“Bacon’s early life as a rugmaker is almost forgotten, and his output so small that an example held by the Victoria and Albert Museum was thought to be one of only three to exist. His rug oeuvre has suddenly increased, however, after an Iranian carpet dealer cleaned out one of her storerooms and took a pile of rugs to an auction house in Wiltshire.”
Tag: 02.25.09
Poet Laureate, One Job That Could Be Eliminated
“Like the awfulness of our National Anthem, the futility of the post of Poet Laureate is one of those running sores in our national culture which seem beyond healing. … Poetry doesn’t need a Poet Laureate: I’m not even sure it needs a ‘flag waver’. All poetry needs is poets, with a rich store of language to draw on.”
Downturn’s Upside For Buyers: Bargains (& Time To Think)
“It’s hardly a surprise that gallery hopping has slowed during the recession. People are focused more on the necessities of life and less on what some might call extravagances. But for collectors, who see paintings and sculptures as both culturally important as well as an investment that will increase in value, the downturn is presenting a rare opportunity.”
Dreamspace Artist Guilty Of Safety-Rules Breach
“An elderly artist whose huge inflatable ‘dream machine’ broke loose from home-made moorings at a summer fair, killing two women trapped inside, was convicted of breaching health and safety rules yesterday. A jury found Maurice Agis, 77, guilty after two days’ deliberation, before retiring to consider two further charge[s] of manslaughter of the victims through gross negligence.”
House Bill Would Add To Budgets Of NEA, NEH
“An omnibus bill for the current fiscal year introduced on Monday by the House Appropriations Committee includes $10 million each for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, which would bring each of their annual budgets to $155 million.”
Naomi Klein Wins £50,000 Warwick Prize
“The complexity of Naomi Klein’s portrayal of the rise of disaster capitalism, The Shock Doctrine, has won its author the inaugural £50,000 Warwick prize for writing. The biennial prize, run by Warwick University, is promising to be one of the most unusual prizes on the books calendar, not least because it will tackle a different theme every two years, with ‘complexity’ chosen as its initial focus.”
The Man Who Named A Woman Concertmaster In Vienna
Clemens Hellsberg, president of the Vienna State Opera Orchestra since 1997, “has been a force for change in a body long resistant to it, increasing social awareness and trying to pull the orchestra into the 21st century. The female issue apart, he has fostered the idea of giving back, even making reparations of a sort, as in the performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the Nazi concentration camp at Mauthausen, Austria, in 2000.”
With Higher Ed Squeezed, Making A Case For Humanities
“With additional painful cuts across the board a near certainty even as millions of federal stimulus dollars may be funneled to education, the humanities are under greater pressure than ever to justify their existence to administrators, policy makers, students and parents. … This crisis of confidence has prompted a reassessment of what has long been considered the humanities’ central and sacred mission: to explore, as one scholar put it, ‘what it means to be a human being.'”
Read Aloud, Kindle — But Pay Authors For The Privilege
Roy Blount Jr. explains the Authors Guild’s complaint — which has angered the National Federation of the Blind — about the Kindle 2’s text-to-speech function. At issue is payment for audio rights to the books. “[P]ublishers, authors and American copyright laws have long provided for free audio availability to the blind and the guild is all for technologies that expand that availability. … But that doesn’t mean Amazon should be able, without copyright-holders’ participation, to pass that service on to everyone.”
Leonard Cohen Says Touring Is Like Zen
“‘There’s a similarity in the quality of the daily life’ on the road and in the monastery, [the Canadian songwriting legend] said. ‘There’s just a sense of purpose’ in which ‘a lot of extraneous material is naturally and necessarily discarded,’ and what is left is a ‘rigorous and severe’ routine in which ‘the capacity to focus becomes much easier.'”