Author: Matthew Westphal

Despite Government Pressure, Hong Kong Arts And Culture Workers Support Protests And Strikes

With many of Hong Kong’s main cultural institutions being government-operated or -funded, a large number of workers in the arts-and-culture field are considered civil servants, which means they take big risks if they participate in the demonstrations currently rocking the territory. Nevertheless, they persist. – The Art Newspaper

Netflix And Amazon India Are Taking On Material Bollywood Has Never Dared Touch

New features and series from the streaming giants deal frankly with such subjects as corruption, government dysfunction, the drug trade, religious and communal violence, and female sexuality. Says the director of one such series about why online studios can treat topics Bollywood can’t, “It’s a given that movie-watching in India is a family experience, a community experience. Families didn’t sit together to see Sacred Games.” – The Guardian

Toni Morrison, 88

“The first black woman to receive the Nobel Prize in literature, … Ms Morrison placed African Americans, particularly women, at the heart of her writing at a time when they were largely relegated to the margins both in literature and in life. With language celebrated for its lyricism, she was credited with conveying as powerfully, or more than perhaps any novelist before her, the nature of black life in America, from slavery to the inequality that went on more than a century after it ended.” – The Washington Post

‘I Have Never Seen Such Chaos’: Mona Lisa’s First Days In New Room At Louvre Have Been Rather Messy

That quote comes from a longstanding guide at the museum, who added, “I did not think it was possible to show such amateurism.” Paris’s most visited painting has been moved while its usual room, the Salle des Etats, is being renovated. But the Louvre’s management seems not to have thought through traffic flow and crowd control issues. – Artnet

Dancers At Rome’s Ballet In Open Rebellion Against Their Director, Who Is (They Say) Disrespectful And Abusive

According to a letter from the dancers’ unions at the Rome Opera Ballet to the theater’s board (a letter which Italy’s largest press agency published in full), Eleonora Abbagnato screamed obscenities at them, threatened (with more obscenities) not to renew their contracts, and called the Rome Opera “a shit theater.” What’s more, Abbagnato is often absent from the company she’s supposed to be running, as she is still an étoile at the Paris Opera Ballet. – Gramilano (Milan)

Tutankhamun’s Coffin, Which Is In God-Awful Shape, Is Undergoing Restoration

“Restorers at the laboratory for wooden objects at the Grand Egyptian Museum have begun fumigating the gilded coffin” — the outer one, largest of three (the two inner coffins are the ones that have always been on display) — “after it was carefully moved from Tutankhamen’s tomb in Luxor’s Valley of the Kings in southern Egypt amid tight security last month.” – Los Angeles Times

Tracy Flick Is Not A Villain, And We’ve Misunderstood ‘Election’ All Along: A.O. Scott

“Somehow I didn’t remember — or didn’t see — what has been right there onscreen the whole time. Which is that Mr. M is a monster — a distillation of human moral squalor with few equals in modern American cinema — and that Tracy Flick is the heroine who bravely, if imperfectly, resists his efforts to destroy her. She’s not Moby-Dick to his Ahab so much as Jean Valjean to his Inspector Javert.” – The New York Times