchestra hasn’t faced any interference in its programming from the Trump administration. But when asked if he feels like Shostakovich playing in the USSR his answer, he cheekily zips his mouth shut.

The leader of the protest at the Met Opera’s late November performance of Carmen released a letter apologizing to the artists and restating the protest’s aims—asking the board of directors of Lincoln Center to remove the late David Koch’s name from the neighboring theater, OperaWire reported. Maybe not an effectively executed protest if you have to explain its aims so many times afterward!

The Will Sharpe-starring Amadeus miniseries is finally coming to Sky on December 21. Will this get more people into Mozart? Maybe! “A short-form version of the Queen of the Night’s jaw-dropping aria from The Magic Flute features in episode five,” musical director Benjamin Holder told The Guardian. “I’d like to think that watching that will make people go: ‘Wow, that’s pretty epic.’”

The Dayton Ballet has decided to unionize under the American Guild of Musical Artists and will now begin the collective bargaining process, Dayton Daily News reported.

Lithuanian’s National Ballet, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary, is trying to boost its profile under its new artistic director, Jurgita Dronina, the New York Times reported. The company just produced a contemporary version of Coppélia, choreographed by Martynas Remeikis, and is working on a new Paquita by Manuel Legris.

Here’s something especially notable: the company has an average seat occupancy of 97 percent. And here’s my prediction: if we don’t see this company at New York City Center’s Fall for Dance in 2026, it will undoubtedly make it by 2027.

Can you believe that France has put more of Empress Josephine’s jewels on display? “Dynastic Jewels: Power, Prestige and Passion, 1700-1950,” a new exhibition at Paris’s Hôtel de la Marine (a museum, not a hotel), was actually supposed to feature Empress Eugénie’s now-stolen pearl tiara. But the show must go on—and it will, through April 6, Le Monde reports. ▲

It seems we are getting closer to learning the “cause” of Sasha Suda’s termination at the Philadelphia Art Museum. A new filing by the museum accuses the former director of misappropriating funds and increasing her salary multiple times despite a lack of approval from the board. Suda’s attorney denied these allegations to ArtNews.

Former Metropolitan Museum of Art president and CEO Daniel H. Weiss has been named as her replacement, the New York Times reported.

Alma Allen has officially been selected to represent the U.S. at the Venice Biennale, but if you read this newsletter you were well ahead of this news.

People keep falling into a water feature at Cairo’s newly opened Grand Egyptian Museum.

Protesters were removed from a recent Carmen show at the Met Opera after they got onto the stage, but it’s unconfirmed what they were protesting (the New York Times reports that one did denounce the late David H. Koch, whose name is inscribed on the neighboring dance theater that serves as New York City Ballet’s HQ. You may also recall that Extinction Rebellion protested NYCB earlier this year).

I did, however, see a video by Davidson Boswell, a comedian who says that he and his friends were disrupting the Met. In a video, he explains that the Met Opera is funded by the Koch brothers (David Koch died in 2019) and that this is the same money that supports the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025. He also says that the Met’s production of Carmen depicts an undocumented immigrant seducing an ICE agent, which is an interpretation that has never been explicitly expressed by director Carrie Cracknell. This production of Carmen debuted in 2023.

OperaWire editor David Salazar commented:

It’s a common misconception that people who go to the opera are stuffy and conservative elites. In New York City, that couldn’t be further from the truth. So ultimately, this entire action came off as dangerously performative.

UPDATE 11/28: Boswell shared a video of the protest and clarified its intentions. You can watch here.

Anyway…NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang and his wife have pledged a $5 million, multi-year donation to the San Francisco Opera, which seems to be doing very well with its production of The Monkey King. Looking at this, paired with the success of the Met’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, I fear I must suggest that action-oriented operas may get the Marvel-inclined into the audience…

I can’t believe that Matthew Bourne—the celebrated British choreographer known for his Swan Lake—didn’t take his first formal dance lesson until he was 21. His production of The Red Shoes is touring the UK through May.

You can’t just buy art, you have to acquire it, you idiot—per the Financial Times.

If any wealthy patrons would like to fund my attendance at New York City Ballet’s The Nutcracker this year, I would gladly accept. ▲

We don’t really know if the United States will make an appearance at the 2026 Venice Biennale—one of the biggest international art and architecture events, which happens every two years. In a way it’s kind of an Olympics of art: each country selects an artist (or a few) to represent it. In 2024, the artist Jeffrey Gibson became the first Indigenous artist to exhibit a solo show for the U.S.’s pavilion. Next year, there may not even be a U.S. pavilion.

Why’s that? It seems the financing has gone all wrong. In the U.S., the artist commission (plus additional costs like shipping) is covered only partially by government funding (typically, a $375,000 grant from the State Department), and the remaining hundreds of thousands—or even millions—in expenses must be covered through corporate sponsorship, private philanthropy, and institutional dollars. Months ago, the Department reportedly selected the sculptor Robert Lazzarini for the commission, but before the choice could even be announced, plans for institutional funding through the University of South Florida collapsed, the Washington Post reported. Lazzarini’s commission was supposed to be announced in September. The Biennale opens May 6.

The art industry intelligence platform Baer Faxt reported that Utah-born, Mexico-based sculptor Alma Allen will now represent the U.S. in Venice, though ArtNews’s sources say that the government can’t make this announcement until the shutdown is over. Whether this will actually be the case remains to be seen.

Maybe you already saw that the password for the Louvre’s security system at the time of the heist was “Louvre,” but it bears repeating. A report published last week also said that the museum’s administration, over decades, prioritized high-profile acquisitions over completing essential security upgrades, Le Monde reported. So far, we also know that one of the suspects is a 39-year-old motocross influencer who, at one time, was a security guard at Paris’s Centre Pompidou, the arts hub that is now closed for renovations until 2030, Le Parisien reported.

Amid all of this, the Louvre added its first contemporary female artist to its permanent collection, Le Monde reported. The Dutch-South African painter Marlene Dumas is known for her close-up, colorful portraiture. “Her work fits into a form of eternity and essentiality that are the very reason for the Louvre’s existence,” said Donatien Grau, adviser for contemporary programs at the museum.

Also in Paris: A major protest of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, which performed at the Philharmonie de Paris on Thursday, Le Monde reported. Four people have been arrested for disrupting the concert, including one man who lit and carried a flare through the auditorium. Palestine Action France claimed responsibility for the action, writing on Instagram: “In the face of the [Philharmonie de Paris’s] refusal to listen during an ongoing, proven genocide, we had no other choice: It was a moral duty to do everything possible to prevent the concert from going ahead.” The United Nations recently reported that Israel has rejected more than 100 aid requests since Gaza ceasefire earlier in October.

French culture minister Rachida Dati and Aurore Bergé, minister for gender equality, condemned the protest in a joint statement, calling the action antisemitic. The concert itself had higher security measures than usual, including the presence of both uniformed and plain clothes police.

The orchestra received a standing ovation and finished the concert with the Israeli national anthem, which the Philharmonie stressed to Le Monde in a statement, was not planned.

Philharmonie de Paris director Laurent Bayle told the paper: “It is troubling to observe how tensions around artistic projects are growing, and will surely continue to increase…intersecting with a multitude of social issues. The situation raises new questions about how institutions should justify their programming choices, as well as their ability to stand by them.”

Opera star Aigul Akhtmetshina released a statement after the protest, which may have been directed toward this protest, similar stories, or even the many recent controversies about programming Putin allies at opera houses worldwide. The concert pianist Anna Geniushene released a similar statement to Slipped Disc. Both musicians were born in Russia.

Akhtmetshina wrote, in part:

In these times it feels deeply wrong that artists constantly stand under pressure—because of politics, religion, nationality or simply because society needs somewhere to unload its frustration. Too often the easiest target becomes art. But our mission is the opposite of division. Even in the darkest times—we are here to bring people together.

She spoke out against the cancellation of artists on the basis of nationality, gender, race, identity, or politics. (One of those is starkly different than the others, I might point out.) She also pointed to a 1980 Unesco decree that “artistic creation must be protected from political pressure.” But this is not the exact phrasing of Unesco’s 1980 Recommendation Concerning the Status of the Artist. The 34-page statement doesn’t exactly talk about political pressure in this way, but says that member states have a “duty to protect, defend, and assist artists and their freedom of creation.”

This is a great ambition. But in practice, art is very often shaped by political pressure—or even used is one that does not hold up to the reality of the world in which we find ourselves because…where is the money coming from? You only have to look at the Trump administration’s crack down on arts funding and its agenda to promote patriotism through art, particularly ahead of the Semiquicentennial. Or Saudi Arabia’s multi-billion dollar investment in the arts.

We should always push for artistic freedom and the protection of artists. But we should not be naive enough to suggest that there never is political motivation behind artistic programming or commissions.

How do you get the Silicon Valley elite excited about ballet? San Francisco Ballet is betting on its rebrand to build on its audience. The company—which has the second biggest budget of any in the U.S., after New York City Ballet—just completed the rollout of its biggest rebrand in 15 years, for which it worked with design agency Burnkit and advertising agency The Shipyard and photography by Kristian Schuller.

The vivid imagery is distinctively contemporary, and leans into the idea of “innovation”—an unexpected but welcome choice for a centuries-old art form. “As one of the world’s preeminent ballet companies and an ambassador for the spirit of innovation and creativity in San Francisco and across the West Coast, SF Ballet’s brand cements a new era for us and evokes the look and feel of experiencing live dance of the highest caliber: dynamic, transcendent, and endlessly inspiring,” said executive director Branislav Henselmann in a press release.

Below the paywall: The Philadelphia Art Museum’s new legal battle, opera companies doing good, a very exciting ballet promotion, and more.

Read more

Last week, I saw BalletCollective’s fall program Echoes of the Unseen (review forthcoming) and Richard Move’s enchanting Martha@BAM: The 1963 Interview (review here). I also briefly lost my keys at BAM, so here I would like to thank the security team of the entire BAM complex who helped me in my moment of panic at 9:30 p.m. on Thursday.

I shared a book pick for November for ’s Content Corner. You can still sign up for the November McNally Editions book club (at the SoHo location), which I will be hosting, here. We are reading Thereafter Johnnie. I just remembered yesterday that I need to read The Sound and the Fury by next week for another book club of which I am a member. Wish me luck.

Time for the news.

Let’s check in on how the Louvre is doing after 80 percent of New York City residents (including me) dressed as jewel thieves for Halloween. French culture minister Rachida Dati said on Friday that the museum will get “anti-ramming devices” by the end of the year, according to Le Monde. Quick turnaround!

Dati added that the Louvre’s security measures, including a severe lack of cameras, are at least 20 years out of date. That may be why it was a “group of small-time criminals” who pulled off the heist, rather than members of a more organized crime ring, Le Monde also reported. The six suspects who are currently in custody are all “local people” and include a couple (ages 37 and 38) who share children. Millennials finally taking things into our own hands, I suppose. The jewels have yet to be uncovered.

Meanwhile, there was also a heist in the U.S. More than 1,000 objects were stolen from the storage facility of the Oakland Museum of California, the New York Times reported. The objects stolen varied: a majority were “common memorabilia such as political pins, award ribbons and souvenir tokens,” but missing artifacts include Indigenous woven baskets, carved walrus tusks, and a necklace by the late artist Florence Resnikoff.

Amid this apparent boon in museum heists, these institutions are continuing to contend with contentious collecting histories. The heirs of Jewish couple Hedwig and Frederick Stern have just sued the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation saying that a Van Gogh painting the museum purchased in 1956 was actually looted by Nazis, the New York Times reported. The original purchaser of the painting, Theodore Rousseau Jr., was an expert on Nazi-looted art, according to the lawsuit, and therefore, should have been able to determine the piece’s rightful ownership. The Met sold “Olive Picking” (1889) in 1972 to the Goulandris Foundation, which currently has it on display in Athens. The Met says that it had no knowledge of the painting’s prior ownership until “decades after” it left the museum collection.

Cairo’s Grand Egyptian Museum finally opened to the public today. The $1 billion project features nearly 50,000 artifacts, including treasures from the tomb of King Tutankhamun. According to the AP, the museum’s CEO, Ahmed Ghoneim, told reporters that it anticipates 7 million visitors a year (for context, the Met Museum welcomed more than 5.7 million visitors in FY2025, the Louvre saw 8.7 million visitors in 2024, and the British Museum had 6.4 million visitors that year).

Monocle’s Gulf correspondent Inzamam Rashid views the 20-year-in-the-making project with some skepticism. It’s clearly an attempt at soft power as Egypt reshapes its image on the global stage. He writes:

It allows Cairo to reframe the conversation from crisis to civilisation, from IMF loans to the legacy of the pharaohs. Indeed, who is this museum for? The ticket prices will certainly deter many Egyptians and the scale of the site feels designed for international tour groups rather than locals on an afternoon outing….The GEM is an extraordinary achievement, yes, but it’s also a reminder that modern Egypt is still negotiating its relationship with the recent past. Whether it becomes a living cultural institution or another monument to ambition will depend on what happens when the world’s cameras leave and the red carpets are rolled away.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I read last week about British choreographer Wayne McGregor’s new exhibition at Somerset House, Infinite Bodies. But my interest has since been piqued.

It uses an AI choreographic tool, AISOMA, developed with the help of Google Arts & Culture to essentially co-choreograph with visitors, using McGregor’s body of work as source material. You can watch him explain it in this video.

McGregor and the curators are very insistent on AI as a tool, rather than a one-and-done art-making machine. Honestly, this looks very cool, and is such an interesting way to introduce people to a choreographer’s style and signatures. The Guardian was impressed, too, but noted that to get the full impact, visitors should also see McGregor’s 3D dance film, On the Other Earth, showing nearby at Stone Nest.

This use of technology is a step in the right direction—it’s being used not only to make more dance more accessible to a wider audience, but it’s using interactivity and personalization to make it more understandable, and dare I say more exciting, to non-dancers. More of this!

Below the paywall: Opera’s misogyny problem, the backlash to a museum rebrand, and international authors to play attention to.

Read more