From the moment Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winning novel, The Life of Pi, came to public attention, it seemed to cry out for images to match the vivid prose. A deal for the movie rights predictably followed, and now, Martel is taking the unusual step of soliciting illustrations for a new edition of the book. Amateurs and professionals alike are invited to submit entries in the competition, which is being sponsored by Martel’s publisher in partnership with newspapers in Canada, Australia, and the UK.
Tag: 12.17.05
D.C. Ballet Kills Off Nutcracker
“Facing a stubborn impasse with its dancers over labor issues, the Washington Ballet has canceled all remaining performances of The Nutcracker, which was to have run through Dec. 24 at the Warner Theatre.” The company and its dancers disagreed over whether the dispute, which had already led several performances to be canceled, was a strike or a lockout. The head of the dancers’ union was shocked by the cancellation of the entire, and accused the company of having no interest in reaching an agreement.
James Ingo Freed, 75
Architect James Ingo Freed, who designed Washington, D.C.’s Holocaust Museum and San Francisco’s Main Public Library, has died aged 75 of complications from Parkinson’s Disease. Freed was a longtime business partner of architect I.M. Pei, and though he never reached the “superstar” status of some of his contemporaries, he was responsible for some of his era’s most beloved buildings.
The Golden Age Of Art Collecting?
“That rarefied practice of collecting high art — from canonized old masters to contemporary works by both international art stars and marketable young upstarts — is experiencing a surge it hasn’t seen since the explosive moment in the late 1980s when the market ballooned to a thinly stretched bubble, before bursting, finally, along with the stock market, in the 1990s. According to Artprice, a Paris-based information service that lists auction prices from more than 300,000 artists, prices for contemporary art alone had risen 40 per cent this year, pushing past even the heyday of the ’80s explosion… Contemporary art, traditionally a tough sell, has also caught the fever… Put simply, the art world is in a full-blown boom.”
Complexity Coalesced
Benjamin Forgey says that James Ingo Freed’s legacy rings particularly true in the nation’s capital, where Freed’s vision for the Holocaust Museum became the cornerstone of the architect’s legacy. “As a man, [Freed] combined lots of complex opposites. He was incredibly intense yet delightfully considerate. He was brave — in the graceful way he refused to give in to the debilitation of Parkinson’s disease. His movements had almost a dancer’s grace. He was gentle yet fierce. His talents and growing independence, however, had been hidden. The Holocaust Museum changed that. It was, indubitably, Freed’s building from start to finish.”
The Exploding Trend Of The “Stupid Book”
We’ve all been there. You’ve been Christmas shopping for weeks, scouring the stores looking for just the right gift for that one impossible-to-shop-for friend, when your eyes light on a brightly colored, snappily titled tome in a stack of books by the register. In an instant, you know two things: 1) this is a decidedly useless book, devoid of any literary or substantive value; and 2) it’s pretty funny, it’s vaguely clever in a cynical, pop-culture-saturated way, and you are unquestionably about to buy it for your friend.
ROM Offers An In-Progress Preview
The Royal Ontario Museum, in the messy midst of a $200 million expansion project, is unveiling ten new finished galleries for public viewing, beginning December 26. Kate Taylor is impressed with ROM’s direction, up to a point: “[The museum’s planners] are exercising a particular museum philosophy here. They wanted to restore rather than hide the heritage building, and the galleries are now being asked not to impinge on the architecture.”
The Critic Takes The Stage
If anyone was expecting the music world Andrew Porter has spent his career critiquing to turn its back when the famed critic brought his own production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute to the Canadian Opera Company stage this weekend, such hopes were dashed last summer, when the entire run of the show sold out months in advance. “Porter may well be the most eminent living music critic in the English-speaking world, a man who for 50 years has set the standard for erudition, fairness and grace in the writing of music criticism… [He] has no immediate plans to continue his directorial career, but he has a dream — to direct Beethoven’s Fidelio.”
The Next DaVinci. And The Next, And The Next…
When it comes right down to it, imitation is not only the sincerest form of flattery, it’s also a surefire method of marketing success. So no one should be surprised that the publishing world is about to start churning out countless books whose plotlines sound an awful lot like a certain bestselling novel concerning religious sects, freemasons, and old Italian artist/inventors. Some are comparing the rush to duplicate the success of The DaVinci Code to the explosion of the “legal thriller” genre in the early 1990s, which was sparked by the commercial success of author John Grisham.
Fireworks At True Trial
“Tempers became heated [Friday] as the Italian state presented new evidence in its case against Marion True, a former antiquities curator at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, who is on trial [in Rome] on charges of dealing in looted antiquities. Ms. True’s defense lawyers shouted out objections when Maurizio Pellegrini, a document and photography analyst with the Italian Culture Ministry who testified as an expert witness for the state, began commenting on correspondence between Ms. True and the antiquities dealer Giacomo Medici, a co-defendant in the case who was sentenced to 10 years in prison last December.”