Measuring The Origins Of Ideas Charles Murray did a statistical analysis of humankind's greatest accomplishments in history. "According to his statistics, a whopping 72 percent of the significant figures in the arts and sciences between 1400 and 1950 came from just four European countries: Britain, France, Germany and Italy. But after weighing a number of possible explanations, including the effects of war, civil unrest, economic growth, cities and political freedom on achievement rates, Mr. Murray still was not satisfied. Why, he wondered, when he factored in population growth, did the achievement rate in Europe appear to plummet beginning in the mid-19th century, a period when peace, prosperity, cities and political freedom were steadily increasing?" The New York Times 10/25/03
Posted: 10/26/2003 10:03 pm
Nude In Grand Central Station Spencer Tunnick's latest project brought 450 women to pose nude in New York's Grand Central Station Sunday morning. "For his latest, he said, he first sought permission to use the New York Public Library and the Museum of Natural History but was rebuffed by both. He's also been arrested several times in New York for previous projects." USAToday 10/26/03
Posted: 10/27/2003 9:18 am
Malaga's New Picasso Museum Fulfilling a longheld wish by the artist, a new Picasso Museum has opened in Malaga, Spain. "Yesterday Malaga was festooned with bunting heralding the new museum and events organised to "receive the maestro". A bullfight, with leading toreros, advertised with a suitable Picasso painting, will be held this afternoon and six bulls will be dispatched in his honour. King Juan Carlos and Queen Sophia will open the museum." The Telegraph (UK) 10/27/03
Posted: 10/27/2003 8:49 am
Choosing The Next Whitney Biennale Three curators have chosen 108 artists for 2004's Whitney Biennale. "While the 2004 biennial may be considered more conservative than biennials of the recent past, with its balance of midcareer and senior artists and unknowns, the mix has been intentional. 'We deliberately set out to be very intergenerational. The last biennial focused on so many younger people, but some midcareer and senior artists we discovered are making the best work of their careers." The New York Times 10/27/03
Posted: 10/26/2003 10:18 pm
Narrowing What It Means To Be Warhol (Only Originals Count) The Andy Warhol Authentication Board has decreed that any artworks the artist did not directly create will no longer be considered Warhol originals. "Andy Warhol often left assistants to 'mass produce' many of his most famous pictures, among them images of the Campbell soup tin. The decision means many art collectors are left with Warhol works which are now considered copies and therefore worth much less, and some are threatening to sue the board." BBC 10/26/03
Posted: 10/26/2003 9:49 pm
Christie's Denied Wrongdoing In Stolen Painting Case Christie's says it alerted the seller of a painting thought to have been stolen by the Gestapo. The auction house says it was not obliged to tell heirs of the painting of its whereabouts or the authorities. "We do not have the legal right to breach our duty of confidentiality by contacting third parties without the vendor's permission, nor did we have the right to withhold the painting from the vendor."
BBC 10/26/03
Posted: 10/26/2003 9:45 pm
- Christie's Accused In Nazi Painting Case "Christie's is refusing to disclose the likely location of an 18th century masterpiece stolen by the Gestapo and being claimed by the heirs of its original Jewish owners. It is the second case uncovered by the Guardian in which the London auction house is accused of failing to help families whose property was looted by the Nazis." The Guardian (UK) 10/25/03
Posted: 10/26/2003 9:43 pm
History - The Good And The Bad A public art specialist working on a brochure for a historical walking tour for a town in Florida discovers some of the town's racist history. Should he include it in the brochure? The town leaders aren't so sure. "Glenn Weiss said he wants to clarify and showcase black history, not to ignite racial hostilities but to acknowledge an important part of the past." The Sun-Sentinel (South Florida) 10/18/03
Posted: 10/26/2003 8:34 pm
Archiving For The Future The National Archives reopens in Washington DC. "The Declaration and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the documents the Archives calls the Charters of Freedom, are back on display in the Rotunda of the Archives building after being away from public view 2 1/2 years. The building has been extensively renovated to make the documents more accessible to visitors, especially the handicapped, and the Charters have been re-encased after minute and painstaking conservation treatment. The entire project is estimated to have cost as much as $136 million." Baltimore Sun 10/26/03
Posted: 10/26/2003 6:20 pm
Disney Passes Expectations In The Fast Lane LA's new Disney Hall got through its opening weekend of three concerts in great style, writes Joshua Kosman. "Taken in tandem with Thursday's opener, the evenings added up to a beguiling snapshot of musical life in the Southland - venturesome, swaggering and ready to embrace whatever cultural developments may be passing through. In addition to its own extravagant charms, at once noble and puppyish, Disney Hall reveals anew the strength and resilience that this orchestra has attained under Salonen's leadership." San Francisco Chronicle 10/27/03
Posted: 10/27/2003 10:27 am
The Music Biz's New Biz Model "In the trickle-down economics of the music industry, the travails of the Big 5 major labels - who have suffered steeply declining sales for the last three years - are having an impact on the smaller bands, record companies and media who make up the rock and rap underground. The idea of the Big 5 multinationals as viable distributors of music becomes a less likely scenario every year; a new business model that is emerging sees the big record companies as glorified marketing companies, expert at spending money to get consumers to spend even more money." Chivago Tribune 10/27/03
Posted: 10/27/2003 9:08 am
Concerto Winnows Piano Competition Field Some 400 pianists applied to compete in the San Antonio International Piano Competition. "Of those, only 38 were able to meet a new requirement that applicants submit a recording of themselves playing with an orchestra." Organizers were dismayed to hear so many excellent pianists were unable to provide a tape of them performing with orchestra. San Antonio Express-News 10/26/03
Posted: 10/26/2003 10:43 pm
Buy A Beethoven A movement of a Beethoven string quartet, written in the composer's hand, is coming up for auction. Earlier this year a manuscript copy of Beethoven's 9th Symphony sold for $3.47 million. "Unlike that manuscript, which was prepared by a copyist but had Beethoven's corrections and comments on most of its pages, the quartet movement is entirely in Beethoven's hand. Sotheby's says it expects the manuscript to bring between $1.6 million and $2.5 million." The New York Times 10/27/03
Posted: 10/26/2003 10:27 pm
Sex (No Drugs) And Rock 'N Roll According to a new study, young rock musicians are more liable to discourage drug use than encourage it. "The research, published by the University of Texas at Austin, explodes the conventional wisdom that popular music encourages teenagers to abuse drugs. The author, John Markert of Cumberland University, Tennessee, says that although there has always been a generally hostile attitude towards heroin and other hard drugs, teenage listeners today 'are being exposed to more negative images of marijuana and LSD than older listeners'." The Guardian (UK) 10/37/04
Posted: 10/26/2003 9:30 pm
OC Register Cuts Back Arts Columns The Orange County Register cuts back its arts coverage, cutting its classical music column back from once a week to once a month. "Behind the change, of course, is the thinking that classical music is a marginal art form, patronized by a very few." Orange County Register 10/26/03
Posted: 10/26/2003 10:33 pm
Connecticut's New Super Culture Agency Connecticut creates a "super-agency" of culture that combines all the state's cultural programs under one roof. "What there is plenty of, are politicos. This could bode well when it comes time to go after significant state dollars beyond the $24.48 million the new agency now oversees this fiscal year ($20 million comes from lodging tax revenues) and at least $20 million for the next; but when it comes to allocating those funds politicians haven't the best of track records of fairness, merit and accountability." Hartford Courant 10/26/03
Posted: 10/26/2003 10:11 pm
After The Lottery... Now What? In the past decade, a flurry of ambitious lottery-funded attractions went up around the UK. Opened in a blaze of publicity, some of them are now finding the going tougher as they try to earn their way. Can we expect a rash of lottery-funded cultural failures in the next few years? The Guardian (UK) 10/27/03
Posted: 10/26/2003 9:37 pm
Jack Valenti, Mogul Wrangler Jack Valenti is 82, and he still runs the Motion Picture Association of America with consummate skill, just as he's done for 37 years now. "What's remarkable is he's managed to hold all the companies together even though we're often fractious among each other and competitive and have heavily divergent issues — some of us have networks, some have cable companies, some have theme parks, some have the Internet. We're all often truly impossible to deal with. Jack has held us together." The New York Times 10/27/04
Posted: 10/26/2003 10:23 pm
In Praise Of Libraries For all their excellence, libraries are low in glamor. "What can a library do to compete with such events as the International Festival of Authors at Toronto's Harbourfront Centre, the announcement of nominees for the Giller Prize and the Governor-General's Award, or the celebrity-cookbook author Indigo is bringing to a suburb near you? It's possible, however, that society's collective inability to appreciate the public library as a vital institution is the library's fault." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/27/03
Posted: 10/27/2003 10:14 am
What Matters, The Booker? So much controversy and hoopla over who wins a literary competition like the Booker. "Perhaps the Booker wars would end if the participants realized that, according to a recent study by one economist, very little is at stake: Judges in aesthetic competitions, according to Victor Ginsburgh, a professor at the University of Brussels, are simply not very good at identifying art works that future generations will acknowledge as great." Boston Globe 10/26/03
Posted: 10/27/2003 8:45 am
NY Review Turns 40 The New York Review of Books celebrates its 40th birthday; since 1963 it has been "the closest thing to a national literary journal in America, its distinctive white-paper bound magazine appearing at two-week intervals. Today, it's a thick publication with 115,000 subscribers. It features lengthy reviews, journalism and commentary by an international list of writers both literary and political, and illustrations by David Levine." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 10/26/03
Posted: 10/26/2003 10:37 pm
Taking A Read Of China "In China, as in America, there is a debate about what constitutes popularity in fiction: Are Yu Hua's best-selling novels a concession to China's newly consumerist culture or a necessary response to the intellectually serious but hopelessly academic "postmodern" fiction in fashion 20 years ago in China? Whereas in the United States this discussion is an aesthetic one, the debate in China has sharper teeth; American writers may fear the culture mafia, but at least they don't have to worry about the Ministry of Culture." Slate 10/24/03
Posted: 10/26/2003 9:55 pm
The Scariest Film Scene Of All What's the scariest scene in all of movies? According to a new British poll, it's Jack Nicholson's "Here's Johny!" in "The Shining. "The scene in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining topped a poll for a Channel 4 special on The 100 Scariest Moments on TV and film. It beat classic terror scenes such as the head-spinning scene in the 1973 horror film The Exorcist and the moment a severed head tumbles from a hole in a boat in Steven Spielberg's Jaws."
BBC 10/26/03
Posted: 10/26/2003 5:43 pm
Wasting Away In Principal "The Royal Ballet's Zenaida Yanowsky has been a fully-fledged principal since 2001 but, despite countless one-act triumphs, these meaty full-evening roles continue to elude her. The 28-year-old Spaniard isn't the first Royal Ballet dancer to be principal in name only - Deborah Bull seldom got to carry a three-act ballet at Covent Garden - but Yanowsky, with her cool blonde beauty, sure technique and dazzlingly broad dramatic and stylistic range represents a serious waste of resources" writes Louise Levene. The Telegraph (UK) 10/22/03
Posted: 10/26/2003 6:04 pm
