“Two acts at this weekend’s Vancouver Folk Music Festival have been denied entry into Canada. They include Tinariwen, an internationally renowned Malian collective that performed in Vancouver at the 2010 Cultural Olympiad; and U.S. banjo artist Morgan O’Kane.”
Tag: 07.15.11
Police Recover Eleven Artworks Stolen In June
“A man who was arrested in the theft of a Picasso drawing from a San Francisco gallery last week was keeping a virtual museum in his apartment, including 11 works stolen from New York galleries and hotels, according to the police.”
British Library Wants To Raise £9 Million To Buy Book
“The book, which is palm-sized and still leather-bound in its original cover, is believed to have been buried with St Cuthbert on Lindisfarne in 698, before the saint and his tome were later reburied in what would become Durham cathedral. The St Cuthbert Gospel has been on loan to the British Library since 1979.”
Enough With The “Iconic” Public Art Cliches!
“Let’s stipulate that public statuary derived from movie scenes is at best dubious… But worse is the endless recycling of images, whether from film, photos or art, that have become–and here’s that dreaded word again–iconic. What is an icon these days but a cliché on stilts?”
Harry Potter Breaks Opening Day Box Office Record
“The film’s distributor, Warner Bros, reports that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, made $92.1m (£57m) in North America on Friday. The previous single-day record belonged to The Twilight Saga: New Moon, which made $72.7m (£45m) on its opening day.”
Time To Open Canadian Broadcasting To Foreign Competition?
“One would assume that when a country has the fastest and most adaptable consumers to modern media, we would have invented a few of the world’s leading websites. Why do we not have one television network or specialty TV network that is carried around the world, despite having had the highest and most advanced cable penetration of any market in the world for three decades?”
Police Break Up International Egyptian Antiquities Theft Ring
“The charges filed in United States District Court in Brooklyn accuse three antiquities dealers and a collector of conspiring to smuggle an Egyptian sarcophagus and other items, and of laundering money. All of the suspects have been arrested except for a Jordanian dealer who operates out of Dubai.”
Does Where You See Shakespeare Really Change How You See Shakespeare?
“I’ve always been mystified why the Zagat restaurant rankings score décor on the same level as food. Does anyone really care about the wall sconces that illuminate their plates as much as the food that sits on them?”
Holbein Painting Sold For $70 Million
Reinhold Wuerth, a German billionaire who turned a family-owned screw wholesaler into a global company, paid more than $70 million to buy a Holbein painting, beating a bid from the Staedel Museum in Frankfurt.
Judge Squashes Hopes Of Brooklyn Waterfront Home For St. Ann’s Warehouse
“In a blow to St. Ann’s Warehouse, a widely admired theater in Brooklyn, a judge has issued a ruling that essentially nullifies a set of decisions by the federal, state and city governments over the last several years that led to approval of a new home for the theater.”