Two burglars cut through a fence at the artist’s Paris property and tried to take apart one of his sculptures made from the now-removed old lead roof of Cologne Cathedral, probably to sell the metal; they were scared away by a security guard. (In 2016, thieves tried to steal another Kiefer sculpture at his suburban Paris warehouse; they didn’t cart it away, but they did serious damage.) – Yahoo! (AFP)
Tag: 09.11.19
Translations Say Something About Their Time. And Of Ours?
Are we reducing everything we translate to standard English, whatever that might be? Or are we struggling to get close to the otherness of foreign texts? – New York Review of Books
Court Rules In Battle Over John Steinbeck Estate And Tells Heirs To Stop Fighting Already
“A federal appeals court attempted to close the book on endless litigation between the relatives of author John Steinbeck in a ruling that upheld a $5 million verdict against his daughter-in-law, but threw out $8 million she faced in punitive damages.” – Yahoo! (AP)
Rethinking Susan Sontag
Sontag’s fraught relationship with her body wasn’t simply about physicality; it was about her tormented relationship to need itself—her shame at having needs in the first place. – The New Republic
Librarians Are Angry, And Ready To Do Battle With Publishers Over Ebooks
It’s a quiet war, but it’s fierce. Macmillan is planning to block libraries from buying more than one digital copy of new books for eight weeks after the book comes out, starting in November. The claim: That library ebooks cannibalize book sales. But “studies consistently show library patrons to be more frequent book buyers overall—which is another reason Macmillan’s letter stung.” – Slate
What’s This About Classical Music Evolving?
“The music itself is not the problem, in fact it’s what we do best—it’s our core product. Yet so many organizations think that if we change the product, it will help the bottom line, but it won’t.” – New York Observer
Mardik Martin, Screenwriter For Martin Scorsese, Dead At 82
An Armenian born in Iran and raised in Iraq, Martin came to New York to study and met Scorsese in the early 1960s. He worked on the director’s first feature (Who’s That Knocking at My Door?) and documentary (Italianamerican) and co-wrote Mean Streets; New York, New York; The Last Waltz; and Raging Bull. – Variety
New Jersey Becomes First US State To Offer Arts Education To All Students
“The state has reached the benchmark for ‘universal arts education access’, meaning each one of its public schools provides some type of school-based arts instruction during the school day for all students.” However, as one official said, “Our work remains undone”: as of 2018, only 81% of students were actually enrolled in arts instruction of any kind. – Hyperallergic
Why Fewer Americans Are Volunteering
Fewer Americans are volunteering their time and money on a regular basis, according to the report. The national volunteer rate has not surpassed 28.8 percent since 2005, and in 2015, it dipped to its lowest, at 24.9 percent. – CityLab
Now: Point Your Phone At Any Art And Find Out What It Is
Magnus is part of a wave of smartphone apps trying to catalog the physical world as a way of providing instantaneous information about songs or clothes or plants or paintings. First came Shazam, an app that allows users to record a few seconds of a song and instantly identifies it. Shazam’s wild success — it boasts more than a billion downloads and 20 million uses daily, and was purchased by Apple for a reported $400 million last year — has spawned endless imitations. There is Shazam for plants or Shazam for clothes and now, Shazam, for art. – The New York Times