Category: today’s top story

“Radio wins more listeners each year. Using only sound, radio stretches the imagination and makes the listener its partner. A humble plastic box can introduce you to writers, ideas, arguments, facts, music and atmospheres you might not encounter in two lifetimes. Speech radio, in particular, is a curious medium: more vivid than print, bringing ambient noise and atmosphere, conveying tones and breaths and hesitations and tension in the voice.”

The university, which made the decision to sell its art collection, has “a projected deficit of $79 million over the next six years, a tapped-out reserve fund, a shrunken endowment and “quite a number” of big donors hit hard by the Madoff scandal? Faced with the prospect of closing 40 percent of the university’s buildings, reducing staff by an additional 30 percent, or firing 200 of its 360 faculty members…”

Nicholas Kristof has gathered a list of non-profits that had money invested with Madoff before his pyramid collapsed. “What is staggering is how many of these 147 foundations had all their assets invested with Mr. Madoff and may have been wiped out as a result.”

“Jehuda Reinharz, Brandeis University president, yesterday opened the possibility that the university would not sell its $350 million art collection but said he would not change his mind about closing Rose Art Museum and turning it into a study and research center.” Brandeis’s provost “said university officials believed they could not operate a museum, which is expected to abide by a code of ethics limiting the reasons it can sell off art, and then sell art to pay for needs other than the museum.”

“Donors and longtime supporters of the Rose Art Museum are exploring whether they can block Brandeis University’s stunning decision to close the museum and sell an art collection that had been valued at $350 million. Jonathan Lee, chairman of the museum’s board of overseers, said yesterday that he intends to meet with officials in the state attorney general’s Public Charity Division to see if there is anything he can do to stop the university from shutting down the 48-year-old museum at the end of the summer.”

“A master of many authorial trades, Mr. Updike was novelist, short story writer, critic, poet – and in each role as prolific as he was gifted… [He] could be brilliant even about his own diligence, writing in his memoir Self-Consciousness (1989) of ‘my ponderously growing oeuvre, dragging behind me like an ever-heavier tail.'”

“The giant, fierce figure of The Colossus as he rises above a fleeing crowd of people, carts and animals is one of Spanish artist Francisco de Goya’s most dramatic and famous pictures – at least it was until yesterday, when Madrid’s Prado museum declared he had not painted it. … Experts at the museum now believe The Colossus was painted by one of Goya’s assistants, whose initials may appear in a corner of the canvass.”

“Rocked by a budget crisis, Brandeis University will close its Rose Art Museum and sell off a 6,000-object collection that includes work by such contemporary masters as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Nam June Paik. The move shocked local arts leaders and drew harsh criticism from the Association of College and University Museums and Galleries. Rose Art Museum director Michael Rush declined comment this evening, saying he had just learned of the decision.”

“What I want people to realize is you don’t have to be an artist that’s connected in politics to do things that make a difference. I did the Obama thing on my own, grass-roots style.”

“The Sacramento Ballet will cancel its remaining three productions for the 2008-09 season in an attempt to get back on its feet financially.” But the company is not closing, and its dancers will perform this spring in the studio, the schools “and such nontraditional venues as art galleries.”