Sphinx Starts New Program To Train Minority Classical Music Administrators

The Detroit-based Sphinx Organization, which for 22 years has run education programs and competitions to develop black and Latinx classical music performers, “is launching a leadership development program with educational and mentorship components aimed at cultivating black and Latinx candidates for leadership positions in orchestras, conservatories and music schools across the country.”

Aversive Verse: At The Alfred Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest

“The judges in the front row were ready to revel in wretchedness, line by line and verse by verse, as the contestants, more than 30 Columbia University students in a lecture hall on the campus, read their poems aloud.” (In case you’ve forgotten, Kilmer is the man who perpetrated “I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree.” He is memorialized with a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike.)

How China’s Influence In Hollywood Has Grown

At stake for China is more than just the validation of Hollywood’s powerbrokers and celebrities. In speeches and at forums, President Xi Jinping has repeatedly emphasized the need to “tell China’s story well” — to make sure a coherent, compelling and, most important, Communist Party-sanctioned narrative of China’s rise to power reaches global audiences.

Italy’s New Far-Right Cabinet Minister Wants To Cancel Loan Of Leonardos To Louvre

Lucia Borgonzoni, undersecretary at the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, is balking at the previous government’s agreement to loan a large group of Leonardo da Vinci works for the artist’s quincentenary next year. “How could any Italians be in favour of giving over these da Vinci works without asking for something equally important to display in this anniversary year? Leonardo was Italian, after all. Why don’t they loan us the Mona Lisa?”

Chinese Author Sentenced To 10 Years In Prison For Gay Erotic Novel

“The writer, surnamed Liu but better known by her internet alias Tianyi, was handed a 10-and-a-half year jail term for ‘producing and selling pornographic materials’ last month, according to a television report on Friday. The book that landed her into trouble was a 2017 novel named Occupy, … about a forbidden love affair between a teacher and a student.” Police assert that the book is full of “graphic depictions of male homosexual sex scenes.”

1,600-Year-Old Mosaic, Looted From Cyprus, Found After 44 Years

The 5th-century mosaic of St. Mark the Evangelist, one of the few Byzantine religious artworks to have survived the original iconoclasts of the 8th and 9th centuries, was hewn from a church wall following the Turkish invasion of northern Cyprus in 1974. Investigator Arthur Brand (“the Indiana Jones of the art world”) found it in an apartment in Monaco.

What The Brexit Deal Would Mean For The Arts

May’s deal, which was revealed on November 14, essentially maintains the status quo until 2020, with the deal “not saying anything concrete” about what will happen after this. This would be effectively “postponing a leap into the dark” for the creative industries until 2020, with “all the important issues left up in the air”.