Category: today’s top story

“As befits an industry with so many teetotallers, recovering alcoholics and drinkers unwittingly developing a trilogy of future shows on their battles with sobriety, comedy has always enjoyed a close but troubled relationship with alcoholic endorsements.”

David Lister: “[There] is a refusal to accept that the current model of public funding may not actually be the only reasonable and civilised one, or that the present reliance on largely unaccountable quangos to fund and administer most arts bodies, small and large, is not necessarily a democratic one, even though it would be pilloried in novels, plays and films if it existed in any other walk of life.”

“In a move that adds another contemporary art museum to the city’s busy art scene, Eli Broad announced formally Monday that he would build his Broad Collection museum downtown and chose a blue-chip New York architecture firm” – Diller Scofidio + Renfro – “to design it.”

“In short, fact-checking has assumed radically new forms in the past 15 years. Only fact-checkers from legacy media probably miss the quaint old procedures. But if the Web has changed what qualifies as fact-checking, has it also changed what qualifies as a fact? I suspect that facts on the Web are now more rhetorical devices than identifiable objects. But I can’t verify that.”

“A Van Gogh painting worth $50m (£32m) stolen from a museum in Cairo is still missing, despite reports it had been recovered hours after the theft.”

Mark Kennedy, who worked at the Associated Press for 13 years before moving to AOL News in March, returns to the agency to take up the theater/entertainment beat left vacant following the death of Michael Kuchwara in May.

“Management has put two proposals on the table, both of which would drastically reduce musicians’ pay. The DSO ranks 10th nationwide in base salaries paid to musicians. However, the new wage proposals would cut pay 28 percent (even more in Proposal B) and drop the DSO’s ranking to at least 18th.”

“Through his foundation, Impossible Music, [Austin] Dacey seeks out persecuted and muzzled musicians around the world. He then finds American counterparts to perform their work and stages live shows where the persecuted can watch the performers rescue their music, even participate a little via live Internet connection.”

“The Slav Epic, which took [Alphonse] Mucha more than a decade to complete, comprises 20 paintings up to 20ft high and 26ft wide that display haunting and evocative moments of Slav history.” In 1963, after spending the postwar years buried under heaps of coal, the work went on display in a small Moravian town hall. Now Prague wants it back.