Culture Canvas

A weekly roundup of arts and culture headlines.

Click to enlarge. Photo by the Times/Gallo Images/Getty Images.

“The Spear,” a painting by Brett Murray at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg that depicts South African President Jacob Zuma with his genitals exposed, was defaced on Tuesday. Zuma’s African National Congress party was due to challenge the displaying of the controversial painting on Thursday, but two supporters of the president vandalized the artwork before the case was heard in court. The gallery has temporarily closed and the case is now postponed indefinitely, via Global Post.

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Elsewhere in Johannesburg, the first Soweto Fashion Week opens Thursday and the $18 million Soweto Theatre complex, which contains a 436-seat main stage and two smaller performance spaces, opens Friday, via the Associated Press and the Huffington Post.

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The Washington Post’s Anne Midgette rounds up the controversy surrounding the Metropolitan Opera banning Opera magazine from writing reviews about its productions.

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Movie studios are looking beyond young movie audiences, via the New York Times.

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Newly released emails and documents showed that the Obama administration offered filmmakers working on a movie about the killing of Osama bin Laden a chance to speak with a SEAL Team Six commander involved in the raid. Republicans are asking questions, via the Wall Street Journal.

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Thirteen months after entering Chapter 11, the Philadelphia Orchestra Association filed its plan for exiting bankruptcy, via the Philadelphia Inquirer.

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A work by street artist Banksy was accidentally ruined by an Australian building worker after he drilled through it to put in a bathroom pipe, via the Independent.

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NPR looks at how director Wes Anderson scores his movies.

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Chinese company Dalian Wanda Group is purchasing AMC Entertainment for $2.6 billion, creating the largest theater chain in the world. It is also China’s biggest acquisition of a U.S. company, via the Hollywood Reporter.

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From Memorial Day through Labor Day, more than 1,600 museums across the country will offer free admission to active-duty military personnel and their families, via the Huffington Post.

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Literary scholar and critic Paul Fussell died Wednesday at age 88. He became famous in 1975 with the publication of “The Great War and Modern Memory,” which won both the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and the National Book Award for Arts and Letters.

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Robin Gibb, one of the three brothers in the pop group the Bee Gees, died on Sunday from cancer at age 62.

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World renowned German opera singer Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau died Friday at age of 86.