Arts & Culture

LOS ANGELES — The Getty Foundation has launched a $2.7 million grant program, New Interpretations, to help 11 museums rethink how they use language, accessibility and community engagement. The goal is to move beyond traditional wall texts and labels, with an emphasis on research and collaboration. Grantees include the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Walker Art Center, the Queens Museum, the Manchester Museum and the Fowler Museum at UCLA. Seoul's Leeum Museum of Art, working with Hong Kong's M+, will host some of the first public projects, including an international gathering at M+ in December. The First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City will survey Native audiences, and the Denver Art Museum will study how artificial intelligence affects visitors.

LONDON — An art historian best known for the BBC series Fake or Fortune has donated a collection of 50 Anglo-Indian artworks to Tate, according to The Art Newspaper. The works date from the 18th and 19th centuries. They include paintings by Indian artists Sita Ram and Ghulam Ali Khan and by European artists who worked in or painted India, including Johan Zoffany and Rudolph Swoboda. The gift also contains Indian landscapes by British artists. The donation widens the museum's holdings in art made during the colonial encounter. Details of when the works will go on display were not given in the report's summary.

ATLANTA — A divided panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Oct. 19 in PEN American Center v. Adams that Escambia County, Florida, school board members cannot use legislative privilege to avoid questioning about why they removed or restricted library books. Judges Andrew Brasher and Jill Pryor held that applying existing policy to specific titles is an administrative act, not a legislative one. Chief Judge William Pryor dissented. The plaintiffs are PEN America, publisher Penguin Random House, authors and a family; they sued in 2023 under the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The majority called its holding narrow and left open whether other privileges or discovery rules could limit depositions. The case now returns to the Northern District of Florida. One commentator notes the ruling does not decide whether the removals were unconstitutional.

NEW DELHI — The Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize released its 2026 shortlist on Wednesday. The five finalists are Narayani Basu's biography of the diplomat K.M. Panikkar, Sam Dalrymple's Shattered Lands on the five partitions that shaped modern Asia, Rohit De and Ornit Shani's Assembling India's Constitution, Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian's A Sixth of Humanity on independent India's development, and Sumana Ramanan's The Secret Master, about the classical vocalist Arun Kashalkar. A jury that includes Tata Sons chairman N. Chandrasekaran, historians Srinath Raghavan and Jahnavi Phalkey, and former diplomat Nirupama Rao chose the list. The prize, set up by NIF in 2018, backs research and writing on India. The winner will be announced in December and honored Dec. 12 at the Bangalore Literature Festival. Last year's winner was Aparajith Ramnath.

LOS ANGELES — Elon Musk has invested roughly $1 billion in Skydance, the company formed when Paramount closed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery on Oct. 6, according to Semafor. CNBC cited a person familiar with the matter. Neither Musk nor Skydance has publicly confirmed the figure. Semafor says the money arrived around the same time as other equity commitments, including from board member Laurene Powell Jobs. The company is targeting $6 billion in cost savings over three years and carries debt of nearly $80 billion. Co-CEOs David Ellison and Ynon Kreiz have said layoffs will accompany integration of the two studios and the Paramount+ and HBO Max streaming services. Larry Ellison, David's father and an old Musk associate, personally guaranteed more than $40 billion of equity financing for the deal. The size of any stake and any governance rights have not been disclosed.

LOS ANGELES — Peter Berg's World War II drama 'The Mosquito Bowl' opens in limited theaters Friday after its world premiere at AFI Fest, and early reviews are divided. The 126-minute film stars Nicholas Galitzine, Bill Skarsgard, Ray Nicholson and Tom Francis as Marines who play a football game before the Battle of Okinawa. The Hollywood Reporter's Angie Han called it technically impressive but emotionally hollow, saying the storytelling falls short of its craft. IndieWire's David Ehrlich gave it a C and faulted its underdeveloped characters and reliance on genre cliches. Deadline's Pete Hammond took the opposite view, calling it a strong antiwar film. Next Best Picture's Matt Neglia scored it 5/10, praising the sound design and three performances but finding it derivative. Berg also directed 'Friday Night Lights' and 'Lone Survivor.'

OTTAWA — The Finnish conductor John Storgårds began his tenure as music director of Canada's National Arts Centre Orchestra this week with his first concerts in the post. Storgårds first conducted the ensemble in 2013 and served as its principal guest conductor from 2015 to 2026. He has said he intends to nurture emerging talent and champion Canadian creativity. Other orchestra news published October 28 included the Los Angeles Philharmonic naming the film composer Joe Hisaishi as its composer in residence. The Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra also announced that its chief executive is leaving. In Helsinki, the city's Philharmonic launched an Emerging Artists Program, with violinist Lilja Haatainen and conductor Maximilian Fagerlund as its first participants.

MEMPHIS — The Memphis Symphony Orchestra's 75th season continues Friday, October 30, at 7:30 p.m. with Orchestra Unplugged: The Planets at the Halloran Centre, 225 South Main. Music director Robert Moody will conduct and host the program, talking through the ideas and musical storytelling in Holst's suite. The series is a partnership between the orchestra and the Orpheum Theatre Group. It follows the orchestra's October 24 concert of Verdi's Rigoletto at the Cannon Center, a collaboration with Opera Memphis. That evening was billed as the two organizations' first semi-staged joint production. Upcoming dates on the orchestra's calendar include Home Alone in Concert on November 28 and the Magic of Memphis holiday concerts on December 5 and 6.

LONDON — A new stage adaptation of The Pianist, the story of the Polish Jewish composer and pianist Władysław Szpilman, has opened at London's Park Theatre and runs to November 28. Adapted by Thom Southerland, it stars Daniel Krikler. Szpilman's son Andreas is among the lyricists. London Theatre gave it three stars. It praised the use of Szpilman's own music but found the show less confronting than its subject deserves. The blog All That Dazzles also gave three stars and called the staging too subdued and static, although it admired the design. A third, independent reviewer awarded five stars, calling the piece subtle and moving. The divided verdicts centre on whether restraint serves the material or dilutes it.