Last week, after a series of unfortunate events, Telltale Games — the studio behind the Walking Dead series and Minecraft: Story Mode — abruptly laid off 90% of its employees. Now a lawsuit alleges that Telltale “failed to pay its laid off workers their respective wages, salary, commissions, bonuses, accrued holiday pay, and accrued vacation for 60 working days following their terminations,” as required by California law.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Sculptor Isa Genzken Wins $100,000 Nasher Prize
“For four decades, Ms. Genzken has drawn praise for her exploration of many aesthetics and mediums, including video, photography and collages. Her perceptive architectural installations and their historical themes, including reconstruction in Germany and the War on Terror, have made her one of the leading artists of the postwar era.”
Why Did The Australian Broadcasting Corp. Abruptly Fire Its Managing Director?
The board’s announcement that Michelle Guthrie was out said only “The decision follows discussions over several months that concluded when directors resolved that it was not in the best interests of the ABC for Ms Guthrie to continue to lead the organisation.” Media journalist David Tiley “make[s] an op-ed stab at the issues behind this.”
Australian State Arts Minister Under Fire For Secretly Redirecting Funds
“[New South Wales] Minister for the Arts, Don Harwin, rejected independent recommendations to distribute $660,000 across 17 projects in a recent Create NSW funding round. [Create NSW is the state’s arts funding body.] Harwin instead signed off on funding for only six of the 16 applications, reallocating $404,000 towards a single project, which the ABC identified as the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.”
Akron Symphony Extends With Music Director Christopher Wilkins Through 2021
“Wilkins has been music director for the 65-year-old orchestra since 2006, and is the sixth conductor.”
How I Maintained My Dance Career After Becoming Paralyzed
Marc Brew, an Australian Ballet alumnus who is now artistic director of the Oakland-based AXIS Dance Company, writes about the spinal-cord injury that left him in a wheelchair and how he continued to work as a performer and choreographer afterward.
Targets and Timeframes
To be sustainable, community engagement must benefit the arts organization in tangible ways. To be supported institutionally, the path to ticket sales, funding, and public policy must be articulated and tracked. A principal difficulty in this is that in order to accomplish these gains we must do work in marketing, funding, and advocacy that we’ve almost never done before.
Anthony Roth Costanzo on Glass, Handel and “putting it together.”
Opera singers aren’t brought up to be as enterprising as Anthony Roth Costanzo. But few have his resume: He’s a child Broadway star-turned Princeton student-turned countertenor. Was Stephen Sondheim’s great networking song, “Putting it Together,” playing in the background when David Patrick Stearns met up with Costanzo a few weeks ago? No, but it should’ve been.
Can ‘Insta Novels’ Get Young People Excited About Literature?
“[The New York Public Library] will be releasing digitized versions of classic novels, novellas, and short stories on their Instagram account, @nypl, through the ‘Stories’ and ‘Highlights’ features. … The campaign started with Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, which released with 200 pages distributed over the course of two days. Forthcoming titles include The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.”
English National Ballet Star Leaves Because She’s Bored There — Does She Have A Point?
“Laurretta Summerscales, a leading dancer with the English National Ballet, left last season for the Bavarian State Ballet in Munich, telling Dancing Times magazine that she yearned for a broader repertoire than the smaller British company could provide.” David Jays considers the merits of her complaint.