Category: today’s top story

“The city should find a way to unload the Sony Centre for the Performing Arts and stop subsidizing its operations to the tune of more than $1 million a year. That is the most drastic recommendation of a report to Mayor Rob Ford from his task force on grants to major arts organizations and the future of three city-owned theatres.”

“[An] appeal court in Norway [has] overturned a previous ruling and cleared the author of The Bookseller of Kabul and her publisher … of invading the privacy of the family she lived with and wrote about, and concluded that the facts of the book were accurate.”

“If an agreement isn’t reached, the unions – which say their new contract would basically turn them into freelancers earning just a fraction of what they used to take home – are pledging not just to strike, but to do everything in their power to put the opera out of business.”

“One of Paris’s most prestigious theatres was being protected by riot police and guard-dog patrols on Thursday after it became the latest target in a wave of Catholic protests across France against so-called ‘blasphemous’ plays.”

“Try to spot the big, obvious, defining differences between 2012 and 1992. Movies and literature and music have never changed less over a 20-year period.”

“More than 300 scholars have signed a petition to Florence’s mayor and that city’s top art authority to stop a project that hopes to find a Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece behind a fresco by Giorgio Vasari in the Palazzo Vecchio, now city hall.”

The Nobel laureate, who was a close associate of Salvador Allende, died 12 days after Gen. Pinochet’s 1973 coup. Officially, the cause was listed as prostate cancer; a subsequent investigation found that the poet had a fatal heart attack. Now a witness claims that Neruda was given a mysterious injection n the day he died, and the calls to dig up and test the body have begun.

“Boyce, whose works include artificial trees and a leaning litter bin, has won the Turner Prize. Glasgow-based Boyce accepted the modern art award at the Baltic gallery in Gateshead – the first time the ceremony has been held outside a Tate venue.”

“With his quietly atmospheric, lyrically autumnal sculptural installation recalling a melancholy urban park with its metallic trees and scattered paper leaves, Martin Boyce has been announced as the winner of the £25,000 Turner prize.”

Saatchi: “Being an art buyer these days is comprehensively and indisputably vulgar. It is the sport of the Eurotrashy, Hedge-fundy, Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs; and of art dealers with masturbatory levels of self-regard.”