Category: today’s top story

“Weekly Reader, a staple in American classrooms for a century, has some hard news for its young readers: it’s shutting down. Chief rival Scholastic, which bought the school newspaper earlier this year, is folding it into Scholastic News and axing all but five of Weekly Reader‘s 60 employees.”

“Deitch vigorously defended his two-year record of exhibitions and programming. He also rejected suggestions recently made by some board members, including in an open letter published in The Times, that the museum has lost its artistic bearings under Deitch and is increasingly under the control of Eli Broad, the billionaire art collector and philanthropist who is MOCA’s top funder.”

Odalisque in Red Pants was reported missing from the Contemporary Art Museum of Caracas in 2002; thieves had put a forgery in the frame and taken the original. “On Tuesday, F.B.I. agents in Miami arrested two people in a sting operation and accused them of trying to sell the long-lost painting, said to be worth $3 million.”

Brand blames many of the Getty’s internal troubles on its management structure. The director of the Art Gallery NSW in Sydney since June, Brand recalls his role as the Getty Museum’s director as a “lonely” one.

Widespread anger and concern greeted the May announcement that, due to budgetary issues, the academic publisher would be closed. “A news release that the university circulated this week announcing plans for a new publishing operation seemed only to intensify the venom.”

“Following a week in which John Baldessari, Catherine Opie and Barbara Kruger all resigned from the board of trustees at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, Ed Ruscha has also resigned, leaving no artists remaining on the museum’s board.”

“The break climaxes years of tension between Villella and the board at a time when the company has reached unparalleled success: a critically acclaimed debut in New York in 2009, the Paris performances, a national TV debut on PBS last fall, and premieres of two successful ballets from major international choreographers last season. The conflict has also exposed the often rough-and-tumble world of arts patronage.”

“In a development described by music experts as ‘a bombshell in the world of Baroque opera,’ a new version of Vivaldi’s opera Orlando Furioso has been discovered, 270 years after his death.” Written 13 years before the composer’s other, well-known opera by the same name, it contains at least 20 new arias.

“[The] Supreme Court decided against an industry plan that would have authorized the collection of additional royalties on music downloaded through services such as Apple’s iTunes. The court said that downloading a copy of a song is essentially the same as going to buy it in a store – so no additional royalties should be added.”