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    Trump Seeks to Eliminate the NEA

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    The president’s budget proposal also called for getting rid of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences.President Trump proposed eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities in the budget he released Friday, taking aim once again at two agencies that he had tried and failed to get rid of during his first term.The endowments, along with the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, were among the entities listed in a section titled “small agency eliminations” in his budget blueprint for the next fiscal year. The document said that the proposal was “consistent with the president’s efforts to decrease the size of the federal government to enhance accountability, reduce waste, and reduce unnecessary governmental entities” and noted that Mr. Trump’s past budget proposals had “also supported these eliminations.”In 2017, during his first term, Mr. Trump proposed eliminating both the arts and the humanities endowments. But bipartisan support in Congress kept them alive, and in fact their budgets grew during the first Trump administration.Since Mr. Trump returned to office this year, his administration has taken aim at the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, canceling most of their existing grants and laying off a large portion of their staffs. But the arts agency had yet to announce major cuts.The proposal to eliminate the endowments drew a quick and furious reaction from Democrats. One, Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, vowed to fight the plan to eliminate the N.E.A. “tooth and nail.”Representative Chellie Pingree of Maine, who serves as the top Democrat on the House subcommittee overseeing the N.E.A., said in an interview that Mr. Trump was “making a broad-based attack on the arts, both for funding and content.” She cited his proposals to eliminate the endowments as well as his takeover of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington and his efforts to influence the Smithsonian Institution.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Rosa Barba Lights Up MoMA With Her Love of Cinema

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      Rosa Barba makes artworks with film. But you wouldn’t call them movies.Sometimes she shoots them with 35-millimeter cameras and beams them onto screens. Other times, she turns celluloid and projectors into whirring sculptures, or choreographs musical performances with flickering light.“Film is kind of the key word,” Barba, 52, said recently. “But, in the end, maybe you can’t say they are films anymore: It’s a film about film, or it’s about the idea of a film.”Film might be her medium, material or subject, but there are many other ideas in Barba’s works, too — about ecology, landscape, science and the nature of knowledge. All her signature obsessions come together at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from May 3, where an installation of her work, called “The Ocean of One’s Pause,” runs through July 6 in the museum’s Kravis Studio, a space devoted to experimentation.The presentation brings together 12 works from the last 16 years, with performances on six dates throughout the run, that add up to a statement on her expanded understanding of cinemaRosa Barba’s “Composition in Field” (2022), a light box overlaid with text-printed celluloid strips, cracking as they turn on motorized reels. Strips are printed with a poem by Charles Olson.“Cinema, for me, is the moment when you start a kind of embarkation,” Barba said in an interview at her Berlin studio. It wasn’t just light, sound, or movement, she said; it was “a chemical reaction” when those elements come together and trigger or unveil something for the viewer — Holland Cotter of The New York Times once described this as an ability “to knock the pins out from under tyrant logic and clear a space where difference can thrive.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In Wes Anderson’s World, It’s All About the Details

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      When Wes Anderson was just starting out and wanted to reshoot some scenes for his 1996 debut “Bottle Rocket,” the rookie director got a shock. Columbia Pictures had sent all the movie’s props off to a store, which had then sold them for next to nothing.So when he made his next movie, “Rushmore” (1998), Anderson decided the same thing would never happen again. He put everything into an S.U.V. when the shoot was over, then drove the hoard away to look after it himself.That decision ended up helping not just Anderson himself. Over the past two-and-a-half years, curators at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris and the Design Museum in London trawled Anderson’s storage facility in Kent, England — which contains thousands of items from his movies — to compile a museum retrospective of the director’s work.The show opened at the Cinémathèque Française this week, where it runs though July 27. It will transfer, expanded, to the Design Museum in the fall.Max Fischer’s Academy uniform from “Rushmore.”The fur coat worn by Margot Tenenbaum in “The Royal Tenenbaums.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      5 Years After Covid Closed the Theaters, Audiences Are Returning

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      Broadway is almost back, and pop music tours and sports events are booming. But Hollywood, museums and other cultural sectors have yet to bounce back.It was five years ago today — March 12, 2020 — that the widening coronavirus pandemic forced Broadway to go dark, museums to shut their doors, concert halls and opera houses to go silent and stadiums and arenas to remain empty.At the time, they hoped to reopen in a month. It took many a year and a half.Since live performances resumed, the recovery has been uneven, but there are signs that audiences are finally coming back. Here’s a snapshot of where things stand:Broadway is 95 percent back.It’s been a slow road back for Broadway, but the industry is finally nearing its prepandemic levels. Attendance so far this season is at about 95 percent of what it was at the same point in the 2018-2019 season, its last full season before the pandemic, when it was setting records.“Oh, Mary!” has been a surprise hit this season, reminding the industry that shows can work without known I.P. or famous stars. “Wicked” is defying gravity thanks to the renewed interest brought by the film adaptation. For the first time since 2018, all 41 Broadway theaters have had shows in them this season. And there are more shows than usual regularly grossing more than $1 million a week.The crowds have returned to Broadway, and to the Times Square area. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut — and this is a big but — profitability is down. That’s because the costs of producing on Broadway keep rising, so even reasonably strong ticket sales are not enough.Beyond Times Square, the picture is decidedly mixed. Touring Broadway shows have been selling quite strongly. But nonprofit theaters, both Off Broadway and in cities across the country, are struggling. Having burned through the government assistance that came at the height of the pandemic, many regional theaters are now reporting budget deficits and are programming fewer shows and attracting smaller audiences than they did previously.— More

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      36 Things That Stuck With Us in 2024

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      The movie scenes, TV episodes, song lyrics and other moments that reporters, critics, editors and visual journalists in Culture couldn’t stop thinking about this year.The Last Scene in a Film‘Challengers’Mike Faist in “Challengers.”MGMReal tennis, like real dancing, happens when the body is rapt and alive, where visceral sensation takes over and the only thing left is the crystallization of every nerve and muscle, both aligned and on edge. That last match was a dance.— More

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      in Music

      At the Serpentine, Holly Herndon Taught A.I. to Sing

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      Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst are presenting their first large-scale solo museum show. It sounds gorgeous, even if its visual elements are lacking.Although it’s easy to feel alienated by the opaque processes behind artificial intelligence and fearful that the technology isn’t regulated, the artists Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst want you to know that A.I. can be beautiful.Their exhibition “The Call,” at the Serpentine Galleries in London through Feb. 2, is the first large-scale solo museum show for the artist duo, who have long been at the forefront of A.I.’s creative possibilities.Herndon — who was born in Tennessee, grew up singing in church choirs and later received a Ph.D. in music composition from Stanford — has made cutting-edge, A.I.-inflected pop music for over a decade. With Dryhurst, a British artist who is also her husband, she has branched out to make tools that help creatives monitor the use of their data online, and recently, into the visual arts.The couple’s work “xhairymutantx,” commissioned for this year’s Whitney Biennial, uses A.I. text prompts to produce an infinite series of Herndon portraits that highlight the playful nature of digital identities.The Serpentine show combines musical and visual elements. With the varied a cappella choral traditions of Britain in mind, Herndon and Dryhurst worked with diverse choirs across the country, from classical to contemporary groups of assorted sizes, to produce training data for an A.I. model. In a wall text, the artists explain that “The Call” consists of more than just the A.I.’s output. They also consider the collection of the data and the training of the machine as works of art.“We’re offering a beautiful way to make A.I.,” the artists’ statement adds. Their utopian take is that A.I. is collectively made: It learns from whatever it is exposed to and can therefore be shaped for good.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Holocaust’s Grandchildren Are Speaking Now

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      Toward the end of “A Real Pain,” a movie written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg coming to theaters on Nov. 1, two first cousins played by Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin approach the house in a Polish town where their recently deceased grandmother had lived before the Holocaust.Eisenberg’s character, David, the more reserved of the pair, proposes the two leave stones on the doorstep, riffing on the Jewish tradition of placing stones on graves.“She’s not buried here,” says Culkin’s cousin, Benji.“Yeah, I know, but it’s the last place she was in Poland,” says David. “It’s the last place any of us were.”The improvised remembrance, the interruption of self-awareness, the confused sense of duty — all are characteristic of how American descendants of the Holocaust’s victims two generations removed today commemorate an event that, nearly 80 years after it ended, can feel like something that still governs their lives, not to mention the lives of Jews and everyone else.This cohort is known as the third generation of Holocaust survivors, and “A Real Pain” is representative of their output. Which is to say: It is often not about the Holocaust at all. The cousins go together on an organized tour of Holocaust sites and memorials in Poland, but much of it — excepting a visit to the Majdanek concentration camp — is lighthearted. David and Benji grieve mainly not for the Holocaust but for their grandmother, who survived it. They struggle with their own problems, including the dissipation of their relationship. They question why they are even there.Jesse Eisenberg on the set of his new movie, “A Real Pain,” about the grandsons of a Holocaust survivor visiting Poland.Agata Grzybowska/Searchlight PicturesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More