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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

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“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.

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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…

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Last night I saw Ballet Collective. Tonight I see Oh Mary.

Everyone* loves a heist. So much so that when a Picasso seemed to go missing in a small Spanish town outside of Grenada, locals jumped to play investigator. But lo, after a week, the authorities uncovered Still Life With Guitar—in its owner’s building, the New York Times reported. All that excitement for nothing!

*Well not everyone.

“Leave Laurence alone!” —the 50-some museum directors who signed a letter of support for Laurence des Cars, president of the Louvre, in light of the museum’s theft. Le Monde published the op-ed, which reads, in part:

Museums are places of transmission and wonder. They offer all visitors opportunities for contemplation and moments of joy. They allow us to learn from the past, to deepen our understanding of the present and to weave meaningful dialogues with the masterpieces they show. Museums allow us to see the world differently.

Le Figaro reported that des Cars tried to submit her resignation after the break-in, but the institution refused to accept it.

O mio Motomami. Will Rosalía get into opera on her forthcoming album? If her latest single, featuring Björk, Yves Tumor, a German-singing choir, and the London Symphony Orchestra, is any proof…maybe! “Berghain,” at the very least, is refreshingly original. (Rosalía is also a classically trained Flamenco singer).

Modern dance choreographer and founder of his eponymous company Mark Morris has been accused of discrimination—specifically mistreating Black dancers—in a new lawsuit, the New York Times reported. The plaintiff, Taína Lyon, started at the company in 2022, and in 2024, her contract was terminated. The suit also contains the account of another Black dancer Charlton Boyd, who danced with Morris’s company in the 1990s and early 2000s; Boyd says that Morris called him by a racial slur on a “regular” basis. Morris and the company deny all allegations.

Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration has donated more than 400 works of art by Indigenous women to Spain, where it will appear in multiple museums and institutions across Madrid. This move is part of the countries’ efforts to reckon with their shared history (of Spain colonizing Mexico) and to uplight the Indigenous women artists that have been far too often ignored or silenced, El País reports.

Why did Akram Khan, the choreographer perhaps most known for his rather progressive take on the ballet Giselle, choreograph a piece in Saudi Arabia? He tells The Times: “Every country has its issues. I have qualms about working in America with Trump but if you take a political stance does that mean you don’t go to America? For me it’s very much about wanting to make work that hopefully will be part of change. And the Saudis agreed to all my conditions. I mean, the fact that I asked for 14 women to dance on stage was a big ask.”

The piece, Thikra: Night of Remembering, which had a site-specific premiere in AlUla this year, debuted in London this week. Another nugget from this interview: Khan has delayed his Royal Ballet commission, Carnage and the Divine, which was set to go up over the summer. Instead, he’s developing a duet for principal Francesca Hayward and guest artist Jeffrey Cirio (who also performed in Tiler Peck’s show at New York City Center).

King Tut’s tomb is at risk of collapse, according ArtNews. Luckily, a study published earlier this year in Nature outlines some ways that researchers can safely reinforce it, which could help preservation efforts at other sites.

Which museum do you think will scoop up Hokusai’s “Great Wave?” The famous Japanese woodblock print will go up for auction at Sotheby’s next month along with other treasures from the Okada Museum of Art, as owner Kazuo Okada has a $50 million legal bill to pay off from a business dispute, the New York Times reported.

Composer John Adams, who is known for his 1987 opera Nixon in China, will not be creating a Trump opera. “Nixon may have had very dark parts to his personality, but he also had idealism and was capable of empathy. Trump has zero empathy,” he told The Times.

Art world films kind of feel like they are trending right now. Auction, which came out last year in France, depicts the discovery of a Nazi-looted artwork by Egon Schiele; it comes to New York City’s Film Forum today, ArtNews reported. Mubi’s timely (yet 1970s-set) art heist movie, The Mastermind—which stars Josh O’Connor—also seems to be doing well.

Are we all planning to dress as the Louvre thieves for Halloween?

I absolutely love this NYT story about the food props of La Bohème (which include Oreos, fried chicken, and bagels). In fact it is compelling me to go see La Bohème.

I’m curious to see what Opera Colorado has planned for its next season. Its new CEO Barbara Lynne Jamison just took the helm, and she’ll have to manage with a tightened budget of $5.5 million. She needs to invigorate both attendees and donors, and it seems like stepping into some new repertoire might be the path forward, The Denver Gazette reported.

For those in Philly: Opera Philadelphia’s December production of The Seasons at the Kimmel Center for the Arts sounds like it will be good. Per OperaWire: “This bold reimagining of Antonio Vivaldi’s string masterpiece The Four Seasons received its world premiere performances in March 2025 with Boston Lyric Opera and features additional arias and ensembles by the composer, woven into a new libretto by Tony-winning playwright Sarah Ruhl.”

There are some high-fashion collabs going on at the Royal Opera. British designer Paul Smith is designing Covent Garden’s Christmas Tree, WWD reported. Meanwhile, a few weeks ago, the Royal Ballet unveiled a collab with British label Reiss. And now I am bummed I will not be in London during the holiday season.

For a very different tone, UK readers may want to check out the Royal Birmingham Ballet’s Black Sabbath: The Ballet, which goes this week to Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre after a run in London, Semafor reports. The full-evening work features the creations of three composers and three choreographers; Tony Iommi, Black Sabbath guitarist, was also involved in the production.

Art is good for your health, according to the medical journal The Lancet, which just published a photo essay showcasing the impact of the arts on wellbeing. “Engaging with the arts is not an indulgence or an afterthought—it is part of the infrastructure of health. Just as we invest in clean water, nutrition and safe housing, we must invest in cultural participation as a determinant of wellbeing,” Nisha Sajnani, the co-director of Jameel Arts & Health Lab, told The Art Newspaper.

Another recent study led by King’s College London also found that visiting art galleries or art museums can “relieve stress, reduce the risk of heart disease and boost your immune system,” The Guardian reported.

Museum workers, however, are still struggling. The New York Times reported that more than half (54 percent) of museum employees have considered quitting in the last five years, according to a new survey by the nonprofit Museums Moving Forward. More than a quarter earn less than a living wage, working full-time jobs. This research found that employee satisfaction and sentiment has improved in the past two years, but still: this isn’t a good situation.

Alessandra Ferri, the prima ballerina now in charge of the Vienna State Ballet, spoke to Io Donna magazine about her role and stance on ballet today:

First of all, technique is not about performing 15 pirouettes, but to become such a master of it that, as you dance, you no longer have to worry about it and you are free. However, my approach is to go beyond preparation for the performance – I try to get the dancers to open the window to their heart, to their soul, and I try to give them the courage to go there. When I see someone get to that place (and I notice this because their facial features change), it is an incredible feeling. Priceless.

The New York City Ballet is still asking folks to send letters to their management as they continue to fight for a fair wage increase.

Misty Copeland spoke to the NYT after her final performance last week. She opened up about struggling to walk the following day and how she got back in shape after a five-year break from ballet. When asked about the pipeline for Black talent at ABT, she called out corps member Madison Brown, who, back in August, I predicted would become a soloist no later than 2027. We will continue to cheer her on! ▲

However, sometimes sleep must come first. So, apologies for my tardiness this week.

Over the weekend, I saw two programs from American Ballet Theatre; I reviewed one. I also saw Tiler Peck’s program at New York City Center, which was excellently curated and performed. My review for that one is also live.

The next McNally Editions book club I’m hosting is on November 17. We’re reading Carolivia Herron’s Thereafter Johnnie. You can sign up here.

I am currently in Phoenix for my aforementioned full-time job, so a shorter send this week. Hope you enjoy!

Sacre bleu! You probably do not need me to tell you that the Louvre has been robbed of its crown jewels, but there have been some developments on this front. The museum has officially reopened since the crime occurred Monday morning. Le Monde reported that President Emmanuel Macron ordered a “speeding up” of security implementations, though it’s unclear what this will entail. A union representative told the publication that, due to job cuts over the past 15 years, the Louvre simply does not have enough security guards for the number of visitors it sees.

The Louvre is the world’s most-visited museum, having welcomed 8.7 million guests last year. As we’ve previously discussed, it is also in disrepair and is in the very beginning stages of a major renovation project, Nouvelle Renaissance, that has a target completion date of 2031. Just last week, five architecture firms were shortlisted for the project, including Selldorf Architects, which led the Frick’s recently completed renovation.

There are more than 100 investigators on the case, trying to get back the jewels, which are uninsured and worth an estimated €88 million. A government audit of the museum’s security, which was just leaked to Radio France, shows that the museum is severely lacking in modern security technology: barely more than a third of the rooms have at least one camera.

When museum director Laurence des Cars addressed the staff after the burglary, they booed, The Times reported.

This is all probably both a welcome and unwelcome distraction from the British Museum’s very fancy Pink Ball, which it hosted on Saturday night, raising around £1.6 million from ticket sales (which went for £2,000 a pop). The museum’s budget for its Master Plan renovation is estimated to be more than £1 billion. The Met Gala, in 2025, raised a record $31 million.

And not everyone was happy about the Pink Ball, either. Climate protestors took to the stage in the middle of a trustee’s speech, interrupting to urge the museum to drop BP as a sponsor (the oil company has pledged to fund it £50 million over 10 years), The Art Newspaper reported.

Greece also decried the museum for hosting its glitzy gala in the same room that holds the Parthenon Marbles, according to Greek Reporter. Greece’s cultural minister Lina Mendoni said in a statement: “The Ministry of Culture has repeatedly and consistently condemned dinners, receptions, and fashion shows organized in museum spaces where monuments and works of art are exhibited. Such actions are offensive to cultural goods and endanger the exhibits themselves.”

Misty Copeland is officially performing her last show with American Ballet Theatre tonight. Regrettably, my prediction that ABT would put on a public simulcast of her last show was not totally right: instead, it is offering free rush tickets for a simulcast that will be held next door to the David Koch Theater, in Alice Tully Hall. This is still largely inaccessible (who can get to Lincoln Center at 4pm on a week day?) and frankly disappointing, though better than nothing. I’ll be curious to see if the recording is ever publicly released for streaming, or at least included in a future documentary.

Harper’s Bazaar released a digital cover with Copeland today. This is the second time the fashion magazine has put out a dance-related cover this year. The first was a very good Kyle Abraham as-told-to in March.

The International Chopin Piano Competition, which is held every five years in Warsaw, has crowned its victor—27-year-old American Eric Lu has won the €6ok prize after several rounds and much deliberation by the 17-person jury. The competition, which is considered by many to be the piano Olympics (even though the Van Cliburn has also been given that moniker) first began in 1927, and has been a star-maker of several major players, including Martha Argerich, Maurizio Pollini, and Seong-Jin Cho. Deutsche Grammophon will release a live album of Lu’s highlights from the competition.

Worth the long read: This Washington Post profile of Katherine Needleman, the Baltimore Symphony’s lead oboist, who also happens to be leading the classical music world’s #MeToo movement. Needleman’s methods are contentious to some: rather than taking a journalistic approach, she amplifies accusations of sexual misconduct on her social media platforms, often tagging employers of the accused. Why some are in favor of this approach: they say that going through the “appropriate channels” so often doesn’t lead to real change or consequences, and potentially allows abusers to continue their harm.

In case you missed it: Music students at the University of Southern California may get to call Solange Knowles their mentor. As the Thornton School of Music’s first scholar-in-residence, the Grammy-winning artist will develop a curriculum with a special focus on curation. “My goal is to nurture students’ curiosity in this field while advancing educational frameworks that reflect the expansiveness of the landscapes—both sonically and visually—that surround musical expressions,” she said in a press release, Harper’s Bazaar reported.

Below the paywall, some quick hits on: museum funding, the Royal Ballet’s new rules, another opera controversy, Zadie Smith’s writing advice, and more.

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On Thursday, I caught Paris Opera Ballet’s performance of Hofesh Shechter’s “Red Carpet” at New York City Center—an entrancing piece which does lose its pacing mid-way, but still delivers a visual treat. I wish it finished as strongly as it started. Shechter’s Batsheva training is very apparent in his movement vocabulary; a lot of the piece reminded me of Sharon Eyal’s “Into the Hairy,” which I saw Nederlands Dans Theater perform in The Hague over the summer (and reviewed here).

After walking through the Met on Saturday, I decided to rush the NY Phil’s Boulez & Bartók performance, conduced by Esa-Pekka Salonen. While I was most excited about Boulez’s “Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna,” which was performed along LA Dance Project, I was a touch underwhelmed by Benjamin Millepied’s choreography, which started to feel halting and underdeveloped after a time—a disservice to Boulez’s haunting, dystopian score.

Salonen is a marvel to watch, though. The standout of the evening was Bartók’s “Concerto for Orchestra,” which was so electrifying that, after the first movement, an audience member let out a “woo!” I got my ticket an hour before the show for $22. The box office attendant asked me if I happened to be a student, and I said, “No but thank you for asking me such a question.”

This week, I’ll be seeing Limón Dance Company at the Joyce, ABT’s A Retrospective of Master Choreographers, and Turn It Out with Tiler Peck & Friends at City Center.

I am about halfway through Annie Ernaux’s The Years for my alma mater’s alumnae book club. (Somehow it feels like most of what I have read this year centers on or around WWII). It is not too late for you to read Pamela Hansford Johnson’s The Unspeakable Skipton—I’ll be discussing it at the McNally Editions Book Club next Monday.

You may have seen the news about the dancers of New York City Ballet boycotting last week’s Fall Fashion Gala in protest of NYCB management refusing to come to the bargaining table with a fair deal. Dancers and stage managers, who are represented by the American Guild of Musical Artists, have been working under an expired contract since August 31. The big issue at stake here is pay: inflation, especially the cost of living in New York City, has far outpaced the dancers’ salaries.

Many of the company’s highest profile dancers have spoken out. Principal dancer Jovani Furlan shared a video yesterday pointing out that the dancers took a 4 percent pay cut during the pandemic, and their pay has only gone up 9.7 percent net since (while inflation in NYC is up 22 percent). On average, the dancers spend 48 percent of their earnings on rent. They also work just 37 weeks a year—which means that they are not paid at all for 15 weeks out of the year (which is why it’s not surprising that some dancers, like Furlan and corps member Jenelle Manzi have additional careers as entrepreneurs, why others, like Chun Wai Chan and India Bradley* appear in fashion campaigns, and likely why principal dancer Tiler Peck seems to work 36 hours a day on her many, many side projects).

Since the dancers boycotted the gala, Furlan said, management came back to the table with a proposal of a 0.5 percent salary increase over three years. This proposed wage increase is less than 1 percent of NYCB’s total budget.

Principal dancer Megan Fairchild, who, at 41, will retire after the spring season, expressed her dismay on Instagram: “In the history of NYCB post-Balanchine, the dancers have never had to escalate to this point.”

Fellow principal Mira Nadon spoke to dance critic and journalist about her involvement in the negotiations. Nadon, 24, is a member of the contract negotiation committee. She said that negotiations have been “slow and arduous” and that as a principal, she feels an obligation to “stand up for the whole shop and address the issues.” A true leader.

Ashley Bouder, a former NYCB principal who retired in the winter season, has also been a vocal proponent in favor of the dancers on her Instagram story over the past few days.

It is worth pointing out that New York City Ballet is largest ballet company by expenditure in the United States. Because it is a nonprofit, its finances, including its executive salaries, are also public: executive director Katherine Brown took home nearly $750k in 2024, while artistic director Jonathan Stafford brought in nearly $473k and associate artistic director Wendy Whelan got about $441k.

The artists are now asking that supporters send a letter directly to management via this form.

City Ballet is far from the only dance company to contend with contract negotiations recently. Don’t forget how Dallas Black Dance Theatre fired its entire main company last year after they organized under AGMA. The San Francisco Ballet (the second-largest company in the U.S. by expenditure) reached a two-year agreement last December one day before it was set for its opening performance of The Nutcracker. In June, Texas Ballet Theater became the first North Texas dance company to reach a union contract in more than 40 years. And after American Ballet Theatre dancers voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike in February 2024, management finally made them an offer they could accept.

Unionization efforts in the ballet world have particularly picked up since the pandemic, The Nation reported last year. “Forming a union is an act of love in a sense,” Griff Braun, AGMA’s national organizing director told the publication. “If you hated the place you worked you would just leave. It’s people who want to stay that want to make it better who form a union. I think that’s an important thing for people to keep in mind and I wish some of our employers would recognize that sooner that these artists are doing this not to hurt the company but to help the company.”

*In more exciting news, India Bradley received a long-overdue promotion! She has become New York City Ballet’s first Black female soloist (which is also wildly overdue). Victor Abreu, Dominika Afanasenkov, Naomi Corti, Mary Thomas MacKinnon, and Andres Zuniga also received promotions to the rank. Congratulations to all!

Last week we talked about all the arts organizations getting in on Saudi Arabia’s cultural funding flush and well would you look at that—Frieze, the London-based art fair, just announced that it will also expand into the Gulf region and launch its Abu Dhabi edition next November, The Art Newspaper reported.

The Charlotte Symphony has taken a cue from Netflix: its rebrand not only has a look, but a sound. The orchestra tapped composer Mason Bates to create a “sonic logo” (like Netflix’s “tadum”) to go along with the redesigned logo it debuted last year. Maestro Kwamé Ryan, who last year became the Symphony’s first Black music director in its 92-year-history, seems to be doing big things. This week, for instance, the Symphony is putting on a multimedia production, “Dolly Parton’s Threads: My Songs in Symphony,” featuring the music of Dolly Parton with her own personally selected guest vocalists.

Another thing I like about the Charlotte Symphony is its various discount offers, including its Music for All program, through which anyone receiving SNAP or WIC benefits can receive $3 tickets to select performances. This is how it’s done!

Here’s a rebrand that hasn’t gone over so well. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is now “Philadelphia Art Museum,” or “PhAM.” Critics called the new logo, by Brooklyn design studio Gretel, “oppressive and bland,” Hyperallergic reported. Others cut to the chase: “We still remember you trying to union bust,” one Instagram user commented, referencing the museum workers’ 2022 strike.

We should also keep an eye on the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, as music director Cristian Macelaru has officially begun his tenure, the New York Times reported. The orchestra is reportedly in discussions with a number of European festivals about international touring. Macelaru also told the NYT that he wants to bring more living composers into the orchestra’s repertoire.

Here’s a fun tidbit: Marcelaru, now 45, had a bit of a Leonard Bernstein moment in 2012 and again in 2013 that served as the breakthrough for his career. Much like Bernstein famously stepped in for the conductor Bruno Walter to lead the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in 1943, Marcelaru stepped in twice to cover for the NY Phil’s former music director, Pierre Boulez. In 2013, Chicago Classical Review wrote that he led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a “compelling and incisive performance.”

Looks like the new stuff does work. Despite mixed reviews from the pros, people seem really excited about the Metropolitan Opera’s Kavalier & Clay, by the aforementioned Bates and librettist Gene Scheer. The opera will come back for four more performances in February and will show a pre-recorded screening of the opera in movie theaters across North America. These encore performances are highly unusual, the New York Times, noted; only once before did the Met do a same-season revival, with its 2019 production of Porgy and Bess.

The stats for its attendance are startlingly good: 87 percent of paid seats were sold for all seven shows, 35 percent of attendees were seeing their first Met performances, and 30 percent were 40 or younger.

As we previously discussed, the staff of Venice’s La Fenice opera house are very displeased over the appointment of hard-right conductor Beatrice Venezi as music director. Now, they will officially strike this Friday, when the first performance of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck is scheduled, The Guardian reported.

Below the paywall: An unexpected MoMA collab, a new routine for the National Symphony Orchestra, a big acquisition at LACMA, an unauthorized exhibit at the Met, and more.

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Misty Copeland is announcing something today at 12:30pm related to her forthcoming farewell performance from American Ballet Theatre. Details have been scant, though in an Instagram story on Friday, her foundation said it was “historic” and alluded to some way that the broader public could be a part of her final performance. My mind immediately jumped here: are they going to livestream Misty’s final show?

This would not be without precedent. Consider the fact that the Metropolitan Opera regularly simulcasts select productions to movie theaters around the world (including the one in my small New Jersey hometown). And while ABT’s fall season is in the adjacent David Koch Theater, we do know that the auditorium is equipped with cameras: after all, there are screens installed on each floor of the building that show the performance, so that latecomers can at least see what’s going on onstage before they are allowed inside. They very well could do this. But will they?

Honestly, it’s a toss-up. I certainly had my gripes when I realized how hard it would be to get tickets to see the performance (they went on sale, first, to affiliate members, which meant that there would be fewer, if any, available to the broader public—which meant they were less accessible to those who can’t afford to pay at least $600 annually for a membership). ABT wrote in its email announcing the ticket sale: “There’s a very high likelihood that tickets will sell out quickly on Monday, July 28. Even with early access, availability is not guaranteed. If you are an Affiliate Member or higher and are hoping to attend this performance, please be prepared to act quickly when early access opens.”

The mission of Copeland’s eponymous foundation is to bring “greater diversity, equity, and inclusion to dance by making ballet affordable, accessible, and fun.” This mission shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows her story. Not only did she become the first Black woman to become a principal dancer at the company in 2015, but her road to that achievement was not an easy one. Growing up in poverty, Copeland was introduced to ballet at 13—a late age for a dancer—thanks to her drill team coach, who saw her talent and recommended she take a ballet class at the local Boys & Girls Club. A few years later Copeland secured a scholarship to ABT’s summer intensive and subsequently joined ABT’s studio company. Over the next 15 years, she moved up the ranks.

Copeland is a fairly obvious example of a prodigy, and someone whose life would have looked very different if not for the encouragement of people who saw her potential. This is why accessibility to dance is so important to her. Her influence as a role model—especially in the predominantly white ballet world—should also not go understated. It’s hard to imagine what could be more meaningful and aligned with her message than letting the whole world watch her take to ABT’s stage one last time.

Not that she’s going anywhere. Copeland told the Wall Street Journal this week that she’s be open to returning to Broadway (she was in On the Town in 2015) and that she’d like to work with community-driven artists like Kendrick Lamar, Pharrell, J. Cole, and the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates.

So what can we expect from her final performance? She’ll be dancing three pieces: a new commission by Kyle Abraham, starring Copeland and Calvin Royal III (who became ABT’s second-ever Black male principal in 2020), the balcony scene from Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet (also performed with Royal), and Twyla Tharp’s Sinatra Suite, performed with Herman Cornejo. The company and ABT Studio Company will also perform select works. It is a gala, after all.

“I want it to feel like a celebration, and not something that drags on for hours,” she told Pointe. “That was my number-one request. In my first meeting with [artistic director] Susan Jaffe, I said, ‘I don’t want this to be long. I want people to be like, ‘Oh, my God, it’s already over.’”

On the topic of representation in ballet: Some happy news! Ashton Edwards, nonbinary member of Pacific Northwest Ballet’s corps, recently made their debut as “Tall Girl” in George Balanchine’s Rubies. Edwards is such a striking dancer, with expansive lines and an energetic presence (hat tip to @dancemomporsha for her coverage of this debut). I’m really rooting for Edwards to move up as a soloist. I first learned about them thanks to this great New York Times piece from 2022 on gender roles in ballet.

Here is something you might not have expected to hear: TikTok is investing in the next generation of classical music. In partnership with London’s Southbank Centre, the app has launched an accelerator program called Crescendo, Variety reported. The program will support 10 UK-based emerging creators who make content about the genre (so they could be a performer, composer, conductor, or potentially even just a mega-fan.) with mentorship, access to Southbank concerts and rehearsals, and more.

The app said in a press release that posts on the #ClassicalMusic hashtag have increased 60 percent year-over-year. “As a platform, what TikTok is able to do is open up new audiences,” Toyin Mustapha, TikTok’s head of music partnerships for the UK and Ireland, told Variety, “It’s a way for people to be able to relate to something that they might otherwise feel is not relatable to them.”

If it seems like a lot of people and institutions in the arts world are collaborating with Saudi Arabia, it’s because they are. The Saudi Cultural Fund just announced nearly $1 billion in deals to drive the Kingdom’s cultural economy (you may remember the Met Opera’s recent deal). In fact, since Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced Vision 2030—the Kingdom’s blueprint for globalizing itself—in 2016, it has invested more than $21 billion in cultural projects. Here I remind you of the country’s record on human rights, including its treatment of women and LGBTQ individuals, crackdowns on free speech, murders of journalists, and practice of modern-day slavery. The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, which is expected to open next year, and the Louvre Abu Dhabi, which opened in 2017, both faced allegations of workers rights abuses for their construction.

Investing in the arts, of course, is a strategy for the country to “artwash” or launder its reputation (or at least convince enough institutions and people to overlook both its record and ongoing practices).

It seems to be good enough for some! You may have seen the contentious Riyadh Comedy Festival, but did you know that pianist Lang Lang recently collaborated with the Saudi Music Commission on a piano intensive? Colnaghi, the London-based art gallery, which was founded in 1760, also just announced it will open a space in Riyadh, The Art Newspaper reported. And MoMA’s outgoing director, Glenn Lowry, just said that he will be working as an advisor on the Saudi-backed Islamic Arts Biennale (he is, to be fair, a scholar of Islamic art). But Hyperallergic noted that Lowry has a history of rubbing shoulders with donors who some may find unsavory, and he said in 2023, on the podcast Art World: What If…?!: “It doesn’t matter whether they’re of the progressive left or the reactionary right if they’re supporting the programs and artists we believe in.”

Here’s the big question: where can these institutions get funding that doesn’t strike up an ethical debate?

In France, at least, where government funding for the arts remains shaky, institutions remain dependent on wealthy American donors (who I am sure have also largely procured their money by unsavory means), Le Monde reported. Many, right now, are concerned about the Trump administration eliminating programs which allow Americans to deduct their contributions from their taxes. They are also inevitably tapping the same people everyone else is tapping—like Stephen Schwarzman, who we mentioned last week.

Below the paywall, a few rapid-fire bits and bobs on the art world, plus a major hire by the Philly Orchestra.

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I’m almost done with Brandon Taylor’s Minor Black Figures, which will be particularly pleasing to the perhaps small percentage of Sally Rooney readers who think Beautiful World, Where Are You is her best novel (me). It is also indisputably Taylor’s most intimate work.

Thank you for your kind responses to the rebrand! A reminder you can also follow Mezzanine Society on Instagram.

As we’ve discussed on and off for the past couple months the wide number of museum renovations, expansions, and re-openings, perhaps you’ve had the thought: Is every big museum remodeling itself these days?

The Louvre, of course, announced its plans for renovation in January, and the Centre Pompidou just closed for its five-year renovation. The Picasso Museum in Paris just announced a €50 million expansion, which it expects to finish by 2030, Le Monde reported. The British Museum is working on its Masterplan with architect Lina Ghotmeh. London’s National Gallery reopened its Sainsbury Wing in the spring after a major refurbishment and rehang. The Frick Museum also reopened in New York after a five-year renovation, and the Met announced its plans to update its Modern and Contemporary Art Wing a few months before it debuted the renovated Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, showing art of the Americas, Africa, and Oceania. Harlem’s Studio Museum will reopen in November.

There have also been plenty of new museum openings. Cairo’s Grand Egyptian Museum is expected to open, in full, before the end of the year. The V&A East Storehouse opened in the spring, as did Japan’s Naoshima New Museum of Art and Rotterdam’s Fenix Museum of Migration. Earlier this month, Kazakhstan just opened the Almaty Museum of Arts, the country’s first private museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art, ArtNews reported. This past weekend, Museo Casa Kahlo—Mexico City’s new museum focused on Frida Kahlo’s family and early life—just opened, the New York Times reported.

This may seem surprising to consider when you think about all the news we’ve seen about funding getting slashed—but the reality is, the vast majority of museum openings and renovations are getting funded primarily through wealthy donors. The Almaty, for instance, is founded by the auto tycoon Nurlan Smagulov, a native to Kazakhstan who, with more than 700 artworks by Kazakh and Central Asian artists, is a veritable patron of the arts.

It wouldn’t be fair to say that these institutions are having an easy time getting the funds they need (hence contentious decisions, like the British Museum’s to accept major gifts from BP). But you do tend to see some of the same names repeating on donor lists—like BlackRock CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman, who donated $35 million for the Frick’s renovation and a staggering £185 million to Oxford University to create a new Centre for the Humanities, which will open next month. Oxford chancellor William Hague spoke about the donation recently to The Times in a piece with a very blunt headline: How we got a rich US donor to pay £185m for our new arts centre. It is the single largest gift the university has received in “modern times,” aka, since the Renaissance (it is the oldest university in the English-speaking world, with its earliest records of teaching dating back to 1096).

So, how did Oxford pull it off? Hague doesn’t actually have an answer. But he does suggest that the UK, generally, is important to BlackRock and therefore important to Schwarzman. Though he won’t put words in his donor’s mouth, Hague adds that there’s good reason for philanthropists to support the arts and humanities right now: “I think in this age of rapid technological change and social media we need the humanities more than ever. We need philosophy, linguistics and a knowledge of history if we are to make sense of the huge changes that are taking place.”

The opera continues to be a place of political battles worldwide—most recently, in Milan, where workers at Teatro La Fenice have vowed to go on a permanent strike in response to the appointment of conductor Beatrice Venezi as music director. Venezi, 35, is seen as an ally of hard-right prime minister Giorgia Meloni, ANSA reported. The classical music critic Alberto Mattioli put it simply to the New York Times: “Venezi is not a famous conductor who happens to be right wing. She’s famous because she is right wing.”

The conductor has previously pushed against the nickname she earned because of her father’s role in hard-right politics: “fascistella,” or “little fascist.”

While the theater’s board unanimously approved Venezi, a musician told the Times that it is custom for the board to consult with members of the orchestra when making this kind of appointment—a task officials failed to carry out.

It is still a dangerous time for professionals in the art world to express dissent against ruling political factions. Maria Smorzhevskikh-Smirnova, the director of Estonia’s Narva Museum, has been sentenced to 10(!) years in prison for the museum’s decision to hang banners that compare Putin with Hitler, The Moscow Times reported. The official charges are of disseminating “war fakes” and “rehabilitating Nazism.”

The curator of a recent exhibition at the Bangkok Art and Culture Center, which criticized authoritarian regimes in China and Myanmar, has fled to London, fearing deportation to his native Myanmar, the New York Times reported. The museum, facing pressure from Chinese authorities, also removed work of four artists from Hong Kong, Tibet, and Xinjiang (where most of the country’s Uyghur population lives), as well as two flags: that of Tibet and one used to express Uyghur independence.

At the very least, there is some positive news in the U.S.: A federal court in Rhode Island ruled that the National Endowment for the Arts could not implement its Trump-instated policy of ensuring recipients aligned with the administration’s crackdown on “gender ideology,” the New York Times reported.

More than 50 artists and performers have signed a letter asking the feminist visual artist Judy Chicago to withdraw her exhibition Judy Chicago: What If Women Ruled the World?, which opened earlier this month, from the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Many signatories, Hyperallergic reports, are Israeli. It reads, in part: “We believe that Israel’s actions are in violation of the vision of the world that you promote through your art, and ask that you do not use your names and reputations to support those actions.”

The museum, in a statement to Hyperallergic, said that it, too, stood against Israel’s war in Gaza, but did not support the idea of a boycott. Director Tania Coen-Uzzielli wrote:

“We too are horrified by the devastation and pain in Gaza, and we use our platform to call for the end of the war and shine a light on its toll. To cancel this project now would not be an act of solidarity, but of surrender. It would only strengthen the very structures of power, violence, and silencing. The Tel Aviv Museum of Art is led by women and has consistently championed the work of women artists across generations, cultures, and identities, including Palestinian artists.”

Pussy Riot founding member Nadya Tolokonnikova, who worked with Chicago on the quilt which composes the exhibit, told the publication that she agrees with the letter writers but does not have “any control over ongoing logistics or where [the art] is shown.”

Here’s a nice story: Houston Ballet principal Harper Watters recently shared with Dance Magazine why he dances. He writes, in part: “Dance has given me the courage to embrace my identity, overcome the hurdles, and then celebrate it—fearlessly—onstage….Arthur Mitchell said, ‘What does dance give you? The freedom to be who you are and do what you want to do.’”

Brief dance history note: Arthur Mitchell, who died in 2018 was the first African American dancer to join New York City Ballet, in 1955. The following year, he became a principal. In 1969, he founded the Dance Theatre of Harlem, widely considered the the first Black classical ballet company.

Remember how everyone was so upset about the Bayeux Tapestry potentially getting damaged in the move from France to the UK? Well, it’s been moved! The process, Le Monde reports, took 90 people and 7 hours and 15 minutes.

Below the paywall: Yuja Wang’s new gig, why Harvard’s orchestra just got suspended, a female Flemish painter gets her due, a new Picasso is revealed, and I find myself agreeing, begrudgingly, with Alec Baldwin. And more!

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