At Last, Opera Grand Rapids Moves Into Its Own Home

After decades of wandering from one rehearsal space to another, the company has begun “moving into the Betty Van Andel Opera Center, a $2.5 million building erected to become the company’s first permanent home in its 42-year history.” The Betty includes “a costume shop, prop storage, rehearsal rooms, meeting rooms, a library, offices and a permanent box office.”

Contemplating The (Guggenheim’s) Void

“As part of its ongoing 50th anniversary celebration, the museum invited nearly 200 architects, artists and designers to propose fanciful new uses for the 90-foot-high rotunda of its Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building.” The curators “asked the participants, whose biggest names include Anish Kapoor, Zaha Hadid, Richard Meier, Alvaro Siza, Toyo Ito and Rachel Whiteread, to leave ‘practicality and even reality behind’.”

AG Asked To Probe Fresno Museum’s Sale Of Its Collection

The “action comes as the [nonprofit Fresno Metropolitan Museum] is scheduled to auction its non-art property today, with proceeds going toward the $4 million in debt that led in part to the museum’s demise last month. … Museum officials have said they are negotiating over an auctioneer and a sale date” for the art in the collection.

Most Plagiarism Scandals Are Overblown, But Not This One

“What smells off” in the case of 17-year-old German novelist Helene Hegemann “is precisely Hegemann’s claim to be using her borrowings to advance a cutting-edge concept of artistry. … This would be more plausible if Hegemann had acknowledged from the beginning that she’d included work from other writers in ‘Axolotl Roadkill,’ but by all indications, she did not.”