The Software Art Connoisseur A group of Dartmouth researchers have developed software they say can detect whether artwork is authentic or not. "There are properties in an artist's pen and brush strokes that aren't visible to the human eye, but that are there nonetheless. And we can find them, through mathematical, statistical analysis." Wired 11/22/04
Posted: 11/22/2004 10:05 pm
Is Liberal Arts Education Endangered? Ivy League educators got together recently to worry about the future of liberal arts education. "The fact that professors at Harvard, Princeton, and Dartmouth are worried about the health of liberal education is noteworthy. If the liberal arts are perceived to be struggling at these institutions, does liberal education stand a chance anywhere?" Boston Globe 11/21/04
Posted: 11/22/2004 5:39 pm
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Indian Museum Off To Good Start In its first month of operation the new National Museum of the American Indian attracted 275,400 visitors. "If that pace continues, the museum is likely to attract about 4.2 million people in its first year. That is in line with the low end of its curators' original estimates. At the time of its opening in September, they projected that the museum would attract 4 million to 6 million people and instituted a system of timed passes to spread out the crowds." Washington Post 11/23/04
Posted: 11/23/2004 10:23 am
Scots Royal Museum To Get Makeover Edinburgh's Royal Museum is a sprawling place, made so by numerous renovations over its 150 years. It's difficult to navigate, and not up to 21st Century museum standards for storing and displaying art. So now there's a major plan to make over the complex... The Scotsman 11/23/04
Posted: 11/23/2004 8:04 am
Indianapolis Museum Director Resigns Anthony Hirschel has resigned as director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, just shy of the opening of the museum's $74 million renovation. Hirschel, who said he was leaving for personal reasons, had led the museum since 2001. Indianapolis Star 11/20/04
Posted: 11/23/2004 7:22 am
Christo Gates To Begin Central Park Installation Installation of artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude's 7,500 gates in New York's Central Park will begin next week. "The Gates," as they are called, will be festooned with saffron-colored fabric panels and will line 23 miles of pedestrian paths from Feb. 12 to 27. They are being made in Queens and are nearly finished. The artists say they have been working on the project for 20 years." The New York Times 11/23/04
Posted: 11/22/2004 10:32 pm
MoMA: A Building That Disappears (That's Good) AJ blogger John Perrault is impressed with the new Museum of Modern Art. "I was surprised that the complex is as successful as it is. It's all a 3-D grid, fittingly so, given the midtown street grid. If the truth be known, neither façade is much to look at. But once inside, except for the atrium, the building disappears. This is an artist's and an art-lovers dream." Artopia (AJBlogs) 11/22/04
Posted: 11/22/2004 6:48 pm
Carmel Says Stop! No More Galleries! "With 120 art galleries in a town of 4,058 people, or one gallery for every 34 residents, the city council of Carmel-by-the-Sea voted last month to limit the number of new galleries moving into town. Carmel's leaders decided that the city, which earns no sales-tax revenue when out-of-state tourists snap up a watercolor, has reached aesthetic overkill." Time 11/22/04
Posted: 11/22/2004 6:14 pm
Colorizing The Classics (Like They Were Meant) "It has long been known that classical statues were painted. Indeed, their creators sometimes chose different kinds of stone for different parts of their statues according to the way they reacted to paint and wax, using types that could be highly polished for the fleshy parts and coarser varieties that would absorb paint for the drapery. Some art history books have included coloured photographs to give an idea of how the statues of the Greeks and Romans would have looked to contemporaries. But I Colori del Bianco (The Colours of White) is the first show to confront us with three-dimensional copies created with the help of meticulous scientific investigation." The Guardian (UK) 11/22/04
Posted: 11/22/2004 5:29 pm
How Britain Embraced The Modernists "The past year or two has seen a total and astonishing reversal in the reputation of modernist architects. These days, who but the most blinkered retired actor would refer to Denys Lasdun's National Theatre as Treblinka? The once mocked and scorned Colin St John Wilson has become a national treasure, knighted by the Queen, whose scion once reviled Wilson's British Library building as resembling an academy for secret police. How come this change of heart?" The Guardian (UK) 11/20/04
Posted: 11/22/2004 5:17 pm
Afghan Treasures Surface Much of the Afghan art missing after the American invasion has been surfacing. "The bulk of the newly inventoried items were found in April 2003 when a presidential palace vault in Kabul was cracked open to reveal a trove of famed, intact Bactrian gold pieces. But many more artifacts, including giant Buddhist sculptures and ancient ivory statues, have been found in recent months in unmarked boxes and safes stashed for safekeeping during the Soviet-led coup and then during the years of hard-line Taliban rule." MSNBC (Reuters) 11/21/04
Posted: 11/22/2004 5:06 pm
MoMA - Art In A Frame "After a period in which strongly sculpted museum buildings have dominated, often upstaging their contents, Taniguchi's MoMA represents a return to the time-honored way of housing art in lofty rectangular rooms. Because it looks so coolly cerebral, it is hard to imagine people making pilgrimages just to see the architecture, as they do with Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim in Spain. Taniguchi's exquisite white-walled spaces are so understated that they verge on invisible, which is exactly what MoMA wanted. The art remains the main draw. The architecture merely provides the frame." Philadelphia Inquirer 11/21/04
Posted: 11/22/2004 2:33 pm
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NJ Schools Ban "Messiah" Performances A New Jersey school district has banned schools from performing religious music. "The district has banned students from performing music related to any religious holiday — defeating the purpose of the schools' traditional 'holiday concerts'." New York Post 11/19/04
Posted: 11/23/2004 10:48 am
America's Orchestras And Their New Deals With ratification of the Philadelphia Orchestra's new contract with its musicians, four of America's top orchestras have signed new deals. So who won and who lost? "Negotiations this time around were generally more bitter than in the recent past. Attendance and endowments were down, and costs and deficits were up. Strikes loomed, angry rhetoric flew and mediators were called in." The New York Times 11/23/04
Posted: 11/22/2004 10:27 pm
Five Years Later - A Royal Opera House That Matters Five years after London's Royal Opera House reopened after an expensive makeover, it's a very different institution, writes Norman Lebrecht. And that's a very good thing... La Scena Musicale 11/17/04
Posted: 11/22/2004 10:22 pm
Levine In Boston - Thrilled To Be Here By all accounts, James Levine is thrilled to be working at his new job in Boston, writes Alex Ross. "Levine is preëminent among American conductors, yet he remains a curiously contested figure." The New Yorker 11/22/04
Posted: 11/22/2004 8:38 pm
Operatic "Angels" As An Opera Angels in America was a hit play and an acclaimed TV event. But "what possessed Hungarian composer Peter Eotvos to make an opera out of this already operatic play? 'The dream scenes, the hallucinations, ghosts, heaven ... these are fantastic for music. It's much harder to make an opera out of real life. And the situation with Aids creates great drama - the characters are touched by the knowledge that their life might be cut short at any moment'." The Guardian (UK) 11/22/04
Posted: 11/22/2004 5:44 pm
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Saratoga Center Dinged For Poor Management The Saratoga Performing Arts Center, which last summer tried to end a longstanding summer residency by New York City Ballet, has been cited for bad management by an audit of the organization. "Over the last few years, the Saratoga arts center has struggled with an annual deficit of $400,000 to $500,000 on an operating budget of $13 million and been forced to dip into its $7 million endowment to cover operating expenses." The New York Times 11/23/04
Posted: 11/23/2004 9:20 am
US Senate Passes New Copyright Bill "The US Senate passed a scaled-back version of a controversial copyright bill Saturday, keeping a provision that imposes severe penalties on people caught with camcorders in movie theaters but scrapping other provisions that copyright-reform activists had criticized." Wired 11/22/04
Posted: 11/22/2004 10:10 pm
America's Top Arts Private Fundraisers Which American arts organizations raised the most money from private donors last year? Carnegie Hall came first, bringing in $82.7, and the Met Opera was second with $68.6 million. But No. 7 was the Nashville Symphony? Chicago Tribune 11/22/04
Posted: 11/22/2004 6:24 pm
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The Honorable Terry Teachout AJ blogger Terry Teachout has just been confirmed by the US Senate as a member of the National Council on the Arts. As the most voracious consumer (and connoisseur) of art we've ever met, the honor is well deserved. Congratulations Terry. About Last Night (AJBlogs) 11/22/04
Posted: 11/22/2004 10:42 pm
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Lit Idol Want to be a literary star? Lit Idol is based on the format of TV's Pop Idol. "Writers must submit up to 10,000 words from the opening chapters of their novels and a synopsis. Professional readers will choose a shortlist of five following the competition closing date on 14 January. The final five will then have to read their work in front of judging panel. A public vote will also take place, which will account for 25% of the final decision." BBC 11/22/04
Posted: 11/23/2004 10:54 am
Cleaning Up After Devastating Book Fire Restorers are working on 62,000 heavily damaged rare books from a fire at the Anna Amalia Library in Weimar in September. "About 10 percent of the library's collection of a million books has been irreparably damaged, library officials say. But the 600-piece Bible collection, including Martin Luther's 1534 copy, and the huge Faust and Shakespeare collections have been saved or only slightly damaged. And between 25,000 and 30,000 other rare books are presumed lost, listed like missing persons in a databank on the library's Web site." The New York Times 11/20/04
Posted: 11/23/2004 10:43 am
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Indecent Indecency Debate "Since Nov. 2, the battle over indecency on the airwaves has been elevated to a level that suggests the issue was more than election-year pandering. The emphasis on values that helped re-elect President Bush is, to some, endorsement for a crusade that may eclipse the one against terrorism in Iraq. But so far, what's most immoral is the spectacle of politicians and special-interest groups trying to hide all the contradictions inherent in deciding what's too dirty for America and using it as a distraction to cover the bigger threat of media consolidation." Seattle Times 11/23/04
Posted: 11/23/2004 10:30 am
Satellite Radio Gets A Boost Satellite radio appears to be catching on. Both American satellite radio companies are seeing big growth in their number of subscribers, with Sirius expecting to top 1 million by the end of the year. XM projects 3 million subscribers by January. Yahoo! (Reuters) 11/23/04
Posted: 11/23/2004 8:40 am
TV Land - America Is LA, NY A new study counts the settings for American TV shows and - no surprise - finds most fictional settings are in New York or Los Angeles. "Those two cities account for just under half of the fictional settings for prime-time television shows going back to 1948, according to a new study by a media agency. California and New York state are settings nearly 60 percent of the time — even though those states make up less than 19 percent of the nation's population." Yahoo! (AP) 11/23/04
Posted: 11/23/2004 8:34 am
The British TV Crisis British television is in trouble. "Everything about British broadcasting at the moment points to too much television relying on the unsustainable business model of the 30-second ad slot. The current industry woes are mere detail against the broader ongoing issues of imminent analogue switch-off, BBC Charter renewal and the droning cultural lament about the general depravity and worthlessness of current screen fodder. We know from experience that crises are a cyclical part of the business, but the changes in technology, audience behaviour and the expectation society has of its linear media mean that we are now at a turning point for our great broadcasting institutions, some of which, at least, will not survive the next decade." The Guardian (UK) 11/22/04
Posted: 11/22/2004 6:33 pm
Signals - The Death Of VCR's Britain's largest electronics store will no longer sell VCR's. "The final nail in the coffin for VCRs is the low price of DVD players, which can now be bought for as little as £25. The cost of DVD recorders are also falling to a level within reach of many consumers." BBC 11/22/04
Posted: 11/22/2004 6:05 pm
Greeks Threaten To Sue Stone Over Alexander Greek lawyers are threatening to sue Oliver Stone over his depiction of Alexander the Great as bisexual. "The lawyers have already requested that a credit is added to the start of the film to make it clear it is pure fiction. Warner Bros and Stone have not made any direct comment about the request." BBC 11/22/04
Posted: 11/22/2004 5:50 pm
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