“Defying high anticipation, one of two portraits of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart that have been in the New York Public Library’s collection for more than a century failed to sell at Sotheby’s yesterday in an auction that had generated advance controversy.” The other portrait sold for considerably less than the auction house had expected. “The works are among 16 paintings, watercolors and sculptures that the New York Public Library put on the block yesterday to raise money for its endowment. The decision, announced in April, drew protests from many art lovers and museum curators who said they felt that the library was jettisoning treasures central to the civic history of New York.”
Tag: 12.01.05
Good News/Bad News at Milwaukee Sym
The Milwaukee Symphony is still in the red to the tune of $2.61 million for the 2004-05 season, but taken in a larger context, the deficit may actually be good news for the ensemble. The shortfall is actually less than the MSO’s board and management budgeted for the year, and easily met the goal for the first year of the organization’s three-year recapitalization plan. Under that plan, the budget would be back in the black by the end of the 2006-07 season. The MSO has been hurting financially for quite some time, and a new executive director made severe cuts in the organization this past season to get the budget under control. The orchestra’s musicians also accepted a temporary pay cut.
Chicago Music School May Drop Music
The Choir Academy of Chicago, a charter school serving underprivileged minority youth and operating in a model based on the Boys Choir of Harlem Academy, is “perilously close to dissolving its music-based curriculum, if not the whole institution.” The school, which opened in 2001, has had financial problems from the beginning, and relations with the Chicago Childrens’ Choir, which oversees the school, have been strained in recent years. The board collapsed in 2004, and as the school desperately tries to stay open, those in charge now appear willing to scrap the music that has always been at the core of its educational approach.
Rediscovered Beethoven Manuscript Sells for Nearly $2m
“A unique manuscript by Ludwig van Beethoven that was lost for more than a century was sold at auction on Thursday for £1.13 million ($1.95 million) to an anonymous buyer. The final price was at the low end of the pre-sale estimates of up to £1.5 million… Discovered in July at the bottom of a dusty filing cabinet at a religious school in Philadelphia, the manuscript sold Thursday is a work in progress for the Grosse Fuge in B flat major — one of Beethoven’s most revolutionary works… Sotheby’s said it was the most important Beethoven manuscript to have come to market in living memory and would prompt a complete reassessment of the German composer’s works.”
Dead Wrong?
Faced with virulent opposition from its fans, the Grateful Dead is reconsidering its decision to disallow free downloading of its concerts…
Met To Italy: Where’s The Proof?
Italian officials have little concrete evidence that objects in the Metropolitan Museum are stolen. “For six of the seven pots, Italian evidence doesn’t tie them to any clandestine digs or tomb robbers, according to a judge’s conviction of Roman art dealer Giacomo Medici, who was charged with smuggling the pots. Italian negotiators are using evidence from his trial in their negotiations with the Met. For the seventh vase, a 2,500-year-old pot painted by the artist Euphronios, an allegedly incriminating journal found in an American art dealer’s Paris apartment makes no mention of the object ever being in Italy.”
Ahhh…Ahhh…Ahhh…
Giles Coren’s book Winkler has won this year’s Bad Sex Award. “The food critic’s book describes a sexual act between a man and a woman, in which she ‘she scratched his back deeply with the nails of both hands’. The rest of the winning passage is unprintable for a family audience. The annual award pitted Coren against writers including John Updike, Salman Rushdie, Ben Elton and Paul Theroux.”