“By far, the star of the bunch was the 1951 masterpiece Saying Grace, which sold for $46 million — a record for Rockwell’s art… The AP says the artist’s previous record of $15 million had been set by “Breaking Home Ties” at a 2006 Sotheby’s auction.”
“Slumping ticket sales contributed to a $1.2 million deficit for the TSO’s 2012/13 season, up from the prior year’s $837,736 deficit, it was announced Tuesday at the annual general meeting.”
“The orchestra recorded a surplus of about $280,000 on total revenue of $9.5 million. The extra money will reduce to $512,000 an accumulated deficit that the SPCO hopes to eliminate in the next few years.”
“The real goal, in a larger perspective, is how to de-monetize art. It’s too late for Detroit to think about such things—any attempt to keep its art out of the market would be vigorously protested by the city’s creditors—but the Detroit crisis has people thinking about how to avert such things in the future.”
“When you 3-D-print an object, it’s a fixed, static thing. If you want something more complex, you need to print it as parts and then assemble it. We thought, instead of assembling intelligence into it afterwards, why not print intelligence into it?”
“If we view people as capable of feeling, but not capable of action, we’re still failing to understand them as fully human. Someone who is incapable of thinking for herself, and yet feels very much, is essentially a puppy.”
“The diversity of display styles suits a young institution that lacks deep holdings of major figures. Instead the museum layout convenes a conversation among local artists and global ones. That’s just perfect for Miami, the restless nexus of the Americas and Europe.”
“Defining quality used to be easy, although taste was always a mitigating factor. Now in our multicultural society, it is more complex. No longer can we calibrate merit solely through a Eurocentric framework.”
“Apparently, a third-party vendor sold the prints to Walmart, which in turn thought nothing of selling ripped off versions of the most famous anti-consumer street artist in the world.”
While it doesn’t provide a definitive answer, new research from Germany presents evidence that improved academic performance truly is a result of musical training.
“A figure less than $2 billion is likely to inflame the passions of bondholders, unions and other creditors who see DIA masterpieces as a prime source for recovering the billions they are owed by the city. It also increases the chances that a court battle over the fate of the DIA will become even more contentious as Kevyn Orr prepares his plan of adjustment to restructure city finances.”
“[That] is the idea behind the Affordable College Textbook Act, a bill recently introduced in Congress by Senators Dick Durbin and Al Franken. The bill would create a grant program that would support the creation and use of so-called ‘open textbooks,’ meaning textbooks that are licensed under terms that allow them to be accessed and distributed for free.”
“‘A one-time infusion of cash by selling an asset,’ he [wrote], would have only delayed the city’s ‘inevitable financial failure’ unless it could have also come up with a sustainable way to enhance income and reduce expenses. Judge Rhodes added that in considering selling assets, a city ‘must take extreme care that the asset is truly unnecessary in carrying out its mission’.”
“Actor David Birrell has received ‘substantial’ damages after he was blinded in his right eye when a prop gun misfired during an onstage duel at the Donmar Warehouse” in 2010.
Jennifer Grout, a 23-year-old from Boston who speaks almost no Arabic, sings it so well that she’s now a finalist on this year’s Arabs Got Talent – the only one performing the classical repertoire in which Umm Kulthum and Fairouz became famous but which most younger Arabs neglect.
Judith Mackrell reviews the bizarre and dramatic backstage saga at the theater that (probably hasn’t) ended with the guilty verdicts in the trial of the men accused of throwing acid into Sergei Filin’s face.
“By analyzing the MRIs of 949 people aged 8 to 22, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania found that male brains have more connections within each hemisphere, while female brains are more interconnected between hemispheres.
“Claiming it to be the first major purpose-built dance venue to open in London for a decade, the touring dance company’s new six-storey base includes three main rehearsal studios, an archive, and physiotherapy facilities.”
Mary Schmidt Campbell: “It is a demonstrated fact that if you put well-designed arts programs into the schools – particularly in areas that are underserved – and you integrate them into the curriculum, you can raise the performance in reading, math and science. … It drives me crazy that we are still struggling to make that case around the country.” T
“To people who follow the pronouncements of Bob Dylan, his comment in a Rolling Stone interview in September 2012 suggesting that American blacks could sense whether whites had slave-master blood ‘just like Jews can sense Nazi blood and the Serbs can sense Croatian blood’ may have seemed just the sort of vaporously impressionistic, emotionally pointed kind of thing that Mr. Dylan has been known to say for decades.” Some Croatians in France beg to differ.
“Mike Poulton, the man charged with condensing [Hilary Mantel's] Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies for the Royal Shakespeare Company” and “Geoffrey Beevers, [who] has hacked George Eliot’s Middlemarch (904 pages) into a trilogy for the Orange Tree theatre in London”, try to explain.
“Derek Gillman, the British-born executive director and president of the Barnes Foundation who guided it through the latter stages of a controversial move from its longtime home in suburban Merion to a grand new gallery on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, announced his resignation Tuesday.”
“While Saint Nicholas may bring gifts to good boys and girls, ancient folklore in Europe’s Alpine region also tells of Krampus, a frightening beast-like creature who emerges during the Yule season, looking for naughty children to punish in horrible ways – or possibly to drag back to his lair in a sack.”
Inspired by the ever-tactful Benjamin Netanyahu’s present to Pope Francis of a history of the Spanish Inquisition, Marc Herman considers what studies have shown that givers and receivers think about gifting and re-gifting.