Tag: 12.19.06

How To Retain Artworks In The Public Sphere?

“With art, money talks. Now it’s talking again, with perhaps [Philadelphia’s] greatest work of American art, Thomas Eakins’ The Gross Clinic, sold Nov. 10 by Thomas Jefferson University for $68 million. In the midst of the controversy over the sale and the local effort to raise $68 million by next Tuesday to match the price being paid by an Arkansas museum and the National Gallery, the questions are again being raised: What other works of art are at risk of sale or removal? What, if anything, can be done to stanch an outflow?”

Public Art Meets Public Surveillance In Chicago

“What strikes you about Jaume Plensa’s twin glass towers at Millennium Park are the faces, as big as JumboTrons, that appear to be looking at you. And since late November, they actually have been. A $52 million grant from the Department of Homeland Security bought the Chicago area a host of public safety improvements–including an obvious and ungainly camera atop each of Plensa’s giant glass towers.” The move has not been a hit with the aesthetically inclined.

Bringing Back The Kids’ Books That Got Away

The New York Review Children’s Collection is in the business of resurrecting beloved kids’ books. “Reprint rights come cheaply enough, [editor Edwin] Frank says, for the New York Review to make money on reissues that sell as few as 5,000 copies. And whatever the numbers, the books’ reappearance makes booksellers and buyers happy — reversing, in a tiny but symbolic way, the odious publishing trend toward keeping books in print for shorter and shorter periods of time.”

Guettel Orchestrates A Life In The Family Business

“Adam Guettel craves control. Journalists arriving for interviews without tape recorders have even known the composer-lyricist to proffer his own digital device. ‘I turn it on and say, “I’m going to e-mail this to you, and this is what you’re going to make your interview based on,” ‘ Guettel explains crisply.” The two Tony Awards he won for “The Light in the Piazza” have given Guettel, the 41-year-old grandson of Richard Rodgers, a measure of control over his career.

Now On Bookshelves: Culture-War Sci-Fi

“The right’s sleep of reason is bringing forth dark, futuristic political thrillers” — science fiction in which Chelsea Clinton is president and terrorists rule Manhattan. For conservatives, such writing is “coping behavior. It’s similar to the tricks some doctors teach young patients who are struggling with cancer or other fatal diseases: They should visualize their maladies. If they picture the tumors ravaging their bodies, they can picture their bodies fighting them off and blasting them into oblivion. Culture war fiction serves the same function.”

If Thomas Wolfe Had Had A Blog

“In the spring of 2005, a fire at the Hotel Chelsea sent residents fleeing to the lobby. While the firefighters worked, the residents passed a bottle and told stories about life in the legendary Bohemian outpost…. When the night ended, Debbie Martin and Ed Hamilton, a couple of transplanted Kentuckians who have lived at the Chelsea for more than a decade, wanted to find a way to keep the stories and camaraderie going. And so was born ‘Living with Legends’ (hotelchelseablog.com), a hip and literate blog about life in the red-brick and black-wrought-iron behemoth on West 23rd Street.”

Recognizing Repatriation’s (Literal) Foot Soldiers

The “efforts of Allied officers and soldiers … to save and repatriate stolen treasures during and after the war is a chapter of World War II history still not particularly well known. Even during the war their work — when compared with saving lives and preserving ways of life — was sometimes discounted. Some members of the military referred to these soldiers as ‘Venus fixers,’ a term with more than a hint of the effete. But the accomplishments of these soldiers, better known as the Monuments Men, are finally starting to come into sharper focus.”