Category: today’s top story

Don Rosenberg, the veteran music critic taken off the Cleveland Orchestra beat last week for being too tough on the orchestra’s music director, says that he was told by his editor that “my reviews were unfair, and I was attacking the orchestra.” He maintains that he has no personal ax to grind with conductor Franz Welser-Möst, but says, “I think this is a case of an extraordinary orchestra with an ordinary conductor.”

“[T]hat it is Rothko, rather than say Vermeer or Monet, who will be pulling in the crowds from all over the country, seems to indicate an important shift in the cultural landscape. What is more, the men and women who will, from tomorrow, pour into Tate Modern to admire and wonder at Rothko’s work are not part of a suddenly expanded Modernist cognoscenti. Rather they are ordinary people who aspire to see more in his work than enormous, vaporous splurges of paint.”

Life.com, a joint venture between Time, Inc. and Getty Images, “is scheduled to launch in the first quarter of 2009 with 6 million images from the LIFE archive… It will add about 3,000 new images a day from Getty Images, which will feed most of its editorial images onto the new site.”

“Bootlegging is, of course, a long artistic tradition. It’s one Shakespeare himself alludes to in The Winter’s Tale….” With the release of the eighth volume in Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series, Ron Rosenbaum argues that “Dylan culture, especially Dylan bootleg culture, figures into the way we assess ‘authorized’ and ‘unauthorized’ work by other great artists such as Shakespeare and Nabokov.”

The museum board’s choice of Richard Armstrong “appears to signal a distinct change in style for the Guggenheim, whose international ambitions under Mr. Krens have stirred some conflict within the institution in recent years.”

New Yorker magazine music critic Alex Ross, lighting designer Jennifer Tipton, Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and installation artist Tara Donovan are among the 25 recipients of this year’s MacArthur “genius” grants. Each will receive $100,000 per year for five years.

“A certain segment of the publishing industry is in jeopardy: literary (with a capital L) fiction. More specifically, literary fiction from New York publishers. Look at who is doing the hand-wringing, who is doing the worrying. If this is the end (and it’s not), then what, exactly, is ending? There is much to be done for the publishing business to become a lean, mean, 21st (and beyond) century machine. The industry as a whole is woefully behind when it comes to digitization of books.”

“Ten months after the Detroit Institute of Arts celebrated the grand opening of its $158-million renovated building and the innovative reinstallation of its permanent collection, the museum’s chronic budget shortfalls — including a $17-million loss in 2008 — have become the top priority at the institution. The DIA’s combined losses have totaled nearly $100 million in the past decade.”

“With Wall Street in a shame spiral, ‘What’s coming next?’ is a question that has everyone in the arts community taking big, anxious gulps… The fear isn’t limited to those groups that were getting money from corporate America’s recently deceased and badly wounded. There’s agita all around.”

The company that fills Verona’s ancient Roman amphitheater on summer evenings is latest of three in Italy to run out of money, due to “poor management, vicious infighting, political interference, miserly sponsorship and, not least, deep cuts in government funding made by the last Silvio Berlusconi government.”