Dallas Museum's New Riches Among A Cultural Boom The Dallas Museum gets $400 million worth of art and cash, making it a major center of modern art. Moreover, "the gifts arrive amid a Dallas cultural building boom: a new $275 million performing arts center includes an opera house designed by Norman Foster, a theater designed by Rem Koolhaas and an arts high school. They will become part of the Dallas Arts District, which already embraces the Morton H. Myerson Symphony Center." The New York Times 02/16/05
Posted: 02/16/2005 7:33 am
Dallas Museum Gets $400 Million The Dallas Museum of Art had a big day Tuesday, getting donations worth as much as $400 million: three extensive art collections, a $25 million Monet, $32 million of endowment funds for acquisitions and a really nice house on Preston Road. The stash of 800 works dating from the 1940s to the present includes giants such as Jasper Johns, Richard Serra, Willem de Kooning and Gerhard Richter. It's the largest combined gift in the museum's history and one of the nation's biggest ever." Dallas Morning News 02/16/05
Posted: 02/16/2005 6:48 am
US Confiscates Art Passports US Customs agents have confiscated fake passports intended for an art show, saying they might be "harmful if imported." "The items belonged to an art group headed by Vienna artist Robert Jelinek, and included what the government described as "fantasy passports," along with ink pads, rubber stamps and ink. They were taken from Jelinek's luggage Feb. 9 in Detroit as he headed for Cincinnati." ABCNews.com 02/16/05
Posted: 02/16/2005 6:03 am
Poker-Playing Dogs Sells For $590,000 "A pair of paintings from the famed series depicting dogs playing poker sold for $590,400 at auction on Tuesday. The winning bid set a new auction record for artist Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, whose previous top sale was $74,000 for a painting at a Sotheby's auction in 1999." Newsday (AP) 02/15/05
Posted: 02/15/2005 6:01 pm
Houston's MFA Gets $450 Million Oil heiress Caroline Wiess Law has left Houston's Museum of Fine Arts the bulk of her estate. "When all of Law's assets are sold and the legal proceedings conclude, possibly by the end of this year, the museum could net between $400 million and $450 million. In recent history, this would be one of the biggest, if not the biggest cash gifts to an art museum. This money will help make Houston one of the most important museums in terms of programming and serving the public." Houston Chronicle 02/15/05
Posted: 02/15/2005 5:58 pm
Colorizing On The Nile A website is offering images of colored ancient statues. The experiments in color are part of "a growing trend that has resulted in a recent Vatican Museum exhibit on colored statues, as well as actual restoration of the world's best-preserved painted sculpture. Before these projects, most all Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Greek, Roman and other early sculptures only were seen in the monotone colors of the sculpture's primary material, such as clay or marble, even though many of the objects originally were covered with gilt and bright paints." Discovery 02/15/05
Posted: 02/15/2005 5:55 pm
Cuno: Chinese Art Embargo A Bad Thing China has recently requested an embargo on art coming out of China. But this is bad policy, writes James Cuno. "China's request to the US Cultural Property Advisory Committee for an embargo on exports of archaeological material and cultural property is injurious to the discovery and dissemination of knowledge about the art and culture of the many peoples who have lived and worked in, and traded through, China for millennia."
Orientations 02/05
Posted: 02/15/2005 5:43 pm
WTC Memorial: A "Grandiose Paen To Grief" What has happened to the World Trade Center Memorial? A year after being chosen, the design has been bloated, writes James Russell. "It was inevitable the planned memorial would grow to a disturbingly large size, once it was deemed that the towers' footprints must be entirely preserved -- for political, not design reasons, in response to pleas from some of the victims' family members. In the past year, the proposed project has expanded into a vast commemorative complex; it threatens to become a grandiose paean to grief." Bloomberg.com 02/15/05
Posted: 02/15/2005 5:23 pm
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Double Discs: Two-Sided Music If you're older than 30, you remember when music came on vinyl records and cassettes and you had to turn the record or cassette over to play the other side. Now the CD generation gets its chance. DualDiscs are here: CD on one side, DVD on the other. The cost is about the same as a conventional CD, with prices ranging from $12 to $19. Boston Herald 02/16/05
Posted: 02/16/2005 6:37 am
Kenyon: A Fascinating Time For Classical Music Classical music in trouble? Not at all, writes Nicholas Kenyon. "The fascinating question is why the repertory has been creatively disoriented in the way it has over the past couple of decades, why people now find gamelan music or 13th-century organum as meaningful to them as the classics. I believe there is a very simple answer to this: we have finally reaped the harvest of a century and more of recording and broadcasting, which has gradually made the widest possible range of music available to us, all at the same time, in an almost frighteningly all inclusive way. How could this overwhelming experience not have a drastic influence on our taste?" The Guardian (UK) 02/15/05
Posted: 02/16/2005 6:10 am
Machover's Music Game Composer Tod Machover has invented a new toy to teach children how to make music. "Working with the Fisher-Price toy company, Machover has come up with Symphony Painter, musical composition software that allows children ages four and above to draw music and have it played through a hand-held device. Selecting from a palette of 24 musical patterns and 24 instruments and zany sounds, the child draws his composition on a small screen called a Color Pixter. The device is fun but not mindless, and encourages the youngster to listen carefully while constructing a coherent piece." Bloomberg.com 02/15/05
Posted: 02/15/2005 6:13 pm
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Copyright Bullies Are corporations bullying the rest of us with the copyright lawsuits? "David Bollier argues that the court's willingness to let corporations get away with such bullying is increasingly eroding our "cultural commons" -- the collection of images, stories, sounds and other creative expressions that, due to their significance and prevalence, no longer belong to any single person or company." Wired 02/16/05
Posted: 02/16/2005 7:52 am
Study: States Increase Arts Funding Again After a couple of brutal years in which state arts funding was cut, US states are increasing their arts budgets again, says a new report. "While most of the funding changes were 10% or less up or down, there were notable exceptions, including Colorado, up 150.0%; Florida, up 135.7%; the District of Columbia, up 126.0%; and New Jersey, up 51.5%. Of the 56 arts agencies surveyed by NASAA, 44 reported level funding or increases this year, while only 12 suffered cuts." Back Stage 02/16/05
Posted: 02/16/2005 7:16 am
Seattle Artists Rally To Fired Director's Defense Last week the board of tiny Seattle contemporary art presenter Consolidated Works abruptly fired founding director Matthew Richter without explanation. Now a virtual Who's Who of Seattle art has signed a letter of protest to the board and the arts community has rallied to his defense. Seattle Post-Intelligencer 02/16/05
Posted: 02/16/2005 6:13 am
Connecticut Governor Proposes Big Arts Funding Cuts Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell is proposing big cuts in the state's arts budget. "The $23.7 million budget of the Commission on Culture and Tourism took a 16 percent decrease last week when Rell proposed her $15.3 billion state budget. Among other cuts was $450,000 removed from $2.25 million in cultural resources grants, which help fund arts groups' operations, education and programs. The commission's new budget total is just under $20 million." Hartford Courant 02/15/05
Posted: 02/15/2005 5:29 pm
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Playwright Uhry: Accused Of Poisoning By Nicotine Patch? "Driving Miss Daisy" playwright Alfred Uhry is accused in a $1.4 million lawsuit of defaming his former son-in-law, who claims he was wrongly accused of child abuse and attempted poisoning by nicotine patch. Seattle Post-Intelligencer (AP) 02/15/05
Posted: 02/15/2005 5:35 pm
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Chicago Theatre League Chief To Step Down Marj Halperin, the long times head of the League of Chicago Theatres, is stepping down from the job. "Established in 1979 -- as the Chicago theater community was just beginning to become a cultural force to reckon with -- the League now serves as umbrella organization for about 170 Chicago area commercial, not-for-profit and presenting theaters. It is a community of organizations whose budgets, artistic missions and audiences vary widely." Chicago Sun-Times 02/16/05
Posted: 02/16/2005 6:39 am
Roundabout Leaves Theatre League New York's Roundabout Theatre has left the League of American Theatres and Producers, which represents Broadway theatres. "Todd Haimes, Roundabout's artistic director, wasn't available for comment. Variety quoted him last week as saying only, 'The league doesn't serve the needs of a nonprofit theatre operating on Broadway'." Back Stage 02/16/05
Posted: 02/16/2005 6:07 am
Of Love And Shakespeare - Maybe Science Can Help? Is their a scientific explanation for the love Shakespeare writes so eloquently about? "Merging art and science, the Royal Shakespeare Company has engaged a psychotherapist to explain the "science of love" to actors rehearsing new productions of Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night's Dream. It hopes that they will get an understanding of what is happening in the human brain when one person gazes into another's eyes and murmurs: I'll follow thee and make a heaven of hell." The Guardian (UK) 02/15/05
Posted: 02/15/2005 6:25 pm
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Super-Size Me - The New Paperbacks "Mass market paperbacks, those pocket-sized best sellers available everywhere from airports to drug stores, are on the decline, apparent victims of increased competition and the squints of baby boomers who value larger print over lower prices." So publishers are experimenting with a larger format. "The new paperbacks will be at least a centimetre taller than mass market books — big enough to make the books more readable, but small enough to fit into pockets and existing store racks. In both size and prize, they will stand midway between mass market books and “trade” paperbacks, which are the same size as hardcovers." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 02/15/05
Posted: 02/16/2005 6:54 am
Publisher Sues P. Diddy For Advance Money Random House is suing P. Diddy to get back a $300,000 advance for an autobiography the rapper never wrote. The book was contracted for in 1999 and no manuscript is yet forthcoming. "Random House has seldom resorted to a legal course of action with its prospective authors who don't write the books we have contracted for, but Mr. Sean Combs has left us no choice." Yahoo! (AP) 02/16/05
Posted: 02/16/2005 6:31 am
Foyles To Expand Worldwide Foyles, London's much-beloved book shop, has announced that it will expand worldwide, in its first expansion since the 1930s. "The privately owned group will target cities where it can establish as authoritative a presence as it has in London, where its business has been based since 1906." The Independent (UK) 02/16/05
Posted: 02/16/2005 6:28 am
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So This Is News? Study: Local TV Ignored November's Elections Local American TV all but ignored last November's elections, says a new study. In the month before November's election, local viewers saw 17 minutes of candidate ads for each minute of local TV news coverage. That disparity was one of many striking findings in an intensive study, released yesterday, that found local political races were given short shrift by newscasts." Philadelphia Inquirer 02/16/05
Posted: 02/16/2005 7:38 am
Actors Union Objects To Indecency Bill The actors union AFTRA has spoken out against a bill in Congress that would dramatically increase fines for broadcast indecency. The bill seems sure to easily pass, but the union says it "represents an unconstitutional threat to free speech that, if passed, would undoubtedly have a chilling effect on artistic freedom." Back Stage 02/15/05
Posted: 02/15/2005 6:05 pm
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Russian Church Protests Rasputin Ballet Members of the Russian Orthodox Church are protesting a ballet called Rasputin that features a character portraying Czar Nicholas II. "Orthodox Christians are offended by the fact that Emperor Nicholas II will be shown dancing in the production. In Czarist Russia, it was not permitted even to show the images of saints on the stage." ABCNews.com 02/15/05
Posted: 02/15/2005 5:17 pm
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