“The Pasadena-based Flintridge Foundation has dropped its 10-year-old visual artists’ grant program, blaming ‘severe investment losses’ from 2002 to 2004. The foundation, founded in 1985 by the estates of Francis and Louisa Moseley, has awarded 10 to 12 grants of $25,000 every other year, distributing $1.4 million among 56 artists since 1997. In addition to ending the artist grants, foundation officials say they will stop making grants to theater organizations and conservation efforts in 2008.”
Tag: 01.16.07
A Smaller Deborah Voigt, With Added Powers
Soprano Deborah Voigt’s much-publicized weight loss has not detracted from her voice, Mark Swed writes; rather, it’s added to her performance palette. “Until recently, she was a large woman with a lively personality who stood and belted. Now with less, she is much more.”
Netflix’s Act II: Streaming Video
“Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, lists more than five dozen personalities whose obituaries were published prematurely. Someone may want to add Netflix to that list.” Particularly, that is, now that it’s announced its second act. “Netflix is introducing a service to deliver movies and television shows directly to users’ PCs, not as downloads but as streaming video, which is not retained in computer memory.”
The Oeuvre Of An Imaginary Artist
The story of the late African-American artist Lester Hayes, whose work is seen in a current retrospective at the Harlem gallery Triple Candie, “is a familiar one, and of a kind the art world loves. Not only was he tragically unrecognized but, we now learn, he was also hugely influential.” Except that he wasn’t. “He never existed.”
Botanical Artist Anne Ophelia Todd Dowden, 99
“Anne Ophelia Todd Dowden, a renowned and popular botanical artist whose subjects ranged from the flowers found in Shakespeare to the weeds found in New York City, died Thursday in Boulder, Colo.”
Copy Cops Quash Digital Freedom, Creativity
“The 40th annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week was packed, as usual, with cool new technology. New devices included ultra-thin/ultrawide TV displays, networked entertainment systems and innumerable gadgets that bring music, movies and television to our hands and homes in new ways. But many of these new products limit our freedom to use and share the music, movies and other content they are intended for. It wasn’t always like this.”
Art Storage Company Pays Millions In Claims
“The company that ran the art storage depot that went up in flames destroying hundreds of pieces of Britart has secretly paid out tens of millions of pounds in damages to leading artists, collectors and insurance companies.”
Staking Life On A New Bookstore
There are plenty of stories about independent bookstores closing. But in New York is recent weeks five new bookstores have opened, and they “embody the kind of pluck that has always characterized New York’s love affair with bookshops. The siren call of the megastore and its feisty cousin, the Internet, is formidable, but in a city of 8 million, surely there’s room for a few mavericks.”
NY & LA – Two Differing Ideas About Architecture
Do New York and Los Angeles compete in architecture? “Among those New Yorkers who care about things architectural, the serious competition has been coming out of Chicago, rather than points farther west, for the past century or so. And though Los Angeles does possess architecture — it is, after all, a city — you don’t have the impression that the majority of its citizens care greatly about their buildings, and surely these do not enter materially into any assessment of the Angelenos’ municipal identity.”
Top Of The Globes
“Babel” wins the Golden Globe for best movie. “In a rather remarkable feat, Helen Mirren won best actress awards for playing two Queen Elizabeths: one for the television mini-series ‘Elizabeth I’ and the second for portraying Elizabeth II in the film ‘The Queen’.”