Brooklyn Museum
Giuliani vs the BMA
News  & Analysis

Attention: If you've reached this page, you need to update your link - go to www.artsjournal.com . For previous day's stories go to: www.artsjournal.com/Digest.html   Thankyou

• REM KOOLHAAS has won this year's Pritzker Prize for architecture. New York Times 04/17/00 (one-time registration required for entry)

  • "The leader of a spectacularly irreverent generation of Dutch architects" Washington Post 04/17/00

  • "Designer and guru, engineer and visionary." Dallas Morning News 04/17/00

  • A new Seattle library: "Koolhaas' contribution will be a honeycombed, wire/mesh and glass building that will extend 12 stories high in a series of sliding platforms." Seattle Post-Intelligencer 04/17/00

  • "Most revolutionary urban thinker." Los Angeles Times 04/17/00

• HIGH STAKES SUIT: The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is suing the heirs of a local collector for $18 million for refusing to come to an agreement about the sale of a Picasso painting. "On one side you have SFMOMA, furious that its generous offer — $3 million more than the family realized at auction — was rejected. On the other, you have the family, furious that its right to dispose of its inheritance as it sees fit is being questioned. How do you explain SFMOMA's lawsuit, which, even if it is won by the museum, might jeopardize its relationship with many potential donors?" San Francisco Examiner 04/15/00

• MUSIC SALES UP: Sales of recorded music worldwide were up 1.5% last year to $38.5 billion, according to the annual report from the Int’l Federation of the Phonographic Industry. The number of recordings sold 3.8 billion - stayed the same however. The US - the world’s largest music market, accounting for 40% of the total - had its fifth straight year of growth, posting an 8% rise in value and a 5% increase in recordings sold, with online sales making up 2.4% of the total. Variety 04/17/00

• GOT A RIGHT TO STREAM? A lawsuit being heard in New York this week could determine how consumers can access their personal music files over the internet. Paul McCartney and two other plaintiffs claim that "MP3.com created an illegal database by purchasing CDs and uploading that music onto MP3.com's servers. Users who signed up for the service and who called my.mp3.com were then able to stream music from that database to any device that can access the Internet." Wired 04/17/00

• THE RUSH TO E-COMMERCE: The Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Museum team up on a commercial website for art. Plans include selling commissioned design products and offering educational programs such as live webcasts of lectures and concerts. It will also carry archival material on art. Profits from the site will help pay the museums' operating expenses.  New York Times 04/17/00 (one-time registration required for entry)

• UNION ACTORS in the US vote to go on strike against producers of TV commercials. Strike set for May. Variety 04/17/00

• HAVE ART, NEED HOME: New Zealand's big state-owned company ECNZ is going out of business. So what's to become of the company's publicly-owned  "highly discriminating corporate art collection" of some of the country's best artists? By law, the collection has to be displayed for the public, but... New Zealand Herald 04/17/00

• (NO) EYE FOR ART: A University of Toronto professor of psychology says that paying close attention to the blind may tell us a whole lot about art. "Over three decades of experiments, the Irish-born scientist has shown that the blind can make and understand pictures in ways that no one had imagined. And that fact forces us to rethink many of our preconceptions about representational art in general." Toronto Globe and Mail 04/17/00

• COLONY POWER: For years Australians looked to Britain for its arts leaders. But with two Aussies taking the top London ballet jobs, it looks like the Brits are seeking the vitality of the former colonies to inject new energy into these keystone establishments. The Age (Melbourne) 04/17/00

• OPERATIC PUNISHMENT: Students "sentenced" to attend a performance of "Tosca" as punishment for their transgressions at a Connecticut school discover they like it. "It was awesome. I wasn't expecting anything. I'd do it again - voluntarily." Philadelphia Inquirer (AP) 04/17/00

• A GIRL CAN DREAM, CAN'T SHE? This week the Guggenheim shows New York the Frank Gehry building it want to build in Lower Manhattan. Will the project really get built? Hard to say, but "like other sideshows that have kept New York in denial about the mediocrity of the buildings it puts up, the feasibility question distracts from the challenge presented by the design. This is the top form architecture comes in these days. Want some?" New York Times 04/17/00 (one-time registration required for entry)  

• INDEPENDENCE DAY: Independent films are hot: "Suddenly the blockbuster culture, the belief that only big money thrown at big screens can work in a popcorn-eating world, feels threatened by the "indie" insurgents, massing on the skyline as if in a John Ford Western. Should the moguls offer battle or a peace pipe?" Financial Times 04/17/00  

• WE'RE SORRY, YOU'RE FIRED, NOW PLEASE GO AWAY: Alberta Ballet ended its season Friday in controversy. The company fired Barbara Moore its "most senior" dancer. "In what superficially looks like an uncanny replay of the now famous fight between the National Ballet and the soi-disant prima who won't go away, Kimberly Glasco, Moore, 31, has launched a wrongful dismissal suit against the company that has been her dancing home for the past 15 years." National Post 04/17/00

  • Also: A CHILLING EFFECT: Fifty prominent Canadian artists sign a letter protesting a judge's ruling reinstating dancer Kimberly Glasco's job at the National Ballet of Canada after she was fired. CBC 04/17/00

  • Previously: WHO'S THE BOSS? A Canadian judge has ordered the National Ballet of Canada to reinstate principal dancer Kimberly Glasco, who was dismissed by the company earlier this season. James Kudelka, the ballet's artistic director, said that Glasco wasn't dancing as well as she once did and that she didn't fit with his artistic vision. Glasco sued for wrongful dismissal, saying she'd been fired for criticizing Kudelka's plans for a new "Swan Lake." CBC 04/10/00

• DIRECTOR of Britain's acclaimed Northern Ballet Theatre resigns after less than a year in the job. BBC 04/17/00

• A LUDDITE ART: "As theater artists ponder the future of their form, they return again and again to the idea of longing - and to language that seems to have more to do with the bedroom than the stage. Technology, which promises to bring drastic changes to the arts in terms of style and substance, will affect theater, too, of course. But at root, theater is a Luddite art, one that rests on the same equation as in the days of Sophocles: The theatrical relationship between performer and audience, like the relationship of lovers, depends on being in the same place at the same time." St. Louis Post-Dispatch 04/17/00

• BARDIC BEAUTY: Even though computer games beat books for most kids' attentions, there's still one writer who grabs their hearts - Shakespeare. "The Victorian children's classic, Tales from Shakespeare, may seem a world away from today's educational agenda, but his words still find ways into teenage hearts." Financial Times 04/17/00

• JUBILANT RETURN: After a decade in exile, Salman Rushdie returns to India. New York Times 04/17/00 (one-time registration required for entry)

  • ANTI-BAN: Salman Rushdie goes to India to call for lifting the ban on his book "Satanic Verses." Hundreds demonstrate against the author in Kashmir. The Age (Melbourne) 04/17/00

• RINGING IN THE MILLENNIUM: It's long, expensive and taxing. And yet, Wagner's "Ring" still has ahold of the imagination. Productions of it continue to flourish, despite the costs. New York Times 04/16/00 (one-time registration required for entry)

• RETURN TO SENDER: A two-hour ballet - "The King" - portraying the life of Elvis Presley, has been shut down before it even opens in Edinburgh by the late singer's daughter. The Independent 04/17/00

• NEW AMERICAN CLASSIC: "Carlisle Floyd's opera 'Cold Sassy Tree,'' which had its world premiere at the Houston Grand Opera on Friday night, is a minor masterpiece of musical storytelling and assured theatrical know- how." San Francisco Chronicle  04/17/00

• IN FOR A POUND: A proposal by the British government to slash admission fees to £1 to London museums is being met with mixed (but generally enthusiastic) reaction. The Art Newspaper 04/15/00 

• MUSICAL CHAIRS: The Boston Symphony could have almost any conductor it wanted as its next music director. Or could it? Handicapping the contenders - for now, at the top of the list is Levine. Boston Globe 04/16/00

  • DUBLIN CHOICE: Ireland's National Symphony Orchestra choice of Gerhard Markson as principal conductor is about as conservative as could have been made in the circumstances. Irish Times 04/15/00

• THE CIRCLE OF LIFE: For the future of American musical theater, look at "The Lion King." For a long time Broadway musicals were defined by a very narrow New York aesthetic. "What Disney has astutely done is create a mythic story that is as accessible in London as it is Tokyo and could be one day in Timbuktu." Toronto Globe and Mail 04/15/00

  • LIFE AFTER THE LION: Robert Brustein chats with Julie Taymor about life after "The Lion King." Taymor's got a new play opening this week on Broadway. New York Times 04/16/00 (one-time registration required for entry)

• CASE STUDY: A documentary on violinist Nadia Salerno-Sonnenberg raises questions about the relationship between manic depression and artists. "I think that people who suffer from depression may be able to use their creativity to help themselves out of it," says one doctor. St. Louis Post-Dispatch 04/16/00

• WHEN POP MUSIC CRITICS GET OLD: Was Washington Post pop music critic Richard Harrington demoted because, at age 53, he was too old for the job? Harrington thinks so, and he's suing. Washington City Paper 04/20/00

• WORKING CLASS COMPLAINTS: At a get-together in London to honor Michael Caine, the actors in attendance moan that the British theater is wracked with snooty class consciousness. Really? The Guardian 04/16/00 

• TROPHY ART: Russia's Pushkin Museum has put the controversial Gold of Troy on permanent display. The Troy collection was secretly taken from Germany by Soviet troops at the end of World War II, and was believed lost until the Russian government revealed, in the early 1990s, that the collection was in Moscow. Germany and Russia are arguing over the return of artwork captured in World War II. The Art Newspaper 04/16/00

• THEY'RE BACK: How old do you have to be before you're not a YBA (Young British Artist) anymore? In any case, the YBA's have new shows up, including an effort at the new White Cube branch office. London Times 04/16/00  

• BATTLE FOR THE NEW: New York's Whitney Museum has its Biennial stocked with 97 artists; across town P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center has its "Greater New York" show, a "spirited affair that rounds up enough youngish artists (146 in all) to start a day camp. The latest art-world trend is untrendy artists. Which show does it better? New York Times 04/16/00 (one-time registration required for entry)

• JUST WHEN YOU WERE WRITING THEM OFF: A number of critics are talking about a renaissance in Hollywood movies. There are a number of reasons, but one of them, ironically, was the success of "Titanic." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 04/16/00 

• OH DOC: Tel Aviv gets its own documentary film festival. Is the step-child of moviedom getting more respect these days? Jerusalem Post 04/16/00

• A USE FOR DEAD TREES: A Detroit sculptor sees a picture of a sculpture on the pages of the Detroit Free Press that was stolen from him last fall and goes out to claim it. Detroit Free Press 04/15/00