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Tuesday, June 8




Visual Arts

Supreme Court Says Family Can Sue Austria Over Klimt Paintings "The US Supreme Court ruled Monday that the 88-year-old niece and heir of an Austrian Jewish art collector can pursue her lawsuit against the Austrian government and its national art gallery for the return of six paintings by Gustav Klimt that belonged to her family before the Nazi takeover." The New York Times 06/08/04
Posted: 06/08/2004 8:02 am

Holocaust Survivors Sue Sotheby's Over Looted Art "Sotheby's is facing a $1.8 billion lawsuit from Holocaust survivors who claim it has recklessly trafficked in works of art stolen from Jews during the Second World War. They allege Sotheby's helped buy and sell looted masterpieces by Rembrandt, Titian, El Greco, Monet, Van Gogh and others since the 1970s." The Observer (UK) 06/06/04
Posted: 06/07/2004 5:45 pm

Gagosian's New Digs There's been much hype about Larry Gagosian's new gallery space in London. "The Gagosian Gallery proves to be a modest creation, housed in a former garage in Britannia Street, a rats' alley smelling of diesel and urine, scuttling across the Metropolitan and Circle underground lines as they rattle between Farringdon and King's Cross-St Pancras. Behind the gaunt facade, Larry Gagosian's architects, Caruso St John, best known for their New Art Gallery, in Walsall, which opened in 2000, have opened up bright, cavernous, concrete-floored, top-lit white spaces. These are particularly refined white spaces; they have something of a religious air about them..." The Guardian (UK) 06/07/04
Posted: 06/07/2004 5:39 pm

Qatar Sheikh"s Buying Spree For Five Museums Sheikh Saud al-Thani of Qatar is building five new museums and is serious about collecting for them. "A team of London agents working for the Sheikh bought 350 of the top lots in last months’ Islamic sales, spending well in excess of £15 million. The objects are all destined for the Museum of Islamic Art under construction in Doha to the designs of I.M. Pei, the Chinese-American architect coaxed out of retirement by Sheikh Saud. With its completion scheduled for 2006, the Islamic museum will be the first of the five to open, and the Sheikh‘s determination to buy the very best for its collection is having an extraordinary effect on the Islamic art market." The Art Newspaper 06/07/04
Posted: 06/07/2004 5:24 pm

The FBI, The Bug, And The Museum Of Modern Art In 2002, the FBI planted a bug in the construction shed at the site of the new Museum of Modern Art in New York. The bug resulted in a 61-count indictment against 24 people including "fifteen family associates; and a number of fellows from locals 14 and 15 of the International Union of Operating Engineers, an AFL-CIO affiliate, have been indicted on charges that include racketeering, extortion, loan-sharking, and all the trimmings. " New York Magazine 06/07/04
Posted: 06/07/2004 5:07 pm

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Music

New Music In Little Pieces Greg Sandow observes that new music has difficulty widening its appeal. "New music in New York seems fragmented, right now, at least to me, and I'd like to see more going on that would bind us together. We talk as if we have common interests, and we have organizations that support us all. But how much do we even know about what we all are doing?" NewMusicBox 06/04
Posted: 06/07/2004 6:38 pm

Regretting The Pulitzer Changes Josh Kosman doesn't like the decision to open the Pulitsers to different geners of music. "In truth, the prize has now been thrown open to all musical comers -- pop, classical, jazz, bluegrass, salsa, hip-hop, written and improvised, recorded and live and everything in between. Any musical utterance heard within the 50 states is now, in theory, eligible for a Pulitzer. Does that amount to inclusiveness, eclecticism, a postmodern abolition of restrictive conceptual categories, or any other warm and fuzzy gesture of goodwill? Not at all. It's an attempt to be all things to all people, something that you and I know never works. The result will inevitably be to drive an already marginal accolade further down the path to insignificance." San Francisco Chronicle 06/07/04
Posted: 06/07/2004 6:26 pm

Are Record Stores About To Slip Into History? A new report says that with the increasing popularity of music downloading and the availability of CDs in supermarkets, record stores in the UK are in danger of disappearing. "The pressure of new players competing for the record buyer's pound could make music stores 'irrelevant', it stated." BBC 06/07/04
Posted: 06/07/2004 7:05 am

Arts Issues

The Great Arts Confab Five thousand performing arts professionals are converging on Pittsburgh this week in the first-ever joint meeting of America's performing arts organizations. "The idea behind the project was to give performing-arts people across the country a chance to share their thoughts on important industry problems and pool their strength. There were real, fieldwide issues that were not subject to solution by any single art form. I had the feeling that we would always be minor-league players while we operated in our silos." The lain Dealer (Cleveland) 06/08/04
Posted: 06/08/2004 8:15 am

Korea To Invest In Arts The Korean government has announced it will make a major investment in culture over the next few years. "The Ministry of Culture and Tourism announced on Tuesday that the government plans to invest over 1.7 trillion won into a new arts development policy in the next five years." Korea Times 06/08/04
Posted: 06/08/2004 7:48 am

How About An Artist For Arts Job? Why should the government's culture minister be a bureaucrat? How about an artist? "Britain has many suitable candidates. At random, I could suggest Simon Rattle, Elton John, Trevor Nunn or Richard Attenborough, all of whom have spent their lives working in the arts. Surely any one of these would be a better choice of arts minister than a professional politician who perhaps sees the job as a stepping stone and who may have some difficulty telling their Arne from their Elgar?" The Telegraph (UK) 06/08/04
Posted: 06/07/2004 9:31 pm

People

Stalin, Movie Director "Stalin loved movies, but he was much more than a movie-buff. The new Communist Party archives in Moscow, and the recently opened personal papers of Stalin, reveal that he fancied himself a super-movie-producer/director/screenwriter as well as supreme censor, suggesting titles, ideas and stories, working on scripts and song lyrics, lecturing directors, coaching actors, ordering re-shoots and cuts and, finally, passing the movies for showing." The Telegraph (UK) 06/06/04
Posted: 06/07/2004 4:54 pm

Theatre

Rating The Tony Show "What started off as an embarrassment turned into a classy Tony Awards, which rewarded devoted theater fans while remaining lively and unstuffy." Rocky Mountain News 06/08/04
Posted: 06/08/2004 9:02 am

Puppet Time (Endangered) "While the puppeteers behind the Tony-winning Avenue Q have won over Broadway, their success comes at a time when many puppeteers -- and puppets -- find themselves being replaced by pixels." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 06/08/04
Posted: 06/08/2004 7:54 am

Is The Broadway Musical Dead? "The Broadway musical is dead. Such, at any rate, is the conventional wisdom, echoed by everyone from aging theatergoers who saw Ethel Merman in Gypsy to youthful academics who write about popular culture as if it were Finnegans Wake. Perhaps. And yet no other genre remains so central to American theatrical life. Most of the best musicals of the 20th century continue to be revived regularly, on Broadway and elsewhere, just as their songs continue to be sung and recorded. Still, it is evident that the demand for first-rate new musicals greatly outstrips the supply." Commentary 06/04
Posted: 06/07/2004 10:01 pm

Why Avenue Q Cleaned Up How is it that "Avenue Q" won the big awards at Sunday's Tonys? The wins were a big surpirse to everyone. "Avenue Q," a modest musical with singing puppets playing in a small Broadway theater, had pulled off what many in the business were calling one of the biggest upsets in Tony history. There even seemed to be a sense of shock inside the producing office for "Avenue Q," where some were nursing hangovers yesterday from a long night celebrating the show's three victories, which included awards for best score (the show's music and lyrics) and best book (its dialogue and structure)." The New York Times 06/08/04
Posted: 06/07/2004 9:37 pm

Publishing

In Search Of Book Buzz How do you generate buzz for your book among the crowd of 100,000 books that are produced each year? "At the meeting that ended Sunday in Chicago, the talk turned often to what it takes to snag media attention and, therefore, new readers in a market shaped by politics and the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. In short, political books have been gold for more than a year, and more are on the way." The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 06/07/04
Posted: 06/08/2004 8:57 am

Romano At BookExpo: A Report A visit to the annual BookExpo in Chicago is an opportunity to see what the buzz in the outside world is (and is going to be) says Carlin Romano. This year's event (attended by 10,000 book people) was a reflection of politics and issues beyond the convention center. Philadelphia Inquirer 06/08/04
Posted: 06/08/2004 8:07 am

The Business End Of Being A Bestseller Azar Nafisi, 54, has a book on the bestseller list. Now she's "learning the pitfalls and conundrums of playing the fame game in her adopted country as she contends with her corporate handlers, her book club fans and jealous former countrymen. "I thought I can live with the snide remarks: `Look at her wanting to become a celebrity, yada yada,' " she said. "That is not pleasant, but you can live with it. But one thing I can't live with, which I would criticize, is to be in competition with my book. A writer should allow the work to speak for itself." The New York Times 06/08/04
Posted: 06/07/2004 9:46 pm

The End Of Seattle BookFest Why did Seattle's BookFest festival bite the dust? "The argument over what Bookfest could have done better is now hypothetical, but what no one seems exactly ready to admit is that if recent festivals had been better and more accessible (and more interesting), they would have drawn more paying vendors and more paying attendees, and the finances would likely have fallen into place. Financial instability, dwindling attendance, the remoteness of the Sand Point venue, and increasing criticism about the quality of the festival are among the problems that have plagued Bookfest in recent years." The Stranger 06/03/04
Posted: 06/07/2004 6:10 pm

UK's Most-Loved Contemporary Books At the Hay Literary Festival, "the women-only Orange prize for fiction set out to discover the British public's most cherished contemporary novels - and found that 58% were by men. But organisers said this margin was smaller than it would have been before the prize was founded to promote writing by women eight years ago." The Guardian (UK) 06/07/04
Posted: 06/07/2004 5:58 pm

Media

NPR To Expand News Resources National Public Radio reveals its plans to start spending some of the money Joan Kroc left to the organization. "Of the $6.2 million in earnings expected next year, NPR will use $2.4 million to give discounts on newsmagazine fees for stations hit by steep price increases over the last five years. The remaining bulk of the investment income will pay for added staff at all levels of the news department."
Posted: 06/07/2004 10:06 pm

Dance

The Capital Of Tango "The preposterous-sounding truth is that, in terms of numbers, if not perhaps artistry, the foremost tango country in the world is actually Finland. The most startling proof of tangomania in Finland is the annual festival in Seinajoki, in which more than 150,000 people take part. The highlight is a tango-singing competition, which is televised, and the winners, the Tango King and Queen, become overnight stars." The Telegraph (UK) 06/08/04
Posted: 06/07/2004 9:22 pm


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