“Several zoos across the country now sell paintings done by animals. The Houston Zoo, for example, offers a $500 experience, in which you can sit and watch an orangutan make a painting just for you.”
Tag: 04.11.08
Jailed Chinese Writers Gets PEN Award
Yang Tongyan, a Chinese writer serving a 12-year prison term for posting anti-government articles on the Internet, will receive this year’s PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award.”
How ‘Bout Some Earlier Curtain Times?
“I often think that I would have been at home in Elizabethan London, when performances took place in the afternoon. … Performance start times are only convention but, like Woman’s Hour, they are hard to shift without protest and don’t always seem to be designed for the convenience of audiences – or reflect the fact that theatre is a service industry.”
EU Won’t Toss File-Sharers Off Internet
“European politicians have voted down calls to throw suspected file-sharers off the net. The idea to cut off persistent pirates formed part of a wide-ranging report on creative industries written for the European parliament.”
Oslo Opens $800M Opera House
“An $800 million opera house that seems to slope like an iceberg into the Oslo fjord opens tomorrow. The Carrara-marble-clad opera house — Norway’s largest cultural building in seven centuries — aims to revive the industrial waterfront and showcase the country’s oil wealth.”
Collectors To Give 50 Museums 50 Works Apiece
“Herbert Vogel, an 82-year-old retired postal clerk, and his wife, Dorothy, 72, a former librarian, spent about 45 years and their life savings collecting Minimalist, Conceptual and post-1960s art. In 1992 the couple pledged more than 2,000 paintings, drawings and sculptures to the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Now, having amassed more art than could be exhibited in most museums, they will distribute 2,500 more pieces to institutions across the country.”
Newseum Design Reflects Anxieties Of Newspaper Biz
“How many mediocre buildings can one city absorb? And what if these buildings are meant to affirm our highest values? Those questions come to mind as I ponder the Newseum, the latest reason to lament the state of contemporary architecture in this city. Rising on a prominent site along Pennsylvania Avenue, it joins a spate of new memorials and museums that have been reshaping the historic center of Washington….”
Have Summer Music Fests Passed The Saturation Point?
“In a slumping music business,” summer festivals “pack a box office punch: the top five American festivals generated a combined $60 million in ticket sales last year, according to Billboard magazine’s estimates. At least four new festivals will make their debuts this summer, raising the total to more than a dozen. Various concert promoters are already warning of the dangers of oversaturation, and point to the clutch of stars headlining multiple festivals.”
Public Theater Exec. Director To Step Down
“Mara Manus, who led the Public Theater out of the red and through nearly six years of steady financial growth, has decided to step down as the organization’s executive director. … Ms. Manus, 49, who notified the theater’s trustees of her decision at a board meeting on Thursday, will serve out the term of her contract, which ends in August.”
MoMA’s Most Intimate Exhibition Space: The Bathroom
“There are several reasons you might want to stage an unauthorized group exhibition inside the fifth-floor restrooms at the Museum of Modern Art: to attract attention, to poke a little fun at a powerful institution, to make a satirical point about the high-dollar commercial art world, to invite your friends to watch you pull off a good goofball stunt.” Such a show last week was, of course, “intended not so much for the fleeting moment as it was for the Web. “