Visual Arts Accusations At Baghdad Museum Americans checking out Baghdad's Museum of Antiquities have suggested that museum staff might have participated in stealing from the museum. And that the museum leadership's membership in the Baathist Party might disqualify them from helping to rebuild the museum. But "for the foreign archaeologists who now throng the museum, the idea that their colleagues could have colluded in its desecration is too appalling to contemplate. They tend to take a relaxed view of the Baathist credentials of [museum director Donny] George and the head of the antiquities board, Jabir Khalil Ibrahim; no one in a senior position, they say, was unqualified." The Economist 05/23/03 Posted: 05/25/2003 10:34 pm Bilbao-On-Hudson? What will define success for Dia's new Beacon home north of Manhattan? "Is this the kind of work that will bring in 100,000 visitors a year? That's the number Dia hopes for. So does the State of New York and Beacon and its surrounding towns, which have chipped in $2.7 million toward the project so far and have visions of Guggenheim Bilbao dancing in their heads. Dia: Beacon offers some of the most potent art experiences to be found anywhere, in some of the most well-considered settings. But it was conceived largely to present difficult work for long durations in one space. And for much of what it offers, difficult is the word." Time 05/25/03 Posted: 05/25/2003 10:31 pm Understanding Dia Dia:Beacon, which opened last week in an old Nabisco factory about an hour north of Manhattan, may be the largest contemporary art museum in the world, with its 300,000 square feet of space. "To understand the ethos of the Dia Center, and how it came to convert such a cathedral-like space as Dia:Beacon, you have to go back to Dia's inception." The Guardian (UK) 05/26/03 Posted: 05/25/2003 6:57 pm Arm Or Armpit? That Is The Question Has the British Museum mislabeled a marble fragment from the Acropolis Marbles? The museum says it is a left arm. An expert maintains it is a right arm from another part of the pediment altogether. "That is not an armpit. They have mistaken the little depression between the tendons behind the arm for the armpit itself. It is a right arm. It won't fit the figure of Iris because it doesn't come from that figure." The Guardian (UK) 05/26/03 Posted: 05/25/2003 6:51 pm Libeskind On The WTC - Now The Tough Part In a classic case of aesthetic symbols confronting political and financial reality, [architect Daniel Libeskind] is fighting to preserve the form - and, with it, the meaning - of his proposal for the 16-acre former site of the World Trade Center. Libeskind also has been forced to confront accusations from a New York City architect that he fibbed when he claimed that, every Sept. 11, on the anniversary of the terrorist attacks that brought down the Trade Center's twin towers, the sun would shine without shadow on an outdoor plaza he calls 'the Wedge of Light'. While Libeskind seems to have weathered the plaza controversy, it remains unclear if he will be able to retain control over his design -- or whether developer Larry Silverstein, who holds the lease to the former World Trade Center site, will twist it beyond recognition." Chicago Tribune 05/25/03 Posted: 05/25/2003 5:57 pm Music Study: Downloaders Actually Buy More Music Than Others People who download music over the internet are said to be the reason that CD sales have declined in the past few years. "But a study released this month shows that people who download music are more than twice as likely to buy CDs as people who don't download. That makes sense. People who spend hours - and it takes a lot of time - scanning the Internet for music to download are likely to be eager music fans, looking for a new kick, a bit of rare trivia or even a cut they heard on the radio and wanted to hear again." San Francisco Chronicle 05/25/03 Posted: 05/25/2003 11:06 pm Inside Pierre Boulez Just how do you learn to play a Pierre Boulez score? "The leaps are awkward. The spacings of the chords are often large and dense, and there are many, many notes on every single page. As with lots of contemporary music, the patterns, the pitches are nothing like what we grew up practicing. The scores are the kind of music that someone who doesn't really read music would say [are just] full of black dots and circles. The page is covered with specks." Los Angeles Times 05/25/03 Posted: 05/25/2003 7:26 pm England Scores A Goose Egg (Oh, The Shame!) In this weekend's Eurovision Song Contest, Britain's entry scored no points. None. Nada. Zip. "An estimated 150 million viewers across the length and breadth of the continent witnessed this national humiliation. They not only watched it; they conspired to bring it about through telephone voting. One German newspaper was quick to grasp the true significance of what had occurred: 'England, motherland of pop, in last place!' This is what is known in English as schadenfreude." The Guardian (UK) 05/26/03 Posted: 05/25/2003 7:00 pm Colleges Become Music Police Colleges are cracking down on students who download music. At Colorado State University, "four or five times a day, college computing administrators receive a message from recording-industry download police giving the specific computer, song and time of a rogue copy made by a student in campus housing. They must pass the message on to a dorm rules enforcer, who in turn must unplug the computer in question and scold the owner that trading in copyrighted songs over the Internet is against the law. Strike two means a formal meeting with a disciplinary officer. Strike three at CSU means the student is denied access to the Internet as long as the wrongdoer remains in campus housing, for the rest of the student's college career." Denver Post 05/25/03 Posted: 05/25/2003 6:08 pm Jerry Springer Is America? " 'Jerry Springer - The Opera' couldn't be a bigger London success if you dipped it in chocolate and threw it to the lesbians, as one of its few reprintable lyrics suggests. What happened, exactly? This: The world now believes America is Jerry Springer, and Americans are Jerry's guests. The world believed it long before there was a 'Jerry Springer Show,' in fact; the show merely solidified that belief, giving justifiable anti-Americanism a name and a face - that of Springer's mild, jaded, half-smile of effrontery." Chicago Tribune 05/25/03 Posted: 05/25/2003 6:00 pm Upscale Melbourne, Downside For Music Melbourne has a lively music scene. "But it's a scene that is in danger of dying, according to some venue owners around town. The pub proprietors say that as house and apartment prices in the inner city have soared, home owners' expectations have changed. The new, more affluent residents have important jobs, peaceful lifestyles to live. They don't want to be kept awake at night by guitars and drums. Their complaints about noise to councils and liquor-licensing bodies are increasingly being taken seriously." The Age (Melbourne) 05/26/03 Posted: 05/25/2003 5:33 pm Open Minds Through Opera Manuela Hoelterhoff writes that the value of broadcasting opera every week throughout America is hard to calculate. "All I know is that I am not unique, and countless children must have listened to those opera broadcasts and gone on to become mathematicians, Supreme Court justices, stock brokers, teachers and captains of industry (if not, I guess, at ChevronTexaco)." The New York Times 05/25/03 Posted: 05/25/2003 7:34 am Arts Issues Artists In Schools "With public education struggling to stave off steep budget cuts and forced to cope with the extra emphasis on standardized testing, it has become difficult if not impossible for schools to add their own art, music, drama and dance teachers. Partnerships [with arts organizations] are sometimes hailed as an alternative to these arts classes. Adding to the desirability of partnerships is that the arts organizations pick up most of the tab for the program; they, in turn, have diverse sources to go to for funding, which has provided a significant impetus in the growth of such programs. But what do partnerships deliver? Are their promises fulfilled? Who really benefits? Until recently, it was hard to answer these questions." Orange County Register 05/25/03 Posted: 05/25/2003 10:54 pm Critics? What Use Are They? "The relationship between artist and critic is an age-old battle between process and product, actor and observer, status quo and innovation. To an artist, a critic can feel like a thorn in the side, an impartial evaluator, a necessary evil to be rationalized accordingly — or one of the malicious, impotent little men and women with nothing better to do than play God with their destinies." Los Angeles Times 05/25/03 Posted: 05/25/2003 7:42 pm People Rehabilitating Sonia Orwell George Orwell's wife Sonia, whome th author married three months before his death, "was completely demonized," says a new biography. Previous biographers have created "a hardhearted, mercenary gold digger who looked like a painting by Renoir and married a skeleton on his deathbed." By contrast, the new book portrays Sonia as "the most generous person - for her to be reimagined as a monster of cold-heartedness and greed is staggering and extremely distressing." New York Daily News 05/25/03 Posted: 05/25/2003 8:03 pm Hands-On Philanthropists (With Strings) Florida billionaires Daniel and Peter Lewis are hands-on arts patrons. Daniel pledged $16 million towards the Florida Philharmonic's $64 million endowment campaign. But when the orchestra failed to raise supporting capital, he insisted the orchestra be shut down. "The Lewis brothers share a conviction that the arts and other nonprofits must be financially sound - an elusive ideal to nearly every arts group - or be dramatically reconfigured, or even shut down. It is an ideal on which neither of the Lewis brothers seems willing to budge." Miami Herald 05/25/03 Posted: 05/25/2003 7:52 pm Theatre What Mr. Wilson Learned Playwright August Wilson takes to the stage himself for the first time in his new play in Seattle. "The 100-minute play, 'How I Learned What I Learned,' is brightened by sudden flashes of poetry and unfolds like a meeting between Dylan Thomas and Malcolm X. The dramatic high point comes when Mr. Wilson leaps into the character of a man in one of his stories who fatally knifes an acquaintance in a bar. He jumps around the stage, curses wildly, slashes the air and brutally kicks his imagined victim." The New York Times 05/26/03 Posted: 05/25/2003 10:49 pm The Five Best Regional Theatres In America? Time magazine has ranked what it considers the five best regional theatres in America. Chicago's Goodman Theatre topped the list, followed by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland; the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass.; the Guthrie in Minneapolis, and the South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, Calif. The Star-Tribune (Minneapolis) 05/25/03 Posted: 05/25/2003 8:10 pm Publishing The New Chick Lit Imprints "Chick Lit is a literary genre that has been demanding attention for about four years. Since then, an explosion of books with candy-colored covers and sassy girlfriend titles have appeared on bookstore shelves across the nation. And now, Pocket Books, a division of publishing giant Simon & Schuster, is launching a new imprint called Downtown Press, symbolized by a shopping-bag logo and devoted exclusively to the genre." Philadelphia Inquirer 05/25/03 Posted: 05/25/2003 10:57 pm In Search Of The Great American Novel "What really is the Great American Novel? It seemed elusive to me, considering the wealth of good novels in the last century and a half. There's no such thing as The Great American Novel, only several good-great American novels, I'd declared, quibbling with the article 'the.' All we can do is trace the threads that run through these novels, isolate them as a scientist isolates germs in a petri dish, and see if that amounts to an American tradition, or an American canon, in the novel. Find what's quintessentially American - if it's there." Miwaukee Journal-Sentinel 05/25/03 Posted: 05/25/2003 8:23 pm Wal-Mart Censors Wal-Mart accounts for about 15% of Amnerica's single-copy magazine sales overall. 'They're the biggest newsstand vehicle in the country for magazines. Thus, Wal-Mart can be not only the country's biggest retailer but its biggest censor as well." Los Angeles Times 05/25/03 Posted: 05/25/2003 7:45 pm Literary Fest Debates Anti-Americanism Discussions at this year's Hay literary festival in the UK seem to have a common theme as it becomes "embroiled in heated slanging matches about anti-Americanism. The Guardian (UK) 05/26/03 Posted: 05/25/2003 7:10 pm Media Van Sant Wins Cannes Gus Van Sant's "Elephant" wins the grand prize at Cannes. "It was certainly exceptional for an American film, the first ever submitted for the festival competition by HBO, to be acknowledged in such a way. 'Elephant' is a documentary-like examination of an ordinary day in a mostly white, middle-class high school in which the calm is splashed with a corrosive burst of violence: two boys arm themselves and begin shooting." The New York Times 05/26/03 Posted: 05/25/2003 10:47 pm Cannes Or Bust Was this year's Cannes a bust, as many critics have been suggesting? "This year's Cannes is only 'wretched' (in the words of one major American critic) if you compare it to the best recent Cannes fests and ignore all the movies shown out of competition - like the restored versions of 20 Federico Fellini films, Charlie Chaplin's 'Modern Times' and a number of rediscovered classics - as well as the best of the new films." Chicago Tribune 05/25/03 Posted: 05/25/2003 6:03 pm Summing Up Cannes As Cannes winds down for another year, Desson Howe writes that one thing is clear about this year's lineup: "Someone was saving the really great movies for another year." Washington Post 05/25/03 Posted: 05/25/2003 9:02 am Dance Washington Ballet - Successful, But What Does That Mean? Septime Webre has been running Washington Ballet for four years. "Sales of yearly subscriptions have tripled. The budget is up more than 50 percent. Last year the pool of individual donations hit the $2 million mark, a first for the institution. The annual number of performances has increased, and the company has moved from the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater to the larger Eisenhower for many engagements." But "the populist drive that marks his programming and helps account for the increased ticket sales has at least one closely connected observer worried about its effects on the sterling tradition of the company's training arm, the Washington School of Ballet." Washington Post 05/25/03 Posted: 05/25/2003 8:55 am