Judgment is having a day. A critic makes the case that a review’s job isn’t to relay one listener’s experience but to offer something “extra-human” — a perspective the concert itself can’t supply (San Francisco Classical Voice). Read that next to the discovery that academic papers are citing experts who don’t exist, names that language models reliably invent when asked to produce authorities in a field (404 Media).

A second look at the violinist data found that the merely-good had logged more practice hours than the best — another crack in the 10,000-hour story we tell about how excellence gets made (Science Blog). And a look inside the book trade names the people who actually decide what you read: supermarket buyers, publicists, and BookTok (The Guardian).

The Met Museum has finally canceled its Galliano show (AP) after an upwell of protest. And Google shipped an AI reading tool publishers actually like, largely because it asks permission first (Publishers Weekly).

Also: Miss Piggy, the last real movie star (Vulture). Hard to argue.

Currently, per Rentrak, the North American box office for the first Friday in May through EOD today stands at $4.598 billion, officially the second-highest summer ever behind 2013. If this summer is going to beat 2013’s all-time high, it has $158M to gross. – Deadline

For the first hour or so, I found the Robot Games enthralling. What can robots already do, and where do they still fall short? Which robot will manage to crawl under an obstacle, and which will pitifully get stuck? But after a while, I suddenly realized that I had grown deeply bored. – Yascha Mounk

It would be an understatement to say that the growing prominence of A.I. music is generating backlash—sometimes it seems this music generates nothing but backlash. – The New Yorker

What’s happening to the New School is an increasingly common story across all of higher education, hit by a perfect storm of financial and political pressures. Well-paid bosses, touting fiscal crises, seek to fire their way to profitability. – Dissent

<a href="https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/2026/08/myles-waldman-stalwart-performance-poets-together-again.html" title="Myles & Waldman
Stalwart Performance Poets Together Again“

An effective review offers what the concert can’t: an extra-human perspective. By “extra-human,” I mean going beyond the experience of any one person, beyond the perspective of the reviewer and beyond the specific concert itself. – San Francisco Classical Voice

This year Curtis will have 13 musicians entering school under the age of 18. But even at a place known for prodigies, Olivia is unusual. She is believed to be the youngest student to study at Curtis since 1950, when 6-year-old violinist Diana Halprin matriculated. – Philadelphia Inquirer (MSN)

Attendance and grosses have fallen from the show’s early highs, with the show playing to 50- to 60-percent capacity this spring, but the production has seen a relatively long, healthy run on Broadway, as the 40th longest running show in its history. – The Hollywood Reporter

The authors don’t actually exist, but are instead names that large language models repeatedly produce when tasked with generating experts in certain fields. – 404 Media

In works that were by turns personal and political — vividly realistic and unsettlingly surreal — he captured and uplifted Palestinian life and history, creating art that served as a form of preservation as well as resistance. – Washington Post

Nearly all (95%) women working in the arts thought gender inequality persisted, while three-quarters (75%) reported experiencing unconscious bias or sexism, according to a survey of 76 arts professionals. – The Guardian

“The ‘10,000-hour rule’ is one of the most repeated ideas in popular writing about skill and success: put in 10,000 hours of practice, the story goes, and elite performance follows. … A 2019 study … redid the underlying comparison and found practice hours didn’t cleanly separate the best violinists from merely good ones.” – Science Blog

“The Metropolitan Museum of Art is canceling its planned exhibit honoring British designer John Galliano, which had led to severe backlash in the Jewish community and beyond because of the designer’s past antisemitic and racist statements.” – AP

“She is part of a lineage that has gone dormant: larger-than-life, carefully curated personas bolstered by their market value at the box office and by how their sheer artistry shapes the texts that end up on the silver screen. These are women like Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Mae West.” – Vulture (MSN)

One might argue that Beckett is the perfect playwright for an actor with that condition to perform — especially when the play is Krapp’s Last Tape, which Peter Marinker is preparing to do this week. Here’s how he, along with the director and crew at London’s Cockpit Theatre, are making it work. – BBC (MSN)

“The reality is that our reading choices are directed and massaged at every turn. … And who are the persuaders? They’re the booksellers, the supermarket stock buyers, the publishing houses and their ranks of marketers and publicists. And, more recently, persuasion often comes from (social media). How is all this changing publishing?” – The Guardian

The 49-year-old native of Estonia danced with San Francisco Ballet for 18 years, retiring as a principal in 2023. He spent over a decade applying for artistic director positions; now that he has one, he’s excited about almost every aspect of it, even the fundraising. – Pointe Magazine

The only issue at the former obstetric nurse’s trial is whether she deliberately planned the killings (as prosecutors argue) or (as she claims) was in the grip of postpartum psychosis. Yet there’s a crop of true-crime fans on TikTok and other platforms who insist that Patrick Clancy is really the murderer. – Variety

“She made more than 20 variants of her mirrored chambers, which use light, sculpture and reflection to create a kind of 360-degree celestial infinity. They have traveled around the world and reached enormous popularity, forever changing the types of exhibits that are staged and the way the public engages with them.” – CNN (Yahoo!)

“(She) produc(ed) 12 novels, four volumes of poetry, one collection of short stories, and an autobiography between 1977 and 2002. … Kusama’s novels are dark, violent, and, in many cases, clearly informed by her decade in New York, no matter how emphatically she entreated readers to interpret them otherwise.” – Artnet

“Two municipal employees in the Dutch city of Rotterdam have been dismissed following an investigation into alleged corruption involving construction contracts. They include work connected to asbestos removal at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, one of the country’s most important museums.” – ARTnews

“The organization announced this week that it will offer Los Angeles County residents with active Medi-Cal or EBT cards $10 tickets to L.A. Phil performances at the Hollywood Bowl starting with the 2027 season.” – Los Angeles Times (Yahoo!)