Polish director Andrzej Wajda will become the first Eastern European film director to receive a lifetime achievement award at this Sunday’s Academy Awards. During a five-decade career, with 44 films to his name – including his 1981 film “Man of Iron,” Wajda’s acclaimed personal show of support for the Solidarity movement – he has revitalized his nation’s film industry. “Last year, for the first time since the end of the communist era and the relaxation of import restrictions on American movies, Polish films logged better box office figures than foreign ones.” – Time (Europe) 03/27/00
Month: March 2000
DRABINSKY IN THE BLACK
Former Livent theater entrepreneur Garth Drabinsky has been hired by Conrad Black’s National Post newspaper to be “creative marketing consultant.” – CBC
DATING SYLVIA PLATH
Before her stormy marriage to poet Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath was dating a Canadian student at Cambridge, who has long since disappeared. Whatever happened to this extra-literary-circle character “with a habitual slouch…an affable sheepish look, and a reputed…alcoholic”? – The Globe and Mail (Canada)
WE WEAR CLOTHES IN BOCA
Artist’s painting is removed by city employees in Florida because figures in the painting weren’t wearing clothes. – Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
EIGHT PLUS ONE
Today the Philadelphia Museum of Art will unveil eight paintings that have been donated by two pioneer American art collectors. The gift, which consists of eight paintings by the artist group known as “The Eight,” and one work by an artist outside the group will substantially strengthen the museum’s 20th century collection. Five of The Eight painters were known as Ashcan realists – artists who “took their subject matter from street life, which more academically inclined artists and critics found too coarse for fine art.” – Philadelphia Inquirer
NO NEVER MIND
Word is that the spring’s auction house sales will be as strong as ever in a robust market, despite investigations of Sotheby’s/Christie’s. – New York Times
IN LIEU OF
Britain’s museums don’t have the acquisition resources of their American counterparts. So the government set up a plan that allows estates faced with paying large sums of inheritance tax to settle part of these bills by handing over works of art in lieu of money to the Government. These are passed to institutions such as the Tate Gallery or the National Gallery. It’s been a boon to museums. – The Telegraph (UK)
ON EDGE
The new Tate Britain hasn’t lost any of its edge for concentrating on the Brits. – The Times (UK)
CONFLICT? WHAT CONFLICT?
As NEA money for the arts has dried up in America, should we be surprised that private financing interests have moved in and that charges of conflict of interest are being leveled at museums and theaters? Robert Brustein writes that: “the high arts have become an endangered species in this country, being picked off by a variety of sharpshooters, including commercial producers, populists, politicians, multi-culturalists, middlebrow critics and, not least of all, the foundations. At the event celebrating thirty-five years of the NEA, I imagined that I saw the heads of many of those extinct animals mounted on the walls, under a plaque designated ‘Art with a capital `A.” – New Republic
SHIFTING PERSPECTIVE
In the second part of MOMA2000, in which the New York Museum of Modern Art has dismantled and rearranged their permanent collection, “Making Choices” examines the years between 1920 – 1960. “Iconic works are plucked from their usual place in Art 101 and placed in a new context; lesser-known works, rarely seen, emerge from museum storage; all the different arts are mixed together.” In this fashion, “the shows together ask not only that you, the viewer, encompass contradiction and paradox but that you acknowledge that good and evil sometimes draw from the same fires in the heart. Which is not a bad way to know the twentieth century.” – New York Magazine