Category: today’s top story

“For years, art scholars pondered a mystery: Did Vincent van Gogh create a painting that matches a sketch in Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum? Now a conservator at the Museum of Fine Arts has discovered the lost painting, but museumgoers will never be able to see it: The painting lies underneath another van Gogh long on display at the MFA, the museum announced yesterday.”

“National Gallery of Victoria says tests reveal a key work is not by legendary impressionist Vincent Van Gogh, as thought for more than 60 years. The gallery today announced the results of authentication tests of the work Head of a Man, which British art experts have called a fake.”

“The vast majority of American historians no longer regard American culture — whether high culture or mainstream popular culture — as an essential area of study. The much-vaunted cultural turn in the humanities has run its course in one of the first disciplines it influenced.”

“Endlessly interpreted, passionately admired, and, in some quarters, heatedly despised, Stanley has been brand-name fodder for polemical crossfire since at least The Making of Kubrick’s 2001, a compilation edited by the writer Jerome Agel in 1970. The first great American director to hone his craft outside the Hollywood studio system, Kubrick left behind a relatively spare legacy of 13 feature films in a 40-year career. But when he died, in 1999, at age 70, the hit-to-miss ratio was as impressive — and controversial — as any in motion-picture history.”

“Days before a threatened cultural embargo was scheduled to take effect, the J. Paul Getty Museum has resumed negotiations with the Italian government over 46 of the museum’s disputed antiquities — opening the door to a possible agreement. … The apparent breakthrough comes after an eight-month deadlock and was made possible when Italy took off the table what had been a key sticking point in the talks: the fate of the so-called Getty Bronze, a 4th century BC statue of a young athlete found by Italian fishermen in the 1960s.”

Venezuela’s El Sistema, which teaches classical music to underprivileged kids, has a new poster boy in LA Philharmonic music director designate Gustavo Dudamel. But El Sistema’s list of successes goes far deeper than Dudamel. “The road taken by Dudamel… is one along which some 270,000 young Venezuelans are now registered to aspire, playing music across a land seeded with 220 youth orchestras from the Andes to the Caribbean.”

Broadway stagehands and the theaters that employ them are bracing for a possible strike that could hit the country’s biggest theatre scene hard in the pocketbook. “The talks come after a record-breaking season at the box office for Broadway, when grosses reached $939 million. But statistics provided by the producers’ league underscore the rising costs of the theater business and, by extension, the high rate of failure.”

It may be time for someone in authority to call out Italian politicians for their obvious grandstanding and reject what some call the “harassment” of Los Angeles’s J. Paul Getty Museum, says Christopher Knight. “[The] escalating anti-Getty posturing is old-fashioned political demagoguery, pitched to voters back home… The emptiness of Italy’s legal and ethical claims for the Getty Bronze are beside the point.”

“The online world is not just about millions of newborn writers exulting in their powers. It’s also about millions of readers who need to sort through this endless universe and figure out which writers are worth reading. Who is going to sort out the exceptional ones? Editors, of some type. Some smart group of people is going to have to separate the wheat from the chaff.”

“What do we do now when the disappearance of the book reviews from so many papers portends the extinguishing of the critical flame? I would urge you to realize that the disappearance of criticism from our papers is not the cause, but the symptom of vast changes in our cultural ecology.”