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TOP
ARTS NEWS
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ACQUIRING
ETHICS: The American Association of Museums, comprised
of 3,000 museums and 11,400 museum professionals and trustees,
will adopt new ethical guidelines for how museums deal with
art borrowed from private collections. Following in the wake
of the Brooklyn Museum scandal in which it was discovered that
Charles Saatchi, the exhibit's largest donor, was also its single
largest financial backer, the question of curatorial ethics
has loomed large at arts organizations around America. The
New York Times 08/03/00
(one-time registration required for entry)
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INFOBERG:
Writers are upset about Contentville, which went online July
5. The site offers "books, articles, TV transcripts and
old speeches, for sale starting at $2.95 each," but "some
publishers are shocked at Contentville's chutzpa. The Village
Voice says it licensed EBSCO to use content for educational
and research purposes. 'It's outrageously unethical. Nobody
ever dreamed of this. It's just gross.' "
Feed 08/01/00
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THE
O'KEEFFE FIASCO: The controversy over the authenticity of
a set of watercolors purported to be by Georgia O'Keeffe is
the biggest scandal in years to hit the National Gallery of
Art. "Whether a grand deception or just a garage-sale dream
gone wrong, it never should have happened. The warning signs
were there from the start, but they were swept away by a tsunami
of money and wishful thinking."
Washington Post 08/06/00
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BOOK
CHAIN SUES NEWSPAPER: Canadian bookstore giant Chapters
sues National Post after stories alleging the chain was behind
in payments to a large publisher. "CEO of Chapters says
that the articles painted a distorted picture of his company."
CBC
08/02/00
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UNESCO
TO THE RESCUE: UNESCO, the UNs
cultural and educational agency, is coordinating a $250 million
international effort to rebuild Moscows 19th-century
Bolshoi Theatre, which is crumbling and close to collapse due
to years of neglect. Theatres from around the world have already
rallied around the cause by sending in contributions equal to
one nights earnings. NPR
07/31/00 [Real Audio
file]
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LEARNING
THROUGH MUSIC: Does having kids play and listen to music
actually make them smarter? An oft-quoted study said yes. But
there has been resistance to the idea. "Researchers are
mustering data to counter those who are intent on debunking
the 'Mozart effect'' - the theory that classical music makes
the brain work better."
Singapore Straits-Times (NYT) 08/04/00
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WILLIAM
MAXWELL DIED at age 91 on Monday. Accomplished novelist
and revered editor at the New Yorker for 40 years,
Maxwell honed the prose of some of this centurys finest
American writers, J.D. Salinger, John Cheever, and Harold Brodkey
among them.
CNN 08/01/00
PLUS:
Singapore bans production of The
Vagina Monologues ~ Australia creates new
arts
business foundation ~ Naked
"performance artists" streak across London's Westminster
Bridge ~ Artist sues Ann
and Gordon Getty over defaced mural ~ Stephen
Hawking blasts new play, "God And Stephen Hawking"
~ Boston Symphony conductor Seiji
Ozawa plays role of heroic bystander in car accident ~ James
Joyce's grandson fights
to stop musical adaptation of Joyce's "Ulysses" ~ Sotheby's
earnings decline 5 percent, though revenue is up in second quarter
~ San
Francisco Airport gets $11.1 million of new art.
TOP
ARTS FEATURES
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AN
INTERVIEW WITH STANLEY KUNITZ, the new U.S. poet laureate.
First published more than 70 years ago, Kunitz, now 95, has
won almost every poetry award (including the Nobel in 1959 to
the National Book Award in 1995), although hes only published
a handful of books. I write poems only when I cannot escape
them, when it is so urgent I will sacrifice everything else
to do it. A new Kunitz collection is due out next year.
NPR
8/01/00
[Real audio file]
-
GET
THE PICTURE? Think digital cameras are going to take over
the art of photography? Not hardly. "Even a $10 single-use
camera offers 10 times better resolution than today's $1,000
digital." Now a French chemist "has developed a new
method of 'doping' film emulsions that promises to make them
five times better at capturing light. 'If it can be widely applied,
it will certainly be one of the greatest inventions in photography
in the last 60 years.' "
Discover Magazine 08/00
-
AN
ANIMATED FUTURE: At the Venice Biennale, US architects present
the future. "The emerging generation of architects represented
here uses animation software to study the effects of natural
forces on different forms, and film- and Web software to produce
virtual environments and atmospheric effects. Moreover, they
say, they are among the first architects to respond to the way
that digital technologies have altered people's aesthetics,
even their very sense of space."
Chronicle of Higher Education 08/02/00
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ALLURE
OF LONDON: A group of New York artists working in London
talk about the differences between the two cities. "They're
impressed by the apparent importance attached to contemporary
art in Britain. Stories about artists make the front page of
newspapers; television documentaries about art are informative
and well made. No matter how crude its terms, Britain, and specifically
London, engages in a national debate about art. This does not
happen to the same extent in America and New York."
London
Evening Standard 08/04/00
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SOUTH
AFRICAN ARTS IN DISARRAY: One
South African artist applies to start a porn site so he can
finance his art. Thus the extent of "the frustrations felt
by many over the state of the arts in South Africa, where the
only certainty is uncertainty. Will the country's last remaining
permanent orchestra, the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic, still be
around in 2001? Will Pretoria's State Theatre survive? Will
lottery funding help to revive the performing arts? Will SA
arts and culture help brand the country as a tourist destination
and as the export product it once was during its theatrical
high point in the '70s and '80s? Sunday
Times (South Africa) 07/30/00
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CULTURAL
ASSET? Dick Cheney is George Bush's running mate, but of
interest to cultural people is his wife Lynne, who was chairperson
of the National Endowment for the Humanities in George Sr's
administration. When she left NEH, though, she attacked it.
Cheney appeared on ABC's 'This Week' last Sunday, "and
told interviewer Cokie Roberts that she had tried to eliminate
the agency because 'the Endowment, under the Clinton administration,
evolved into something outrageous,' and that 'it was such a
misuse of taxpayer money.' "
Backstage
08/04/00
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FASCINATING
YET DISCONCERTING:
Composers have always experimented
with new ways of producing music. So today's forays into interactivity
come from a long tradition. "Yet these interactive inventions
may someday put composers out of business, at least those who
cling to the quaint idea that composing means one person in
private putting notes and sounds together for later public performance."
New
York Times 08/06/00 (one-time
registration required for entry)
-
THE
COMPLICATIONS OF LOVE AND HATE: "Any number of classical
music lovers will tell you with glee of the bad pieces they
love to hate. But people who will tell you about pieces they
hate to love, but love anyway, are somewhat more rare. Saying
you've got a thing for Brahms' Hungarian Dances Nos. 4 and 5,
for instance, especially if you've ever gone anywhere near a
music school, is particularly dangerous - but only if you mean
it sincerely. Irony does exist in classical music, but it's
mostly in the ears of cynical (younger) beholders."
Philadelphia Inquirer 08/01/00
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THREE
DECADES OF THEATRE: Theatre
critic Benedict Nightingale reflects on 35 years of attending
the Edinburgh Festival. Unpredictability is the essence
of Edinburgh. If I have seen plenty of chic schlock there -
Stein, Sellars and Robert Wilson at their most overrated - I
have also seen plenty that stays with me still. And here let's
agree that the distinction between Festival and Fringe is often
slim. London
Times 08/01/00
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WHY
I HATE EDINBURGH: "Brian McMaster is the man who
runs the Edinburgh International Festival, and sometimes
it is hard to tell whether he just has a perverse love of
emptying theatres or whether it's all more sinister than
that and that he is, au fond, an out-and-out sadist, who
gets his kicks out of boring people into a state of mental
derangement."
The
Telegraph (London) 08/06/00
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NEVER
NEUTRAL: "In 1991, Pauline Kael decided to stop writing
movie reviews for The New Yorker, which she had been doing more
or less continuously since 1968. Nine years later, everyone
still wonders what the most influential movie critic of all
time thinks." Toronto
Star 08/06/00
PLUS:
The New York
art scene: hotter than ever ~ The Mona Lisa in ceramic? Check
out Japan's new
"ceramic
archive" ~ Inside the 20th Annual Romance
Writers of America Conference ~ Former Jewish Museum Berlin
director Tom
Freudenheim on antisemitism in Germany, the Holocaust Memorial,
and differences between the arts in the U.S. and Germany ~ A salute
to beloved deceased actor Marcello
Mastroianni ~ The fierce queen of Egyptian
belly dancing ~ The sad decline of Glasgow's
museums
SPECIAL
INTEREST
-
THE
NEW LATIN: "Think of mathematics as the Latin of modern
times. Across the world, it plays, as several historians have
noted, the role that Latin played for Europeans in the Middle
Ages. It's the international language of vital work. It unites
those whose thoughts produce big changes, and it helps make
those changes occur. We who know nothing of mathematics (like
Europeans who knew nothing of Latin in, say, 1350) are fated
to be, in a crucial sense, more spectators than participants
at the central dramas of our lifetime." National
Post (Canada) 08/01/00
-
HOW
COMPUTERS CHANGE US: Computers are useful tools, to be sure.
But using them is also changing the way we think. "The
computer is a new semiotic channel. When it processes information
it changes that information. Consider, for example, the hunt-and-browse
method of research one does when actually working in library
stacks. Compare this to the Boolean search procedures one uses
when doing computer assisted research. This change is bound
make a difference in the knowledge produced, but as yet we do
not know in what way."
The Idler 08/04/00
-
WHERE
SHOULD BEAUTY LIVE? The hypothetical question of where
the Elgin Marbles would go if they were returned to Greece has
incited a debate over the proper context for items of beauty.
Do we have a responsibility to make sure works of art remain
in the place that gives them artistic life? "It's our loss
if we find reasons not to worship beauty and condemn ourselves
to a life of aesthetic squalor." The
Guardian 08/03/00
-
IN
THE LAND OF THE PHILISTINES: There are, of course, all the
standard reasons for a publisher to turn down a book. "But
what, I wonder, are 'all the standard arguments'? The notion
that fortune - in the shape of a huge advance and a lot of hype
for an unwritten first novel - favours the young? That the winner,
so long as he or she has no literary record, takes all? That
what sells a book is a pretty face on the jacket? No publisher
would dare reject a book because the author was the wrong colour
or the wrong gender, but to be the wrong age is unforgivable."
The
Observer (London) 08/06/00
JUST
FOR FUN
-
THE
"CAT" GOES LATIN: Two years ago a husband/wife
team published a version of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas"
in Latin. It was an unexpected hit. Now they're back with "The
Cat in the Hat." "Of course, unless you're fluent
in the language of Cicero and Nero, it's hard to judge the playfulness
of such lines as: 'At tunc quies est erepta!/ Tota domus est
correpta/ Tum tumultu, tum fragore!' In the original English
version, those same lines, about the first appearance of the
Cat, go this way: 'And then something went bump!/ How that bump
made us jump!/ We looked!' " Chicago
Tribune 08/01/00
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TALES
FROM A CLASSICAL MUSIC STORE: Who shops at a classical music
store? There are "the Toscanini freaks and the Ricardo
Muti-Walks-on-Water squad, who will pay anything - anything
- to own a CD of their hero doing the stick-waving equivalent
of singing in the shower." Some are "a little less
than erudite. Many come in search of 'The Fat Guy' (Luciano
Pavarotti), 'The Blind Guy' (Andrea Bocelli) or 'The English
Kid' (Charlotte Church, who's Welsh, not English, by the way)."
There was one confused man who came in looking for "WOCTAKOBNY"
(or Shostakovich - in Cyrillic lettering.) The
Baltimore Sun 07/31/00
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WANNA
WRITE LIKE A SPICE GIRL? Choosing from country music generators
that know the long road from "flirt" to "hurt"
or Goth-inspired generators that will search for that perfect
rhyme for "pierced skin" ("fierce kin"?),
phonetically challenged songsmiths and Web surfers looking for
distraction can now pick up the mouse and sit back as the poetry
springs forth from the computer screen. New
York Times 08/03/00
(one-time
registration required for entry)
-
SF-LAND:
Plans for a huge history museum with "fake fog, a mini
Golden Gate Bridge and a re-creation of the 1960s-era Haight-Ashbury
district" have Bay Area residents conflicted. "Opponents
deride the plan as a kitschy, Las Vegas-style tourist trap and
consider the fight to stop the 70,000-square-foot San Francisco
Interactive History Museum no less than a battle for the city's
soul."
Cleveland Plain Dealer (AP) 08/06/00
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