– is the biggest thing to hit the classical charts in recent years. Now the manager who helped get her there is suing the 14-year-old for breaking her contract with him. – BBC
Month: February 2000
“DAMN THOSE CANADIAN JUDGES”
Francis Ford Coppola’s online writers’ workshop is a figure skating free-for-all. The judges can be brutal, but the experience of having your work mauled out there in the ether can also be strangely addictive. – Salon
SLUMP? WHAT SLUMP?
US book publishing sales rose 4 percent last year, beating $24 billion. – Publishers Weekly
BOLD BUT BLOWN OUT
The budget and box office, that is, for this year’s Perth Festival, which reached for some ambitious international projects, but seems headed to a record deficit. – Sydney Morning Herald
GROWING CHORUS —
— of artists protests inclusion of Joerg Haider’s far-right Freedom party in the Austrian government. – CBC (AP)
HARVARD UNDER ATTACK
Native Americans charge the university is trying to get around a law requiring the return of American Indian artifacts. “(Harvard) is very unpopular with natives from coast to coast right now,” said Ramona Peters of the Wampanoag tribe in Gay Head. “It appears they view our ancestors as their property.” – Boston Herald
- RESPONSIBLE RETURN: Some American museums are struggling with complying with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which mandates the return of native artifacts to Indian tribes. – Boston Herald
- NATIVE AMERICAN FRUSTRATION: “So you go into the museum as the authority figure. And guess who the authorities are on Indians? White people. That’s the hypocrisy. You go in possessing all these qualities and the non-Indian doesn’t recognize you because you don’t have a paper on the wall that says Ph.D. on it.” – Boston Herald
ARTIST RESALE RIGHTS
British opponents of an EU plan to give artists a cut on the resale of their work say the plan will gut the English market and drive art-sellers to Switzerland or New York where the tax won’t be collected. Is that any reason not to let artists share in profits on their work? – The Telegraph (UK)
HERE A PLINTH, THERE A PLINTH…
Public statues are a guarantee to oblivion. Who pays any attention to them? “Who could have named any of the occupants of Trafalgar Square – apart from Nelson – before the Royal Society of Arts launched its campaign to fill the fourth plinth, which has remained empty since Charles Barry laid out the square in 1829?” – New Statesman
MONUMENTAL FAILURE
A Lyon opera house, built in 1993 by leading architect Jean Nouvel, had to close its doors and the company cancel its season after a rash of structural and mechanical failures in the building. This is the latest mishap in a pattern of failure afflicting celebrated modern French buildings. The Opéra Bastille, the Grande Arche de la Défense, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Conservatoire of music have all suffered collapses and dysfunctions costing millions to repair. – The Times (UK)
NOT US
Revelations that some US museums have asked for commissions on sales of work they exhibit leave other museums scrambling to deny they engage in the ethically questionable practice. – New York Times