Arts & Culture

NEW YORK — The Museum of Modern Art opens 'Brancusi: The Artist and His Studio' to the public on Sunday, after member previews running October 22 to 24. The show runs through February 27, 2027. It is built around works from the Atelier Brancusi, the contents of the Romanian-born sculptor's Paris studio. He left the studio to the French state in 1957. The pieces can travel now only because the Centre Pompidou, which holds them, is closed for a long renovation, according to Artprice. The exhibition fills MoMA's sixth floor. It pairs sculptures with the artist's hand-carved pedestals and furniture, tools, photographs, films and archival material. It also draws on MoMA's own Brancusi holdings and local loans. The curators argue the studio was itself a composed work of art, in which the base and the room were part of the sculpture.

MEMPHIS — The Memphis Art Museum, formerly the Brooks, opens its new downtown building on December 6, six weeks from now. The Herzog & de Meuron design sits on a rebuilt bluff over the Mississippi. The Art Newspaper reported that the 123,500-square-foot building expands gallery space by 50 percent. A museum spokesperson put the cost of the whole project, including new park space and infrastructure and pedestrian improvements, at $222 million. Shelby County residents will get free admission permanently. The main opening exhibition covers a historic Black-owned photography studio that operated in Memphis for most of the 20th century. Galleries will open with 19 capsule presentations from the permanent collection. Architectural Record notes the building is framed in regionally sourced mass timber, with local firm archimania as architect of record.

PARIS — Three French tech entrepreneurs, Philippe Rodriguez, Albin Serviant and Gilles Mentré, opened the Prix Pascal de Littérature IA on October 20. They describe it as the first literary prize for books written with artificial intelligence. It is open to unpublished French-language fiction from anyone, with no publisher required. Entrants must submit a technical file describing the AI tools they used. All major language models are permitted. Entries close November 30, and a jury of five is to be named shortly. The winner will be announced in mid-December. No prize money has been declared, but the winner will receive help with publication. The launch came a day before the Canadian publisher Boréal said it had confirmed that Thélyson Orélien used AI in writing his novel, which was removed from the Goncourt shortlist. Orélien denies that AI wrote the book.

ATLANTA — The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 on October 19 that members of the Escambia County, Florida, school board cannot invoke legislative privilege to avoid testifying about why they removed library books. Judges Andrew Brasher and Jill Pryor held that voting on specific titles applied existing policy, which makes it an administrative act and not a legislative one. Brasher called the decision narrow and said it does not cover every decision to stock or remove a book. Chief Judge William Pryor dissented. The ruling affirms a district court. The 2023 suit was brought by PEN America, publisher Penguin Random House, authors and parents, who allege the removals targeted books by or about people of color and LGBTQ people. The case now returns to the Northern District of Florida, where the plaintiffs expect to take the board members' depositions.

Sacha Baron Cohen's 'Ali G: Who Iz I?' opened in U.S. theaters Friday through Amazon MGM Studios, and reviews are sharply divided. It is a roughly 89-minute mockumentary. Baron Cohen directs and plays several characters, including a progressive professor and a former Mossad agent. Real people appear in it, among them former congressman George Santos. Deadline called it outrageous and in the spirit of vintage Baron Cohen. The Guardian-style tabloid-free UK outlet Time Out gave three stars out of five and called it hit-and-miss. Variety found only scattered laughs and likened it to a Saturday Night Live spinoff. Canada's Globe and Mail was harshest, calling it a laugh-free sequel and a career low. Baron Cohen has said he revived the character to satirize extremism on both political sides, and critics disagree on whether that works.

Mubi began a limited U.S. release Friday of 'Fatherland,' Paweł Pawlikowski's black-and-white drama about Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika. They travel across a ruined, divided Germany in 1949. Sandra Hüller plays Erika opposite Hanns Zischler, and the film runs only 82 minutes. It premiered in competition at Cannes in May, where Pawlikowski won the best director prize. Rotten Tomatoes lists a 94 percent score, with a consensus praising the father-daughter dynamic. Reviews are not uniform. IndieWire gave it a B and found it emotionally restrained, while The New Yorker's Richard Brody criticized its rigid compositions. Mubi holds distribution rights in North America, the UK, Germany and several other markets. The film follows 'Ida' and 'Cold War' as the third part of Pawlikowski's postwar trilogy.

MEMPHIS — The Memphis Symphony Orchestra and Opera Memphis present Verdi's Rigoletto for one night only on Saturday, October 24, at 7:30 p.m. at the Cannon Center for the Performing Arts, 255 N. Main St. MSO Music Director Robert Moody conducts. WKNO reports it is the first semi-staged collaboration between the two organizations. Opera Memphis General Director Ned Canty and Moody told the station about the challenges and rewards of staging an opera with the orchestra on stage. The MSO bills the evening as a Masterworks concert with the score at the center. It is part of the orchestra's 75th season. The next MSO date is Orchestra Unplugged: The Planets, with Moody as conductor and host, on Friday, October 30, at 7:30 p.m. at the Halloran Centre.

Daniil Trifonov's Mi Historia Americana: Sur, released October 2 on Deutsche Grammophon, completes the two-volume survey he began in 2024 with My American Story: North. The two-disc set pairs solo piano works with the first recording of Cuadros del Sur, a piano-and-orchestra suite by Gonzalo Grau drawn from Osvaldo Golijov's St Mark Passion. Trifonov plays it with the São Paulo Symphony under Grau. The solo pieces include Ginastera's Second Sonata, Gabriela Lena Frank's Sonata Andina, Villa-Lobos's Bachianas brasileiras No. 4 and Trifonov's own Tango. Gramophone's reviewer found it surprising in its mix of styles and said Trifonov's involvement is a major benefit for the repertoire. The Classic Review called the programme intriguing, enjoyable and finely rendered, though it wanted less pedal in Camilo's Suntan.

PARIS — Krystian Zimerman played an unannounced recital on October 17 in the Grande salle Pierre Boulez at the Philharmonie de Paris. Bachtrack's Pierre Michel reviewed it. Rather than a conventional programme, the Polish pianist played many short pieces joined by logical tonal relationships. The listed works included a Statkowski prelude, Debussy's La Danse de Puck, a Szymanowski prelude, a Kapustin prelude and Rachmaninov's C-sharp minor Prelude. Michel praised the luminous, at times near-blinding sound, and wrote that it turned every bar to gold. He singled out the purity, clarity and almost aristocratic composure of Zimerman's phrasing. Bachtrack also carries a July review of Zimerman's account of Brahms's First Piano Concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra and Simon Rattle, which it called a rare and uplifting experience.