After a preliminary victory for arts supporters, Republicans in Congress used an 11th-hour maneuver Thursday to block a spending bill that would have added $15 million to the National Endowment for the Arts budget – the first NEA increase approved by the House since 1992. GOP leaders defeated the bill by crafting an amendment that diverted the additional money to Indian health services. – New Jersey Online
Tag: 06.16.00
LEARNING FROM POPULAR CULTURE
Literature demands careful study while entertainment exists solely for our pleasure. “But that distinction has more to do with context than with any inherent quality of the stories.” In dismissing entertainment as beneath the versions we find in literary anthologies, “we lose sight of popular culture as a potentially powerful teaching tool.” – Chronicle of Higher Education
BETTER LEFT UNDONE?
Art historians have always puzzled over the large number of paintings left “unfinished” by Paul Cezanne. Now a major exhibit of his “unfinished” works are on exhibit at Zurich’s Kunsthaus museum. As Cezanne wrote home to his mother in 1874: “I have to work constantly, (but) not in order to arrive at the finish, which attracts the admiration of imbeciles. I must strive to complete only for the satisfaction of becoming truer and wiser.” – MSNBC
THE ART LISTS
It’s been two months since American museums put up lists of artwork with questionable provenance during the Nazi era. “So far, no claimants have come forward to identify and seek restitution for objects on the Web sites put up by the Museum of Fine Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, or the Art Institute of Chicago. Nor have the sites yielded significant evidence that could lead to the recovery of stolen objects.” – Boston Globe
PRINTS OF WALES
Thirty of the Prince of Wales’s watercolor paintings – signed only “C”- went on display today in London, along with 26 oils by Saudi prince Khalid Al-Faisal, in the exhibition “Painting and Patronage.” – Times of India (AP)
FRANCE COMES CLEAN
It’s been more than five decades since World War II, and France is just now beginning to look openly, in history books and art exhibits, at its collaborationist past. A new museum opens in Paris this week dedicated to shedding light on just what transpired during the Vichy regime. “The museum pulls no punches: it shows that collaboration with the Nazis was a major phenomenon in wartime France and that French police were as dangerous for resistance fighters and Jews as the Gestapo.” – Times of India (Reuters)
TRACES OF ROYALTY
“Researchers plan to test DNA from a mummy that sat in an oddity museum in Canada for decades to see if it is the body of an Egyptian pharaoh. The Niagara Falls Museum in Ontario displayed the mummy for 138 years as part of its collection, which included two-headed cows, a five-legged pig, Wild Bill Hickok’s saddle and a humpback whale skeleton.” – Chicago Sun-Times