Archives for March 2009

What is it about opera in Chicago and a dollar bill? In the last year, two companies there have used the buck as a way to draw in people and raise some money at the same time.  Last year, the Chicago Opera Theater set up a six-week "People's Opera" contest, asking people to choose the opera, out of three, that they wanted to see produced -- for $1 a vote. … [Read more...] about $1 Goes Far for Two Chicago Opera Companies

The National Endowment for the Humanities gets far too little attention, imho. So I took some time this past weekend to look at its most recent round of grants, which were announced earlier this month. Nearly 200 awards worth a total of $20 million were made to cultural institutions, universities and libraries in 36 states and Washington, D.C., plus a … [Read more...] about The Unloved NEH? There’s more there than many know

While "Chelsea Visits Havana," the first big group show of American art in Cuba was moving into place -- it opened on Friday at the 10th Havana Biennial -- there was other art news on the Cuban front that slipped below the radar. Credit my friend Georgina Adam, an editor-at-large at The Art Newspaper, who pointed me to it in an item in her regular Saturday column for … [Read more...] about The Fanjuls Win (a small) One

Twenty-four hours after first reading Lynn Chu's op-ed in Saturday's Wall Street Journal on the proposed Google book settlement, it's still on my mind. I have not been following this issue as closely as I should be, and no doubt there are counter-arguments. But her analysis certainly disturbed me. Here are some key passages: There is nothing more individual in the … [Read more...] about Is Google being evil?

Friday afternoon: waiting for callbacks for stories I'm working on, callbacks that rarely come on Fridays after about now. Unfortunately. Which set me to some Friday afternoon pipe-dreaming. The Frick Collection has been thinking about expansion since at least Sam Sachs was director there; current director Anne Poulet has echoed the call for "limited expansion," as she has … [Read more...] about How collector Aby Rosen can become a real hero