07.00 – ArtsJournal Wayback

THE LOST CITIES

The waters of Abu Qir, off Egypt, are yielding amazing archaeological treasures this summer. “A team of French underwater archaeologists working in conjunction with the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) has uncovered two sunken cities, believed to be the legendary Herakleion and Menouthis. ‘This city is absolutely untouched. It’s the first time it has been seen, that somebody could dive on it. You can see that everything remains as it was.'” – Egypt Today

GOING FOR VAN GOGH

“In the last decade, according to an ARTnews survey of scholars, museum curators, and art dealers in Europe and the United States, suspicions about fake van Goghs have tainted some of the most expensive paintings in the world, including the Yasuda ‘Sunflowers’, purchased in 1987 by the Yasuda Fire and Marine Insurance Company of Japan for $39.9 million, at the time the highest sum ever paid for a work of art.” – ARTnews

THE ANNUAL ARTNEWS LIST —

— of the world’s biggest collectors of art is out. “The market is very much dominated by Americans. What’s especially healthy is that the whole speculative element of the ’80s is gone. Now the buyers want to keep the works. They’re not going into bank vaults.” – ARTnews

WHAT ABOUT THE HISTORY THAT NEVER HAPPENED?

“Provisional history, standby history, or simply outtakes: whatever the name, it denotes an existential sphere that is vast and growing. Think of all the newspaper stories that editors have decided to spike; the millions of words that have been cut out of books; the miles of footage yanked by directors from their movies. Think of all the caps, manufactured but never sold, proclaiming the Buffalo Bills to be the champions of Super Bowls XXV, XXVI, XXVII, and XXVIII.” – The Atlantic

ODE TO GEEKS

Geeks are getting a lot of attention these days. “Some constants emerge from geek studies. Geeks are almost always depicted as deficient in traditional social skills but as possessing some special gift or talent in recompense. Writers tend to be divided over which side of this equation should be emphasized (usually to the exclusion of the other). Some fear that the spread of geekdom means an irreparable hole is being torn in the social fabric; others see geekdom as a less hidebound and authoritarian society in the making.” – The Atlantic Unbound

LAST DAYS?

Over the past decade the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has lost more than half its viewers for CBC-produced programming. “From the ’50s through the ’70s, the CBC was one of the world’s great public broadcasters. But the Corporation was also evolving into its own self-contained world of bigger budgets, exploding infrastructure, myriad administrators and, ultimately, a kind of on-air arrogance.” Now budget cuts and a failing mandate with the politicians threatens the network. – Mediachannel 07/00

BEST READ

What are America’s top public libraries? Here’s a list. – Book

INFORMATION OVERLOAD

“Our ability to generate information has outpaced our ability to comprehend it. We’re driven to make sense of it all, to shape and sort and classify information into systems we can use. From the days of writing on cave walls to the creation of XML, we’ve tried to do a better job of comprehending the information at hand. The thing is, we’ve become so good at creating information that it’s piling up faster than promises in a political campaign.” – *spark-online

THE REAL STRAVINSKY

For a good part of the 20th Century Igor Stravinsky was considered the greatest composer of the era. But “by the time of his death in 1971 the plaudits of the mass media were out of sync with the opinions of musical tastemakers in Europe and America; these dismissed him as a diehard reactionary who had waited too long to acknowledge the historical inevitability of atonality. But the tastemakers were wrong, and with the restoration of tonality and the demise of the atonal avant-garde, Stravinsky’s music has once again returned to the limelight.” – Commentary