A cigarette tax approved last year by Cleveland-area voters to help fund the arts is expected to pull in $17m this year alone, and the money will be divvied up between nearly 70 local arts groups. “Seventy-two institutions submitted applications to a panel of nine arts and culture experts from outside Ohio, which convened this week and commented on the strengths and weaknesses of each application. Institutions qualified for support if they scored 75 or higher out of 100.”
Tag: 10.18.07
Shakespeare Portrait Looking Like The Real Thing
“A portrait believed by its Canadian owner to be the only likeness of William Shakespeare painted in his lifetime got a major boost in its credibility this week when experts in the United States announced that the ink identifying the portrait as such dates back to the Bard’s era.”
New Leadership For PA Arts Academy
“The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts has named both a new president/chief executive officer and a new museum director. Edward T. Lewis, 73, former president of St. Mary’s College of Maryland, will become president of the entire institution on Nov. 1. David R. Brigham, 43, an art scholar who was most recently executive director of the Allentown Art Museum, began work Monday as director of the academy museum.”
Working-Class Kid With A Posh Price Tag
The Broadway-bound musical version of Billy Elliot “which will open in the fall of 2008 at the Imperial Theatre, is budgeted at $18.5 million, making it one of the most expensive non-Disney musicals ever… One thing is clear: Broadway has turned its back on the working and middle classes. If you’re not rich, if you don’t have a loft in SoHo or a three-bedroom on the Upper West Side or a house in Westport, get lost, we don’t need you, you can’t afford us.” So it’s ironic that the story of a young working-class boy fighting to break free of his status should be so expensively embraced by the Broadway power brokers.
Queen-Sized Bed, Bath, Cable TV, And A Van Gogh
An innkeeper in France is attempting to raise $30m or more to purchase a Van Gogh landscape at auction. If he is successful, the painting would hang in the attic room where the painter died two days after shooting himself in 1890. “The plan is dismissed as a mad fantasy by some curators and art dealers,” but the innkeeper seems to be skilled at attracting backers.
Great Art, Yes. But Should It Really Belong To You?
When cosmetics heir Robert Lauder bought a Klimt portrait for $135m last year, it instantly made him one of the world’s most famous collectors. “But for some experts in Holocaust restitution research, the show raises another issue related to Mr. Lauder’s trove: He declines to issue documentation of his private collection for public scrutiny.”
TV Writers More Than Just Hired Wordsmiths
With a writers’ strike a very real possibility in Hollywood this fall, observers say that TV has a lot more at stake than the movies. “Movie executives generally consider screenwriters to be expendable. But television writers — and particularly the writer-producers who serve as show runners — wield considerable power over a television show, so much so that it often is not clear where their writing duties end and their producing duties begin.”
Bronfman’s Grand Central Debut
Does your train station have a concert hall, and an internationally celebrated pianist to play in it? New York’s does: “Vanderbilt Hall, cavernous and echo-y, is not an ideal acoustical environment for serious piano listening.” But Yefim Bronfman, teaming with a New York food bank to raise money to fight hunger, tackled the tricky acoustics with a morning rush hour recital, performed in front of a crowd of jaded Big Apple commuters.
Scientist Creates Microscopic Radio
“A scientist has unveiled a working radio built from carbon nanotubes that are only a few atoms across, or almost 1,000 times smaller than today’s radio technology. The nanotech device is a demodulator, a simple circuit that decodes radio waves and turns them into audio signals… Nanoelectronic systems are considered crucial to the continued miniaturization of electronic devices. Many companies are interested in the long-term potential of the technology.”
Watching A Network Kill Itself
TV networks have their ups and downs, but NBC has been in a years-long slump that has confounded even the most jaded observers. Matthew Gilbert says that the incompetence of the network’s leaders borders on infuriating, and the mistakes they are currently making could have been avoided with the briefest of refresher courses on network mistakes of the past.