LONDON (AFP) ― Britain’s greatest living artist, David Hockney, has swapped the Californian sunshine for the landscape of his native Yorkshire for a blockbuster exhibition which goes on show this week.Hockney has portrayed country lanes and hedgerows in a riot of colour that leaps off the wall at the Royal Academy of Arts, a short walk from Piccadilly Circus in London.In the show, “A Bigger Picture,” Hockney and his team also show the countryside shifting through the seasons on a giant bank of v

NEW YORK (AP) ― Opera superstar Placido Domingo is getting ready to conduct 35 New York City schoolchildren who are studying music five days a week under a program inspired by Venezuela’s acclaimed youth orchestra program, El Sistema.Domingo will conduct the fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders from Public School 129 in Harlem and Public School 152 in Flatbush, Brooklyn, at a fundraiser Wednesday for their after-school music program, called Harmony.The children will play Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus

LOS ANGELES ― Everywhere you look, people are going about their lives to the tunes of their own personal soundtrack. They sweat through “YMCA” at the gym, pound out programming code to Rammstein’s brutal beats and nurse broken hearts with a mournful Bach cello concerto.In the last few decades, technology has transformed music from a social gathering experience to an intensely solitary one in which donning a pair of headphones in public is equivalent to shouting, “Leave me alone!”But in a move th

NEW YORK (AP) ― Producers of Broadway’s “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark’’ have fired back in their legal fight with one-time director Julie Taymor, claiming the woman who they once called a visionary later failed to fulfill her legal obligations, wrote a “disjointed’’ and “hallucinogenic’’ musical, and refused to collaborate on changes when the $75 million show was in trouble.In a countersuit filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against Taymor and her company

DENTON, Texas (AP) ― Arnold Greissle-Schoenberg can still picture his grandfather, composer Arnold Schoenberg, raising his finger to command attention.“Whenever Schoenberg wanted to say something he would raise his finger and everybody would fall silent and then he would have his say,’’ said Greissle-Schoenberg, whose childhood memories include watching his grandfather holding court with other musical luminaries.The 88-year-old grandson of the famous 20th century composer remembers a side of Sch

When the Sundance Film Festival launches its annual 10-day run Thursday, it will mark the independent film event’s 34th, 27th or 23rd year ― depending on whether you’re counting from the founding of the U.S. Film Festival in 1978, its takeover by Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute in 1985, or its renaming to “Sundance” in 1989. What’s evident from this year’s lineup is that well-known names have increasingly come to dominate the proceedings, which will make tiny, oxygen-deprived Park City, Utah

PARIS (AP) ― American tourists fill the galleries of the Louvre Museum, yet American art is surprisingly scarce.Paris’ premier museum and three U.S. art institutions are seeking to change that with an exhibit tracing the birth of American landscape painting and its influences.“As soon as I arrived at the Louvre, I noticed that American art was not displayed at the level it merits,’’ said Louvre director Henri Loyrette.Even the exhibit’s English-French melange of a name breaks tradition: It’s cal