Twentieth-century Italian art made quite a showing at Sotheby’s recent London auctions, far outselling the work of other, more well-known European artists. “Although lacking heavyweight material by Modigliani or the Futurists, Sotheby’s realised £7.5 million for just 54 lots and set half a dozen new artists’ records in the process. Were it a football match, the result, on the basis of these figures, would have read Italy 4, Germany 2.” – The Telegraph (UK)
Tag: 10.30.00
THE GRAVES BUSINESS
“In the 1980s, Graves became the darling of postmodernist architecture. Then he designed a tea kettle for Alessi, with a bird on the spout, that became an icon of sophisticated home design. Today, he is a self-proclaimed ‘old fogey’ who designs toasters for Target – and, by the way, more buildings than ever.” – The Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
WHEN IN DOUBT, SEE THE ART TEACHER
“Watching my class of potential Rembrandts and Van Goghs in action last week, I reflected for a moment on how it was that I had become that ever-popular enigma: the ‘art teacher.’ You know who I mean. The teacher that is always just a little lost, a little dirty and can never quite seem to find anything. For the most part, we are popular with the students because we never seem to be very concerned with discipline and we remain close to the hearts of fellow colleagues who are always in a constant search for bristol board and construction paper.” – The Globe and Mail (Canada)
THE ‘OTHER’ ONLINE PUBLISHING
Negotiating book rights is “a time- and labor-consuming, long winded, costly and inefficient business; heavy manuscripts have to be expensively shipped often over long distances, and there is a huge amount of copying, and faxing and phoning at international rates, with often only a comparatively small reward. Why not, indeed, work it all out online: post catalogues, properties, partial manuscripts on the Web, e-mail pitch letters and offers, conduct auctions? – Publishers Weekly
RESCUING MARTHA GRAHAM
Finally, maybe a plan to rescue the Martha Graham Dance Company, which went out of business in May. The company “is poised to reopen in temporary quarters as soon as January with a fresh infusion of private contributions and a promise of a $750,000 capital grant from the state senator from its home district. The state contribution comes with strings; the dance center cannot get the money unless it raises $750,000 in private donations for operating expenses. – New York Times
THE RIGHT DIRECTION
The National Ballet of Canada will lose only $165,000 this year, compared to the $1 million it lost last year. – National Post (Canada)
DOES HYPE PAY OFF?
Do the books publishers spend huge sums marketing and generating pre-publication buzz for actually end up with the readership and popularity that was hoped for? Here are some real sales figures on some of the most recently hyped releases. – Inside.com
TWO APPROACHES TO WRITING A LIFE STORY
- Recent biographies of John Updike and Saul Bellow take two very different approaches to their subjects. James Atlas “meditates on Bellow’s controversial role as a public intellectual, maintaining a remarkable level of objectivity,” while “William H. Pritchard, on the other hand, shies away from the personal details of Updike’s life, openly deriding ‘talk show revelations and displays’. He argues that ‘such events pale in interest when put next to [Updike’s] writings, products of all those hours sitting at the desk with pencil or typewriter or computer’.” – Chronicle of Higher Education
A MATTER OF LABELS?
“Article after article about this most vilified and most lauded pasty-faced pimply ‘rapper of the year’ have made the same error, referring to Eminem as a ‘white rapper’ too many times to list here. A crossover artist. Crossing over from what? While we should all pay attention to the vile lyrics of Eminem’s work, we should also pay close attention to the equally vile way the media have focused so much on this one offensive rapper out of hundreds, constantly reminding the public of his whiteness.” – The Globe and Mail (Canada)
SEARCHING FOR SHOSTAKOVICH
The debate over Shostakovich’s reputation raged on at this weekend’s international Shostakovich symposium in Glasgow, commemorating the 25th anniversary of the composer’s death. A memoir supposedly dictated by the composer himself and smuggled out to the west has “purportedly revealed the composer to have been a secret dissident through Stalin’s reign of terror, and to have encoded that dissidence within his music. The essence of the argument has always been this: one camp thinks it’s authentic, the other believes it to be a monstrous fraud.” – The Herald (Scotland)