Category: issues

Ask Steve Wynn. Casino mogul owns half the art in Vegas’ Bellagio Hotel, which he leases to the hotel for $5 million a year. As Wynn made a deal to sell the hotel, he retained first right of refusal to buy any of the rest of the $400 million worth of art in the hotel. – Las Vegas Sun

Okay, so the new Whitney Biennial includes some internet art. SFMOMA has its $50,000 prize for net art. And the emerging genre certainly has buzz. But does all this validation make it any easier to buy, sell or even define art on the web? – Salon

— calls for more support for artists. Study says that twice as many people are entering the cultural workforce in British Columbia than any other industry. – CBC

A medieval Jewish cemetery in the center of Prague has become a battleground between Orthodox rabbis and a local insurance company that would like to build a garage and offices above the 13th-century burial ground. – Washington Post

What’s the different between “high” culture and “low” culture, anyway? Between Mozart and Madonna, Picasso and the World Wide Wrestling Federation? Is one superior to the other? Not necessarily. The old cultural arbiters, whose job was to decide what was `good’ in the sense of `valuable,’ have largely been replaced by a new type of arbiter, whose skill was to define “good” in terms of “popular.” Ignore them at your peril. – Chicago Tribune

How Detroit landed the honor of being the opening venue for an important new Van Gogh exhibition. – Boston Herald

The world’s two auction giants may be having their difficulties, but the art market is the strongest it’s been in years. – The Telegraph (UK)

Seventy-eight percent of the world’s websites are in English – only 1.2 percent are in French. “More than any other medium of recent years, the Internet is challenging France’s attempts to control and protect its culture. Its pride in its culture is fierce. No other country—save Spain—has a body quite like the Académie Française, dedicating itself for the past 365 years to the defense of the national language.” – The Economist

To help arts institutions stop living paycheck to paycheck, the Missouri Cultural Trust has a proposition: for every dollar arts groups put aside for a rainy day, the Trust will add 50 cents. It’s working. By 2008, the Trust expects to have given away $100 million. – St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“For a long time, people saw Africa as only animals,” said Comfort Opoku Wave of the Ghana tourism board. “Now they’re realizing that there is culture, fabrics, lakes, rivers.” – Die Welt (Germany)