Lincoln's Watch Inscription, Kennedy Center Art Dispute, and NAZA Documentary Controversy Lead Art News

Key facts

• In April 1861, a watchmaker engraved "Thank God we have a government" inside Abraham Lincoln's pocket watch on the day Fort Sumter fell.
• The inscription was not discovered until the Smithsonian opened the watch in 2009.
• Aardman, the Bristol animation studio behind Wallace and Gromit, turns 50 this year and still wins BAFTAs with stop-motion.
• Aardman says AI won't reach the storytelling and its academy teaches students to keep the imperfections of a hand-made blink.
• The Kennedy Center's African Lounge held a Ghanaian carving of grief at Kennedy's death, kente cloth, and Yoruba doors; the room is now empty and the curator wasn't told where the works went.
• The Kennedy Center calls the works "fully safeguarded" but declines to show them.
• Venue owners got Macklemore pulled from Ed Sheeran's tour; within a week Sheeran and Robert Kraft pledged millions to Gaza relief.
• Netanyahu is threatening to strip the citizenship of the two Israeli directors of NAZA, a documentary on civilian deaths in Gaza that took a record 25-minute ovation at Venice and reaches the New York Film Festival on September 26.
• Deborah Sandler Kemper, general director of the Lyric Opera of Kansas City, is leaving after 15 seasons.
• She kept the company alive after Covid with a $2.5 million state appropriation she won by lobbying Missouri's governor herself, unannounced.