Category: today’s top story

Roughly two years after the Honolulu Symphony’s painful, ignominious collapse, professional-level orchestral music returns to the islands as the newly-constituted Hawaii Symphony gives its first performance this weekend in Honolulu.

Following widespread concern from opera lovers and threats of a strike from employees, the Gran Teatre del Liceu has concluded an agreement with its staff’s labor unions that (says management) will allow the house to resume virtually all of the programming that had been cancelled due to a shortage of funds.

“The Chinese architect Wang Shu, whose buildings in a rapidly developing China honor the past with salvaged materials even as they experiment with modern forms, has been awarded the 2012 Pritzker Architecture Prize. Mr. Wang is the first Chinese citizen to win the prize … and the fourth-youngest.”

“UX is sort of like an artist’s collective, but far from being avant-garde–confronting audiences by pushing the boundaries of the new–its only audience is itself. More surprising still, its work is often radically conservative, intemperate in its devotion to the old. Through meticulous infiltration, UX members have carried out shocking acts of cultural preservation and repair, with an ethos of ‘restoring those invisible parts of our patrimony that the government has abandoned or doesn’t have the means to maintain’.”

Director of the Ashmolean at Oxford: “The £7.83 million, though a substantial sum to be found, is a mere fraction of the picture’s actual worth and it would therefore be an enormous disappointment if it could not be saved for the nation.”

“Fortunately, a technology on the verge of going mainstream will soon give us a chance to re-examine the role that copyright plays in our lives. By connecting the physical and the digital, 3-D printers remind us that copyright is not a general-purpose legal right that allows people to demand control over whatever they want. Instead, copyright has a narrow scope. And most of the things that make up our world simply do not fall into it.”

“Art historians have been disturbed by allegations that the Tate was about to dump its invaluable photographic archive in a skip when another institution realised its importance and rescued it, and that the Victoria & Albert Museum has already destroyed its own thematic archive.”

“[He] was most identified with his work at Grove Press, the New York-based book publisher he bought in the early 1950s. For the next several decades, he … used his company to distribute critically acclaimed but sexually explicit books by D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and William S. Burroughs and engaged in a series of groundbreaking legal battles that changed the way the government interpreted the First Amendment.”

“A Los Angeles Times study found that academy voters are markedly less diverse than the moviegoing public, and even more monolithic than many in the film industry may suspect. Oscar voters are nearly 94% Caucasian and 77% male, The Times found. Blacks are about 2% of the academy, and Latinos are less than 2%. Oscar voters have a median age of 62, the study showed. People younger than 50 constitute just 14% of the membership.”

“Sotheby’s will offer the only privately owned version of Edvard Munch’s haunting work The Scream at an auction in New York on May 2 where it expects to fetch over $80 million, the highest pre-sale value the auctioneer has ever put on a work of art.”