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Weekend, July 23-24




Visual Arts

You Get Part Of The Painting This Year, Part Next year... Since the American federal tax law changed in 1969, arts institutions can benefit enormously from fractional giving. "And donors like it because they can spread their tax write-offs over a longer period of time while also continuing to enjoy the artwork. The museum and donor sign an agreement called a deed of gift." The donor reaps write-offs while gradually giving small percentages of paintings and other art objects to a museum, which eventually takes ownership of the artwork." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 07/24/05
Posted: 07/24/2005 5:35 pm

Jesus Got A New Halo. Who's The Guilty Party? "Over the course of nearly 150 years, two enigmatic paintings at St. Ignatius Roman Catholic Church have been treated as anything but masterpieces. They've been stashed away in closets, ripped, faded and - perhaps worst of all - touched up at the hands of a well-meaning, but ill-advised, artist. That apparent artistic license has been particularly puzzling to current church officials and a German conservator as they worked to restore the paintings, ignored for years but now believed to be the work of 19th-century Italian master Constantino Brumidi. Who would have painted a completely different halo over Jesus' head, or given him a full new beard?" Baltimore Sun 07/23/05
Posted: 07/24/2005 8:50 am

Gallery Director Fired After 'Daily Show' Chat "An art gallery director says she was fired for talking on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart last week about a sexually explicit caricature of President Bush, a sheik and a barrel of oil." The Florida gallery says the two events were unrelated. Baltimore Sun (AP) 07/23/05
Posted: 07/24/2005 8:36 am

Native Americans In Venice: Progress Or Tokenism? "The Venice Biennale is the world's oldest and most important survey of contemporary art. When artists have been chosen for the Biennale, you know they've truly arrived. This year, two native North Americans had prominent spots in the exhibition. Does this mean that native art in general has reached a new level of art-world recognition? Or is it a fluke, or even the kind of tokenism that could disappear again?" Washington Post 07/24/05
Posted: 07/24/2005 7:14 am

Beneath The Radar, Collecting Inexpensively At San Francisco's Lost Art, the experience of buying art is deliberately "anti-gallery": unintimidating and -- gasp -- affordable. "There are no pristine white walls or fancy track lighting. Instead, framed paintings by unknown artists and others on the cusp of stardom occupy nearly every inch of available wall space in the cozy salon, which is dolled up with midcentury furnishings to feel more like some cool bohemian aunt's living room than a place of business."

San Francisco Chronicle 07/24/05
Posted: 07/24/2005 6:57 am

LACMA Keeps Eyes Peeled For Ice Age "Much of the public discussion surrounding an upcoming expansion of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's mid-Wilshire campus has been about money. So far, not much has been said about fossils. In March, the museum announced it had raised $156 million, enough for a first phase of construction — a turning point for LACMA, which had to abandon an earlier, more sweeping plan as too expensive. But now, as the campus readies for new construction, the issue is pre-history: The 23-acre Hancock Park property, which includes LACMA and the county-owned Page Museum at La Brea Tar Pits, contains one of the richest Ice Age fossil sites in North America." Los Angeles Times 07/24/05
Posted: 07/24/2005 6:42 am

Expanded Huntington Feels Newly Vibrant Yet Familiar Things are both changing and staying (mostly) the same at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, where several new spaces are transforming visitors' experience of the institution. "I am extremely keen that people shouldn't think the Huntington has only two paintings, (Lawrence's) 'Pinkie' and (Gainsborough's) 'The Blue Boy,'" said John Murdoch, director of art collections at the Huntington. "There is a terrible danger if you've got world-famous paintings that people will say, 'I've seen that. I don't need to go there again.'" Los Angeles Times 07/24/05
Posted: 07/24/2005 6:03 am

Quick! Which Font Is This? Those who see design subtleties where the rest of us see only letters and numbers headed to New York this week to luxuriate in the company of their own kind. "These pilgrims were among about 500 people, some from as far away as Brazil and Finland, who have converged on the city for TypeCon, a yearly gathering of typographers, printers, designers, calligraphers and assorted, self-described font freaks and type nerds who can argue about kerning into the wee hours." The New York Times 07/23/05
Posted: 07/24/2005 4:29 am

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Music

In Alsop Controversy, All Orchestras May Lose The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra broke a gender barrier when it appointed Marin Alsop to be its next music director. "But management made another bit of history, this one unfortunate, because it hired Alsop over the unusually public objections of its own musicians. By brushing aside the opinion of its artists on the most important artistic decision an orchestra can make, management runs the risk of setting her up for failure. The move has likely stunted the growth of Alsop's nascent rapport with the musicians, and has alerted listeners to a possibly troubled relationship - two things no orchestra ever wants to do, unless it is acting out of desperation." Philadelphia Inquirer 07/24/05
Posted: 07/24/2005 10:10 am

Chicago Can Learn From Baltimore's Missteps "The botched process by which Marin Alsop was hired earlier this week to be the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's next music director poses a cautionary tale for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which for more than a year has been conducting a search of its own to find a successor to Daniel Barenboim." Chicago Tribune 07/24/05
Posted: 07/24/2005 7:35 am

Domingo As Neruda In 'Postino' "Tenor Plácido Domingo will create the role of Chilean Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda in a new opera, 'Il Postino,' by Mexican composer Daniel Catán, Los Angeles Opera company artistic director Edgar Baitzel said Friday." Inspired by the novel that became the Oscar-nominated 1995 movie "Il Postino," the opera will premiere in Los Angeles in 2009. Los Angeles Times 07/23/05
Posted: 07/24/2005 5:55 am

The Violin Section, Where The Glass Ceiling Has Shattered "A male violinist's discrimination suit against the New York Philharmonic underscores a little-noted phenomenon: women have come to dominate the violin sections of some of the nation's leading orchestras, or at least hold their own. And their numbers among violin players have also helped raise their prominence as concertmasters, the most important orchestra jobs after the conductors. But men still predominate in orchestras, and the testosterone level rises with the string instrument's size." The New York Times 07/23/05
Posted: 07/24/2005 3:54 am

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Arts Issues

The Censorship Debacle - Why A California Protest Failss Attempts at censorship almost always backfire, as protests against an anti-Bush painting in the California Department of Justice will show. "Throughout human history, great art has been political, or inspired by an artist's political experience. Unless you want museums and public buildings to be sanitized, boring and free of any real art, you have to tolerate works that are sometimes offensive. The other alternative is to create a government committee to approve all public art. Orwell had a name for this. He called it the Ministry of Truth." Sacramento Bee 07/24/05
Posted: 07/24/2005 5:43 pm

Salzburg Festival Opens With Comments On Terrorism "Austrian President Heinz Fischer warned against the dangers of European values being 'bombed away' on Sunday at the opening ceremonies of the Salzburg Festival, the world-famous musical and drama event dedicated to art as a universal value. Touching on the terror attacks over the last few weeks in London and Egypt, Fischer said that a Europe recovering from an earlier horror — the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler — was ill prepared for the new threat that targets innocents everywhere." Yahoo! (AP) 07/24/05
Posted: 07/24/2005 11:20 am

Exploiting Our Own Creative Capital: Yes, We Can! "Let's talk intellectual capital. I keep hearing that phrase from Carl Kurlander, the native son screen writer returned from the Wrong Coast to teach at Pitt and evangelize on the depth and potential of Pittsburgh's entertainment talent. Our generally downbeat view of local abilities to the contrary, Pittsburghers have a huge role in the national entertainment industry. Rather than continuing to export that creative and entrepreneurial talent, why not put it to work right here? ... (W)hat's mainly needed is a heightened sense of our own capabilities, a more developed culture of can-do." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 07/24/05
Posted: 07/24/2005 10:20 am

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Theatre

Topical Musicals Reach Critical Mass At Edinburgh Fringe "Alzheimer's, 9/11, Asbos, the Yorkshire Ripper, the 'war on terror', the apocalypse - there's no shortage of provocative topics on the Edinburgh Fringe this year. The extraordinary thing is they are all being tackled in musicals. It's striking that song-and-dance extravaganzas can be staged out of such sensitive subjects. How did a 'low' artform get so grown-up?" The Observer (UK) 07/24/05
Posted: 07/24/2005 9:06 am

How Much Is That Plane Ticket To New York? Broadway junkies just can't seem to get a proper fix in the Twin Cities. "There's much to brag about in local theater, from the reported number of seats sold to the fact that we have three Tony-winning regional playhouses in Minneapolis: the Guthrie, which is completing its $125 million, three-stage complex on the Mississippi River; the Children's Theatre, which will soon unveil its own $24 million expansion, and Theatre de la Jeune Lune, whose inventive creations have drawn a growing international following. But the upcoming seasons in Minneapolis and St. Paul, each without a pre-Broadway show or buzz-heavy blockbuster, make us look as if we are in the sticks." Star Tribune (Minneapolis) 07/24/05
Posted: 07/24/2005 8:24 am

No Stopover In Twin Cities For Broadway-Bound Shows Minneapolis is an arts mecca, no doubt about it. But there's one category in which it consistently loses out to Chicago and San Francisco: premieres of Broadway-bound plays and musicals. Star Tribune (Minneapolis) 07/24/05
Posted: 07/24/2005 7:56 am

Non-Equity Tour May Prompt Leafleting In LA The formula is simple: Budget woes demand cheaper shows. But when theaters cut costs by hosting nonunion touring productions, Actors' Equity feels compelled to object -- as it threatens to do if the debt-saddled Civic Light Opera of South Bay Cities presents a non-Equity tour of "42nd Street."
Los Angeles Times 07/24/05
Posted: 07/24/2005 4:56 am

A Star In The Making In Western Mass. "Every summer, a theater world routinely awakens, Brigadoon-like, in the Berkshires. But the past few summers have brought a genuine surprise: Julianne Boyd's nonprofit Barrington Stage Company, which has emerged as a serious challenge to the dominance of the region's most established venues." A little show that premiered there, "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee," won two Tony Awards this year. The New York Times 07/24/05
Posted: 07/24/2005 4:05 am

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Publishing

Bush Stars As 'Idiot' In Faulkner Parody "A scathing parody that likens President Bush to the 'idiot' in William Faulkner's novel 'The Sound and the Fury' has won this year's Faulkner write-alike contest — and touched off a literary spat. Organizers of the Faux Faulkner competition are accusing Hemispheres, the United Airlines magazine that has sponsored the contest for six years, of playing politics by not putting Sam Apple's 'The Administration and the Fury' in its print edition — only on its Web site." Hemispheres' editor says politics had nothing to do with the decision. Yahoo! (AP) 07/23/05
Posted: 07/24/2005 10:48 am

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