— stolen by Russia’s Red Army after World War II and since kept in Armenia’s Academy of Sciences were returned to Germany this week. Armenia first returned war booty to Germany in 1998 with a huge shipment of antiques. Germany’s culture minister is confident the remaining artifacts will be returned shortly. – Russia Today (Reuters) 08/10/00
Tag: 08.10.00
SHOWDOWN IN NEW YORK
“In the arts world, passions can run pretty deep. But passions have carved a Grand Canyon-size divide among warring factions of artists fighting for control of the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural Center on the Lower East Side. And the fight could end up in a death grip, with all the artists being kicked out of the castlelike building.” – New York Times
EASY TARGETS
“There are three people truly disliked by Hollywood. John McCain, conservative moralist William Bennett and Joe Lieberman. That’s because each has sought the spotlight to further his own career by picking on an easy target — the pop culture spewed out by television, movies, music and video games. Most of the culture-war cackling from these three heats up during an election year. It’s a no-brainer for politicians: TV equals filth. We need guidelines — like ratings, a V-chip and content concessions from Hollywood producers. That Lieberman is now in the running to become vice president is not good for those who oppose censorship.” – San Francisco Examiner 08/10/00
ROCKWELL REVISITED
While he was wildly successful as a commercial illustrator, Norman Rockwell was almost universally dismissed in his day as a shallow artist. So what are we to make of the current campaign to rehabilitate his reputation as a painter? “The present attempt to add Rockwell to the canon of American art is almost exclusively the work of critics. It is not the artists who have adopted Rockwell, but museum directors, curators, and writers on art.” – New York Review of Books
NO JOKE
Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Club is on the ropes. “In fact, the Pudding has been going broke since at least 1986, when the club sold the land under the theater to Harvard for back taxes and agreed to pay rent to the World’s Greatest University. The Pudding, as the old joke goes, has been getting a little behind in the rent – $480,000 behind. The university plans to take over the building Aug. 31, and what happens next is anyone’s guess.” – San Jose Mercury News
18,000 MANUSCRIPTS, BOOKS, AND MUSIC COMPOSITIONS —
— stolen by Russia’s Red Army after World War II and since kept in Armenia’s Academy of Sciences were returned to Germany this week. Armenia first returned war booty to Germany in 1998 with a huge shipment of antiques. Germany’s culture minister is confident the remaining artifacts will be returned shortly. – Russia Today (Reuters)
GUILTY UNTIL…
An artist is arrested after a photo processing store calls the police because the photos are of the artist’s naked children. “I felt they had decided I was guilty and treated me as such right up to the day when charges were dropped.” – The Sunday Times (UK)
LEARNING TO LOVE
“There is a basic myth of modernism, essential to its ideology, that all great works of art are initially repellent. It is only natural that this should give rise to the suspicion that any art which seems repellent at first is perhaps, after all, daring and provocative. In the past, however, the assimilation of a new style which was originally detested was most often the work not of critics but of the artists themselves.” – New York Review of Books
WITH THE TWIRL OF HIS PEN —
— the Lord Mayor of Sydney has signed three memorandums that will help ensure a brighter financial future of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art. The MCA will now receive nearly $2 million a year in public funding, and no longer has to worry about paying off its debt to the University of Sydney. – Sydney Morning Herald
BIRD’S EYE ART
A Japanese artist has new meaning to the word “detail”; he rents a helicopter, photographs a particular city, and then recreates it on paper with a magnifying glass, drafting pens and calligraphy brushes. Recently he spent 12 hours photographing Manhattan. “From the Hudson River to the East River, every rooftop chicken coop and streetside hot dog stand has surely been accounted for. There are people, too: some 8,000 pinpricks among the 5,000 cars and 230,000 buildings.” – Daily Yomiuri (Japan)