Category: today’s top story

The theft of a million-dollar portrait by Frans van Mieris from Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales has pointed up the lack of modern security at the museum. “The absence of electronic surveillance such as alarms or movement detectors means any of the estimated 6000 people there that day could have walked out with the work – insured for $1.4 million – hidden in clothing or in a bag.”

A 17th-century painting by the Dutch master Frans van Mieris was stolen from the Art Gallery of New South Wakes in Australia last weekend. Police say that the theft appears to be a professional job, and given that some 6,000 people visited the gallery that day (and also that there were no security cameras in the room that housed the van Mieris,) it will be a tough crime to solve.

The cause is an accident with the underground irrigation system. “The 18th century Trevi fountain and Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona are no longer being fed by the 13-mile ‘Virgin’ aqueduct after concrete foundations laid in the city’s exclusive, outlying Parioli district crashed into a buried section of the ancient channel, creating a three-metre gash and blocking it with rubble.”

“Since Frank Gehry was hired nearly two years ago to design a massive mixed-use project along Grand Avenue, he has clashed repeatedly and sometimes bitterly with the developer, New York’s Related Cos. Barring some sudden rapprochement, it now seems unlikely that Gehry will return for the planned second and third phases of the project. But the plan … has turned a significant corner in recent weeks. The latest version suggests it will rise not only as an effective complement to Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall across the street but also as a dramatic architectural presence in its own right.”

Michael Rosen is Britain’s newly-appointed children’s laureate. He doesn’t think much of current reading education programs: “I utterly resent and reject the notion that you can teach reading without books. There is a huge push on to create an environment – in nurseries, and reception, and year ones and year twos – where books are secondary to the process of reading. This seems oxymoronic to me. We must, must have at the heart of learning to read the pleasure that is reading. Otherwise why bother?”

Prosecutors in the art trafficking trial of Getty Museum trustee Marion True and antiquities dealer Robert Hecht have been following a strategy of “calling attention to collectors, especially well-heeled Americans, with the implicit message that every player in the global antiquities trade is within their sights… The tactic has infuriated defense lawyers, whose objections became so heated on Friday that Judge Gustavo Barbalinardo decided to suspend the proceedings until tempers cooled.”

“Over the past 25-30 years, there’s been an assumption that the condition of a downtown jazz/new music venue’s needing to be subsidized by benefits was an abnormal condition, a special situation necessitated by a particular emergency, after which the venue would return to its normal functioning, either as a market entity (Knitting Factory, Tonic, etc) or, in a few cases like The Kitchen and Roulette, as institutions funded by public and private foundations. But a sea change has taken place in the relation of these clubs to the market with few really acknowledging it.”

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has announced that starchitect Frank Gehry has signed on to design a new $4 million playground in the city’s Battery Park neighborhood. “The project, which Mr. Bloomberg first announced at a conservancy gala on Tuesday night, is getting under way as the city has moved to reimagine and redesign its public spaces.”

“The soft rollout of Chicago Public Radio’s new, experimental radio station/Web site hybrid continues this week, primarily on the Web for Chicago-area listeners. It’s called Vocalo, and it wants to be bold and adventurous like performance art for the radio. But will it be the good kind of performance art (very rare) or the which-half-wit-gave-this-quarter-wit-a-grant and when-will-he-put-his-pants-back-on kind (common)?”

“Grey Gardens” and “Spring Awakening” are not your parents’ Broadway musicals, and they may mark a significant shift in musical theatre. “These two daring, surreally unusual musicals — both transfers from the 2005-06 Off-Broadway season — have dominated Broadway during the past six months. Together, they will likely walk away with many of the Tony Awards in the major musical categories. … In Times Square, audacious visions are the new black….”