Washington State Collectors Skate On Taxes Wealthy art collectors in Washington state weren't paying taxes on the art they bought out of state. But when an enterprising revenue agent began going after them to collect the taxes, her investigations were shut down. Why? Seems a little pressure applied in the right places can buy a little special treatment... Seattle Post-Intelligencer 05/20/05
Posted: 05/20/2005 7:43 am
Getty Curator Indicted In Italy A Getty curator has been indicted in Italy on charges of plundering antiquities. "Marion True, 56, curator for antiquities at the museum and director of the Getty Villa, is accused of criminal conspiracy to receive stolen goods and illicit receipt of archeological items. It is also alleged that True in effect laundered goods that were purchased by a private collection and then sold to the Getty in paper transactions that created phony documentation." Los Angeles Times 05/20/05
Posted: 05/20/2005 7:38 am
MoMA Buys Land For Expansion Barley into its big new home, the Museum of Modern Art has bought the land immediately west of its location for future expansion. "The museum is thinking of constructing a project on the new land, but notes that the air rights over the space far exceed the gallery needs of the museum. Therefore, he says the likely outcome will be additional galleries with space above for commercial use." The Art Newspaper 05/20/05
Posted: 05/20/2005 7:35 am
Banksy Strikes Again (This Time It's The British Museum) A rock was hung on a wall in the British Musuem. It had a caveman-like picture of a man pushing a shopping cart. "The rock was put there by art prankster Banksy, who has previously put works in galleries in London and New York. A British Museum spokeswoman said they were 'seeing the lighter side of it'. She said it went unnoticed for one or two days but Banksy said three days." BBC 05/19/05
Posted: 05/19/2005 6:37 pm
Manhattan's International Freedom Center - A Lot Of Politics A new museum in lower Manhattan that will house the International Freedom Center and the Drawing Center is desitgned by the Norwegian firm Snohetta. The design is "strangely seductive: with some fine-tuning, it could even become a fascinating work. It is already closer to the standard set by Santiago Calatrava's soaring glass-and-steel transportation hub than that of the site's troubled Freedom Tower, for example. But ultimately, the museum is more about politics than architecture - a theme-park view of American ideals in an alluring wrapper." The New York Times 05/20/05
Posted: 05/19/2005 6:04 pm
- So What, Exactly, Is A "Freedom Center"? "Relying on varied exhibits and multimedia presentations, the Freedom Center will foster "conversations on freedom" in a building to be shared in an odd-couple arrangement with the Drawing Center, an ostensibly more hip organization in SoHo devoted to contemporary works on paper." The New York Times 05/20/05
Posted: 05/19/2005 6:01 pm
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South Korean Wins Montreal Competition South Korean singer Sin Nyung Hwang has won the fourth Montreal International Musical Competition. The Geneva-based soprano won the top prize – worth $25,000 – Wednesday. CBC 05/19/05
Posted: 05/19/2005 8:57 pm
Music For Babies "Numerous studies conclude that playing music to babies in the womb and in the early years helps build the neural bridges along which thoughts and information travel. And research suggests it can stimulate the brain's alpha waves, creating a feeling of calm; a recent study of premature infants found that they were soothed by the music." Now a new program aims at bringing music to the very young. "Sound Beginnings - and a planned "baby prom" next year - came about as babies and toddlers are rarely welcome in concert halls." BBC 05/19/05
Posted: 05/19/2005 8:52 pm
London Symphony At A Crossroads Clive Gillinson Leaves a successful London Symphony behind. "First among British orchestras, it set up a New York office and a residency at Lincoln Center. Its record label, LSO Live, sells tracks on iTunes. Gillinson slashed concert tickets to a fiver with a view to attracting younger listeners and urged players to get a life outside the orchestra, making chamber music and educational ventures in what he reinvisaged as a 'portfolio career'. Life in the LSO is more varied than before; around one-third of the players have been attracted from abroad." And yet there are persistent artistics problems to solve, writes Norman Lebrecht. La Scena Musicale 05/19/05
Posted: 05/19/2005 8:45 pm
Chicago Lyric In The Passing Lane Chicago Lyric Opera is a juggernaut of efficiency. "The 91 performances given last season generated box office revenues of more than $30 million, on an operating budget of $58.2 million. Fundraising topped $21.5 million, the highest in the company's history. Of that amount, $5 million came from Lyric's sold-out golden jubilee concert in October. The endowment campaign reached its goal of $50 million." Chicago Tribune 05/19/05
Posted: 05/19/2005 8:14 am
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Sifton Named To Run NYT Culture Pages Sam Sifton has been named culture editor of the New York Times. "He has demonstrated a strong sense of the intersecting worlds of the arts, a powerful devotion to strengthening the reporting tradition in Culture, and a coherent vision of how the disparate pieces of that complex department fit together. Sam has an impresario’s gift for matching writers with ideas." LAWeekly 05/19/05
Posted: 05/19/2005 7:17 pm
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60 Years Of Borodin Valentin Berlinsky has been a member of the Borodin String Quartet since its first concert. "It is rare for a quartet to have an unbroken history of 60 years, unique for the same artist to have been a member throughout. While there have been changes of occupancy in the other three seats over the years, Berlinsky, now a nimble 80-year-old, took part in the quartet's first public concerts in 1945 (when it was known as the Moscow Conservatoire Quartet) and has been its common thread ever since." The Telegraph (UK) 05/18/05
Posted: 05/19/2005 8:10 pm
Fischer-Dieskau At 80 Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was the greatest lieder singer of he 20th Century. "It is more than 12 years since the most influential singer of the 20th century stepped quietly out of the limelight and brought the curtain down on his 50-year career. Now, to mark his 80th birthday on May 28, there will be ceremonies and awards; a new pictorial biography by Hans Neunzig; large selections from his enormous recorded legacy are poised for reissue by DG; and the singer himself is giving a steady stream of interviews in the Berlin house where he has lived for more than half a century." The Guardian (UK) 05/20/05
Posted: 05/19/2005 7:42 pm
Kurtz Decries New McCarthyism Artist Steven Kurtz, who has been investigated for bio-terrorism because of his artwork, has condemned the government's investigation. "There's no doubt that this is a politically motivated case, to my mind. Look back to the tendencies of the government and the Department of Justice. . . . There's fanaticism in the air. I think we're in a very unfortunate moment now in U.S. history. A form of neo-McCarthyism has made a comeback. . . . We're going to see a whole host of politically motivated trials which have nothing to do with crime but everything to do with artistic expression." Buffalo News 05/18/05
Posted: 05/19/2005 6:44 pm
Bill T - Still Speaking His Mind More than 10 years after a controversial essay trashing his work appeared in the New Yorker, Bill T. Jones still finds himself having to defend himself. "An articulate and forceful advocate for his work and his company, Jones is keenly analytical and self-aware. In conversation, he spools off tightly argued paragraphs aglint with references to John Cage, Euripides, Merce Cunningham, high modernism, Marcel Proust, avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage and Krishna consciousness. His programs invite viewers to trace references, make comparisons and find patterns." San Francisco Chronicle 05/19/05
Posted: 05/19/2005 7:35 am
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The Great American Musical Project The American Music Theatre Project is a $2 million, multiyear endeavor designed to turn Northwestern University into the "leading collegiate incubator of new works of musical theater. If all goes according to the long-range plan, future summers in Evanston will feature a variety of music-theater professionals working with students on new musicals in a developmental atmosphere somewhat akin to the Sundance Theatre Institute or a musical version of the Williamstown Theatre Festival or the Iowa Writers Workshop." Chicago Tribune 05/19/05
Posted: 05/19/2005 8:10 am
- A New Plan For New Musicals "The American Music Theatre Project, which has a $2 million budget for its initial three-year trial period, will bring top artists in the field to the Northwestern Unigversity campus to collaborate with the school's students, and with a faculty that already includes professional artists -- among them Frank Galati and Mary Zimmerman -- who have national and international reputations. During this period, four new shows, each in various stages of completion, will receive high-level public productions in one of the school's many theaters." Chicago Sun-Times 05/19/05
Posted: 05/19/2005 8:07 am
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Holmes - The Case Of The Enduring Detective Sherlock Holmes has had one of the most enduring afterlifes in all of literature. "Holmes has become a one-man entertainment complex. He has been the subject of at least 100 movies and nearly as many plays and radio dramas, and he has inspired an entire library's worth of books. There have been countless sequels and knockoffs..." So why does Holmes continue to fascinate us? The New York Times 05/20/05
Posted: 05/20/2005 8:17 am
A Matter Of Reputations (How Does It Work?) "No problem in literature, perhaps, is less instantly soluble than the question of reputations: the bewildering process by which, in the years after their deaths, one writer's stock soars while another's sinks into bankruptcy. The only real judge of a book, Martin Amis once remarked, is posterity." The Guardian (UK) 05/19/05
Posted: 05/19/2005 7:52 pm
What's Wrong With The Modern Book Review "Book reviews should inspire reading. They should excite, stimulate, agitate and empower readers to discover new books and avoid bad ones. They should turn you on to undiscovered authors, prompt you into finally reading the writer you have never quite got round to, and make you wonder at the world of delights that remain unread. But let's be honest. They don't, do they?" The Bookseller 05/13/05
Posted: 05/19/2005 7:35 pm
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Why People Are Abandoning The Movie Theatre Movie attendance is falling, and even the expected mega-hit Star Wars installment isn't likely to turn things around. "If Americans went to the movies every week, as they did during cinema's heyday in the 1940s, the national box office would be running about $2 billion a week, which it's not even close to. Audiences have cooled on the moviegoing experience, in which high ticket and food prices and hit-or-miss sound and projection systems in neighborhood theaters have driven people to create their own Friday night popcorn experience." Christian Science Monitor 05/19/05
Posted: 05/19/2005 7:28 pm
You'll Need A Fingerprint To Watch A DVD? A proposed new security system for DVDs would add an RFID tag and require biometric information to view the disk. "At the store, someone buying a new DVD would have to provide a password or some kind of biometric data, like a fingerprint or iris scan, which would be added to the DVD's RFID tag. Then, when the DVD was popped into a specially equipped DVD player, the viewer would be required to re-enter his or her password or fingerprint. The system would require consumers to buy new DVD players with RFID readers." Wired 05/19/05
Posted: 05/19/2005 6:53 pm
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Physics of Dance (Or Dance Of Physics) A choreographer and a theoretical physicist team up to create dance of three of Einstein's papers. "Of all the art forms that one can use to express the notion of here, now and what happens then, dance is probably the best. In some sense, there are ways you can represent equations by movement because they often describe movement. The equations and ideas in Einstein's papers are very dynamical. Dance is better suited to the 1905 papers than any of the other visual arts." New Scientist 05/19/05
Posted: 05/19/2005 8:34 pm
Kudelka - More Time For Choreography National Ballet of Canada sources say James Kudelka was not forced out of the artistic director job this week. Kudelka wanted more time to spend on his choreography. "You've got to ask yourself a question, if you are James Kudelka: 'How many great years of choreography do I have in me? And do I take my salad years and spend them doing performance appraisals or joining in funding calls or all the other ancillary things you have to do as artistic director?'" The Globe & Mail (Canada) 05/19/05
Posted: 05/19/2005 7:43 am
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