Sotheby’s dropped almost 7 percent in New York after an art-market analyst said more than half of the contemporary-art lots offered by three major auction houses last month in London fell short of or barely beat their low estimates.
Tag: 03.06.08
Italy’s Rules For Authors’ Rights Gets First Update Since Royal Days
“Italy’s decree governing the rights of authors was updated for the first time in 66 years Wednesday, creating more transparency in how writers are compensated but allowing for more time before payment for acquiring rights to a work is made.”
Shanghai Applies To Build A Disneyland
“Plans for a Shanghai Disneyland emerged in 2005 but were suspended when the city’s Communist Party boss, Chen Liangyu, was implicated in a corruption investigation in 2006.”
Digital Copyright Reform Stalled In Canada
With unauthorized downloading still legal in Canada, a digital copyright bill remains indefinitely delayed. But there are myriad competing interests…
Was Author’s Foundation A Fake Too?
Margaret Seltzer, “who confessed this week to making up her memoir, ‘Love and Consequences,’ about growing up as a foster child in gang-ridden South-Central Los Angeles, appears also to have made up a foundation that she claimed was helping ‘to reduce gang violence and mentor urban teens’.”
Does “CSI” Make The Real Detectives Look Dumb?
“The increasing sophistication with which television dramas have portrayed investigators in recent years nearly guarantees our disappointment when we encounter the real ones, who too often don’t display the intuitive or analytic genius of a Monk on ‘Monk’ or McNulty on ‘The Wire.’ ‘Crime 360’ unintentionally creates the suspicion that gadgetry has supplanted thinking.”
Getting Off At Oscar Peterson
“A grassroots campaign has taken hold in Montreal to rename a busy subway station after Mr. Peterson, the Montreal-born music legend who died in December. The problem is that the station, located around the corner from where Mr. Peterson was born and raised, is currently named Station Lionel-Groulx.”
Hollywood In Therapy
“Is this the year of the therapist in Hollywood? Sure, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and psychologists have been fixtures in our popular entertainment through the ages. But often they’ve been silly caricatures on the sidelines… Suddenly, though, it seems the fictional therapist has hit center stage.”
Madrid Gets A New Museum
“Madrid’s latest art museum, the CaixaForum, has opened in the heart of the city’s cultural district near the Prado, the Reina Sofia and the Thyssen-Bornemisza museums. The $94m project has been funded by the Caixa Foundation.”
Who Owns Art? Really?
“When will The Art Newspaper and the rest of the media and political world get it into their heads that no one owns Matisse and Picasso, or for that matter Botticelli or Caravaggio, any more than they own Shakespeare, Chekhov, Beethoven or Shostakovich? Issues of copyright regarding writers and musicians do at least have statutes of limitation placed upon them; it is more than high time that similar limitations were placed on art and material culture.”