“The New York City cultural landscape is mapped by the surnames of great patronage: Guggenheim, Whitney, Morgan, Frick, Cooper Hewitt and, more recently, Geffen, Koch and Bloomberg. Now the name of another donor seems likely to enter the lexicon: Wade Thompson. Mr. Thompson, who died in 2009, made his money by reviving the Airstream brand of shiny aluminum trailers, and in the 1990s, he began devoting a sizable amount of his fortune to reviving the grand but crumbling Park Avenue Armory, at 66th Street, which has transformed itself into a hangar-size stage for art, music and performance. The Thompson Family Foundation, which Mr. Thompson began in the late 1980s, has decided to add to the largess and is giving the armory $65 million, which will be used to create an endowment for arts programming and educational initiatives.”

​“Pierre Audi is a serious multitasker. He has led the Dutch National Opera since 1988 while also serving as artistic director of the Holland Festival in Amsterdam from 2004 until 2014. Somehow he found time to work as a critically acclaimed director, after founding London’s avant-garde Almeida Theater. Now he’s taken on yet another major position: artistic director of the Park Avenue Armory, a young institution with an ambitious reach.”

The blue-blooded Park Avenue Armory has announced the next stage of its modernization. The architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron will restore the building’s opulent Veterans Room, which has one of the few surviving interiors designed by Louis C. Tiffany and Company, the firm identified with the American Aesthetic Movement, led by Louis Comfort Tiffany, working with Samuel Colman, Lockwood de Forest, Candace Wheeler and Stanford White. The work, which began in January, is part of a $200 million renovation of the landmark, and it follows the 2013 restoration of its Board of Officers Room.

The fraught interiority of the xx’s music found an almost perfect expression in this stark but dynamic staging that suggested a meditation on distance and scale (and scarcity, at least where tickets were concerned). In an age of ballooning pop spectacle, here was an act of spectacular compression, one that served both to illuminate the songs and to interrogate their premise.

Over the last few years, Culture Shed, the visual- and performing-arts institution planned for the Far West Side of Manhattan, has been nurtured by prominent designers (Elizabeth Diller and David Rockwell); substantial city support ($75 million); and influential advocates (former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his deputy, Daniel L. Doctoroff). Hanging over the project was always a question: Who is going to run it? Now there is an answer: Alex Poots has been named artistic director and chief executive.

Blood, excrement, alcohol and M & Ms flew through the air as Mr. McCarthy took down targets ranging from Walt Disney (“WS” stands for Snow White backward), himself (the ranch house was a replica of his childhood home) and America’s lust for bigness and waste.