In the middle of the night earlier this month, 33-year-old Jorge Arizamendoza pried open an iron gate and scaled a fence at the Ancient Spanish Monastery in North Miami Beach, a 12th-century structure from Segovia which William Randolph Hearst brought to the U.S. piece by piece. He then destroyed the head of a statue of King Alfonso VII of Castile and León from 1141. (Three days later, he came for Sunday Mass and threatened to shoot the priest and congregation, at which point he was arrested.)
Tag: 06.20.16
Police In Spain Seize 10,000 Stolen Artworks And Antiquities
The Guardia Civil has arrested an antiques collector in the town of Bullas and impounded an enormous cache: 4,000 archaeological artifacts, some dating to the Bronze Age; 5,000 rare coins; 150 relics, included a supposed piece of the True Cross once certified by the Vatican; 40 paintings; and 30 manuscripts, including a late medieval Book of Psalms.
Think You’ll Enjoy Some Schadenfreude If Barnes And Noble Closes? Don’t – It’ll Be A Calamity
“There’s more than a little irony to the impending collapse of Barnes & Noble. The mega-retailer that drove many small, independent booksellers out of business is now being done in by the rise of Amazon. But while many book lovers may be tempted to gloat, the death of Barnes & Noble would be catastrophic – not just for publishing houses and the writers they publish, but for American culture as a whole.”
How The Smithsonian’s Next Museum Is Going To Extend America’s ‘National Conversation On Race’
Lonnie Bunch, founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture: “We felt it was really important to take on things that might be deemed controversial or difficult. And the challenge for us was to find the right tension between those moments of pain and those moments of resiliency. … This is not the Holocaust Museum. This is not a community simply defined by victimization. But rather, it’s a community that has, in many ways, helped America live up to its stated ideals.”
David Gockley’s Legacy At San Francisco Opera – It’s Not Just World Premieres
“His record of commissioning opera is nothing short of astonishing. But it’s pretty clear that Gockley’s main achievements as General Director were organizational. He has been an exceptional manager in a field that is notably lacking in exceptional managers.”
David Murray, Longtime Music Critic For Financial Times, Dead At 79
In addition to his 27 years with the pink paper, “Murray worked as a lecturer in philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London, into his 60s. In philosophy, as in music, he would easily become immersed in his subject. One student later recalled how they had met at his house and continued to talk even when the fire brigade arrived to put out a blaze in the apartment downstairs.”
‘The Alpha And Omega Of Restoration Projects’ At Jerusalem’s Church Of The Holy Sepulchre
“They are going to repair Jesus’ tomb – with titanium bolts. Over the next nine months, a team of Greek conservationists will restore the collapsing chapel built above and around the burial cave where the faithful believe that Jesus was buried and rose from the dead after the Crucifixion.”
New Tate Modern Breaks Attendance Records
“Tate said there had been 143,000 visits since the revamped and expanded modern art gallery opened on Friday. On Saturday alone there were more than 54,000 visits – around double the usual visitor number and the highest ever attendance for a single day.”
That Time That Theatre Saved A City
Today, the idea that a work written for the theater could “save” a nation—for this was what Aristophanes’ word polis, “city,” really meant; Athens, for the Athenians, was their country—seems odd, even as a joke. For us, popular theater and politics are two distinct realms. In the contemporary theatrical landscape, overtly political dramas that seize the public’s imagination (Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, say, with its thinly veiled parable about McCarthyism, or Tony Kushner’s AIDS epic Angels in America) tend to be the exception rather than the rule.
Did Academia Take New Music Down The Wrong Path?
“At present, contemporary music in U.S. academia has primarily become the space where young U.S. citizens can explore sound creatively without ever needing to consider that music may perhaps be more than a commodity. Without having a desire to be polemical, I am afraid that this music has merely become the elitist entertainment of a shrinking upper-middle class that still can afford to go to college. Perhaps from the very beginning, the project of New Music had already been defeated, but that does not mean it is dead.”