RUNNING BALLET

What’s it take to run a successful ballet company? When Carole McPhee took over management of the English National Ballet, the company had a huge debt. She turned things around and turned the ENB into a successful touring company. After 11 years McPhee is leaving ENB and returning to Australia. The Age (Melbourne)

DESERT IN BLOOM

A year ago Ballet Arizona was on the brink of collapse, and only an emergency bailout allowed the company to meet its payroll. But things have turned around – “Ballet Arizona is emerging from that near-death experience with a clear artistic vision and a more stable public image. Most tellingly, the level of red ink that nearly drowned the troupe last year has receded.” Arizona Republic

Issues: July 2001

Tuesday July 31

WE REAP WHAT WE SOW: Artists in China can have a hard time pushing the envelope, what with the political repression, the torture, and all. So many have turned to a completely apolitical form of “shock art” based on visually disturbing images. “They reflect the bizarre direction in which Chinese art has moved under a government that tolerates what some would argue are meaningless ‘shock’ creations but not social criticism.” Washington Post 07/31/01

PAYING TO PLAY: A mysterious amateur philosopher hires prominent philosophers to review a paper. The pay’s good, the paper’s not bad, but the exercise says something about the state of academic inquiry… Lingua Franca 07/01

$300 FOR “THE LION KING” SUDDENLY SEEMS A BIT HIGH: As the U.S. economy continues to tank, the effects are being felt in all corners of the entertainment industry. For most folks, the arts are considered a luxury, and when money gets tight, no one much feels like ponying up for overpriced concert tickets, inexplicably skyrocketing movie passes, or even expensive hardcover books. The New York Times 07/31/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Monday July 30

ARTS FUNDING IS ELECTION ISSUE: Australia’s Labour Party has promised to make increased arts funding part of its electionj pitch. The party promises to “repair the damage” done to the arts community by the current Howard Government’s funding priorities. The Age (Melbourne) 07/30/01

WORLD LEADERS: Are the world leaders of the 21st century creative artists, not politicians? Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre has created a festival on that premise and invited 14 artists from around the world to come together. The “project is designed to explore the nature of the creative process, the nature of the creative spirit, the idea of innovation and the idea of risk-taking, and also the fact that one creative mind can actually change aspects of the world.” McLean’s 07/30/01

POSTAL BUTTS: The Brooklyn Academy of Music wanted to promote a low-budget film it is showing, with a postcard that shows a photo of a line of men from the movie with their naked butts showing (an admittedly not pretty sight). But the US postal service has refused to let the cards go through the mail. “With bulk mail we try to think about the few people who will have objections.” BBC 07/30/01

HELP FOR IRISH ARTISTS: With Ireland’s recent prosperity have come rising rents. “An exodus of artistic types in recent years has led to concern that the country’s main cities will become the preserve of go-getting Celtic Tiger sorts.” Now a request to city officials for cheap housing for artists.” Sunday Times (UK) 07/29/01

BENEFACTOR OVERBOARD: London’s Royal Opera House is ditching its greatest benefactor. Vivien Duffield “has raised more than £100 million for it and personally donated millions more – perhaps as much as £25 million.” Sunday Times (UK) 07/29/01

Sunday July 29

MULTICULT FALLOUT: In many ways, multiculturalism defined American arts of the 1990s. “Most important, it reversed old patterns of exclusion and brought voices into the mainstream that had rarely, if ever, been there before. But limitations became apparent. The ideal of diversity — of mixing things up, spreading the wealth, creating a new Us — never quite happened.” And, it came with some unexpected problems. The New York Times 07/29/01 (one-time registration required for access)

CENTER OF SUMMER CULTURE: It may be rural, but Massachusetts’ Berkshires is home to America’s biggest cultural resort: Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer home; the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Becket; the Williamstown Theatre Festival; the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown; Mass. MoCA, the Berkshire Opera Company, and Shakespeare & Company. “The arts generate more than half of Berkshire County’s annual $250 million tourist trade. Tanglewood alone brings between $60 and $70 million to the area.” Boston Globe 07/29/01

CRACKING DOWN ON COPYRIGHT: The US government is taking copyright infringement more seriously. “The Senate has earmarked $10 million for copyright prosecutions, enough money for 155 agents and attorneys in the fiscal year starting in October. That’s up from a current $4 million allocated for 75 positions.” Wired 07/29/01

Friday July 27

SMITHSONIAN NEEDS MAJOR OVERHAUL: “An independent review of the Smithsonian Institution said yesterday that the museum complex is even shabbier and more dilapidated than previously reported. Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence M. Small has been telling Congress for a year and a half that the situation was grim and last month estimated the cost of vital repairs at $1 billion. The independent team of experts put the figure higher: $1.5 billion.” Washington Post 07/27/01

  • BAD DAY IN D.C., PART 2: “City health officials have ordered the Kennedy Center to remove asbestos from ceilings near exclusive seating areas in the Opera House, including the presidential box. D.C. Health Department officials said yesterday that there was no risk to any theatergoers who have been in that area. The Eisenhower Theater, next to the Opera House, will be closed for the rest of the summer while workers remove asbestos from ceilings.” Washington Post 07/27/01

AUSSIE ARTS BILL: How much do Australian governments spend on culture? “Funding for radio and television broadcasting, film, music, visual arts, museums, art galleries, multi-media, venues, zoos, civic centres, publishing, archives and other activities” added up to almost $4 billion in 1999-2000. This was equivalent to $209 per person. Sydney Morning Herald 07/27/01

CORPORATE SPONSORS: FEEL ME, TOUCH ME: One side says, “The company is taking an active role with children. I don’t see any harm in that.” The other side says, “The corporation has an obligation to give back to the community. Do it, shut up, and don’t expect anything in return.” At immediate issue is McDonald’s 20-year, $5 million sponsorship of Philadelphia’s Please Touch Museum for children. Philadelphia Inquirer 07/26/01

REALNETWORKS CUTS BACK: RealNetworks, whose Real Player is probably the most widely-used streaming audio software on the Internet, is laying off 15 percent of its work force. For the second quarter of this year, the company reported a loss of just over $19 million. During the Internet boom of a couple years ago, a loss that small would have looked like a profit. Nando Times 07/26/01

Thursday July 26

INVESTMENT UP/ATTENDANCE DOWN: A new study of arts support in the UK says “the percentage of adults attending arts events was either static or falling across plays, opera, ballet, contemporary dance, jazz, classical music and art galleries.” This despite massive public funding of cultural activities. “The report estimated public funding of the cultural sector in 1998-99 at £5.2 billion, a 10% rise on the last study in 1993-94. The Guardian (UK) 07/26/01

PUT A METER ON THAT JUKEBOX: “The US is set to compensate European songwriters and composers for millions of pounds worth of lost revenue. The musicians have won their fight against a US law which let bars and grills avoid paying royalties for playing their music on TV or radio. Music groups have estimated royalty losses at $27m a year. ” BBC 07/26/01

ARTS-PLATED: Several American states are raising money for the arts by selling arts-themed car license plates. California has sold 79,000 arts licenses since 1994, raising $4.2 million. Indiana, Texas and Florida have also been successful. “The Texas arts plate is the best-selling specialty plate in Texas in a field of more than 100.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch 07/25/01

CRASHING THE SENATE: The U.S. Senate was all set for another of their famous hearings on the way that popular music and, specifically, hip-hop are destroying the moral fabric of the nation, staining the minds of our children, and just generally leading the entire country down the road to ruin. (And it’s not even an election year!) But the sanctimony took a distinct dive once an actual, uninvited purveyor of rap music showed up to speak. Nando Times (AP) 07/25/01

Wednesday July 25

ART IN FASHION: “Can fashion — by nature both ephemeral and functional — be on a par with fine art? Can an ad campaign be counted as culture?” London dealer Jay Jopling has recycled photographs seen in ads in magazines and made a show of them in his gallery. The Times (UK) 07/25/01

TAKING THE TEMPERATURE OF AMERICA’S PERFORMING ARTS: What is the state of the performing arts in America at the turn of the century? A new Rand study takes a look. “After decades of expansion, how are performing arts organizations faring? Has demand for live performances been increasing or decreasing? Are more Americans choosing the performing arts as a profession? And what is the likely effect of the Internet on the arts?” [The complete report is online] Rand 07/01

LOW AUDIENCE & LOW ACCOUNTABILITY: “New research suggests that arts audiences are declining, despite record levels of public funding. A report, compiled by a team of 25 experts over two years, looked at film, libraries, heritage buildings, literature, the arts and public broadcasting. . . The 600-page report, by the think-tank The Policy Studies Institute (PSI), also said that publicly funded bodies in the arts are failing to account for how their grants are spent.” BBC 07/25/01

RISK AVERSE: After unexpectedly losing $1.2 million on last year’s Adelaide Festival, organizers seriously considered abandoning director Peter Sellars’ controversial plans for next years festival. But “it was judged to be too damaging to the festival’s image to walk away at this late stage.” Sydney Morning Herald 07/25/01

DO VIRTUAL ACTORS HAVE TO PAY UNION DUES? The furor that has erupted over the computer-generated “Final Fantasy” film has been almost comical in its hysteria. No less venerable a personage than Tom Hanks has voiced his concern that virtual actors might someday replace flesh-and-bone thespians, and the Screen Actors Guild has been shrilling its objections ever since the mediocre film’s release. But the man behind the computer magic laughs at the notion that his creations could ever do what human actors can. The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 07/25/01

AOL COULD BUY AMAZON: “AOL Time Warner would be allowed to propose a takeover bid for Amazon.com — as long as it did so quietly — under the terms of a $100 million investment AOL made in Amazon Monday. According to records filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and reported by Dow Jones Newswires, AOL could propose a buyout, but not publicly and not without the approval of Amazon.com.” The New York Times (AP) 07/25/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Tuesday July 24

OF ARTS FUNDING AND MEDICAL RESEARCH: “Dear friends, you made a deal with the devil. You knew they were narrow-minded and stupid when you took their money. You made a deal with the devil. You probably wrote a play about how evil the devil was in Vietnam or Nicaragua or Waco. Now the devil acts like the devil. There is a solution: Don’t take the money. Alas, the government has made cash junkies of too many people and institutions, and there’s nothing more hypocritical than the whining of a junkie.” San Francisco Chronicle 07/24/01

FUNDING VISUAL ARTISTS: Last year Australia’s performing arts got a $43 million boost in funding by the government after a study documented need. Now the country’s visual artists are hoping a newly announced study will give the same bump in funding for the visual arts. Sydney Morning Herald 07/24/01

  • WHY DISPARITY? Federal inquiry will try to find out “why visual artists and craftspeople are among the lowest income earners in the country and among the lowest paid of all artists.” The Age (Melbourne) 07/24/01

THE VICTORIAN COPYRIGHT SOLUTION: So you think our battles over copyright are something new? Some 160 years ago Charles Dickens was crusading over the value of copyright. In the days before copyright was universal, publishers in America were ripping off Dickens and other authors with impunity. Industry Standard 07/23/01

Monday July 23

CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE: A major new study of 30-year trends among American arts organizations says that while small and large arts organizations are doing well, mid-size groups are in peril. The New York Times 07/23/01 (one-time registration required for access)

HANDICAPPING THE NEA: Speculation in the press about who George Bush might appoint as the next chair of the National Endowment for the Arts has intensified. Does this mean a decision is near? The Idler handicaps the field. The Idler 07/23/01

THE RATINGS GAME: Music producers haven’t done enough to keep violent material out of the hands of children, a US House subcommittee reported Friday. But movie and video game makers have made some progress. “A final FTC report on the effectiveness of the entertainment industry’s restrictions on explicit material is due this fall.” Dallas Morning News 07/22/01

THE MAGIC OF SCIENCE: “Have we entered an era in which mind-sizzling technological leaps – virtual reality, genetically altered rabbits that glow in the dark, digital actors, laboratory animals bred to grow human organs, stock-trading in your back yard, clones – are now so common that even respected members of the scientific world are finding it increasingly difficult to separate miracles, magic, myths and madness?” Washington Post 07/23/01

HOW WE SPEAK: “Language is not living, not growing, and not a thing; it is a vast system of social habits and conventions, inherited from our forebears, and showing every sign of being an artifact rather than an organic growth.” Vocabula.com 07/01

Friday July 20

SECOND SALES: European governments have agreed to give artists a share of subsequent sales of their work. “Authors of works of art will receive a royalty of up to 4% every time their original paintings, sculptures, or other artistic treasures are sold on by agents or at auction in Britain or anywhere else in the EU.” But the provision won’t kick in until 2012. BBC 07/20/01

Thursday July 19

LEGALLY BINDING: “Artists’ rights in the U.S. are still pretty shoddy today. Artists have many more legal recourses and protections now, but mostly America’s laws regarding artists continue to reflect our national attitude toward artists: These are weird, potentially dangerous people who often care less about money than is acceptable. That’s true whether you’re a painter, writer, cartoonist, songwriter, director, dancer, or anyone else who’s trying to create something you want other people to see or hear. Business is our national art form, and business is deeply suspicious of art. So is our court system.” LAWeekly 07/18/01

A REASON TO GIVE: “Many corporations confuse philanthropy with advertising. Until the federal government put a stop to their contributions, the most generous corporate arts patrons in Canada were the tobacco companies – because they could not advertise and regarded sponsorships as the next-best thing. It is because of that corporate confusion that we need government funding of the arts, funding that is awarded to artists on the merits of their past achievements and future proposals by knowledgeable juries set up by arms-length arts councils. No system is perfect, but that formula tends to build the arts – rather than corporate profits or political egos.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 07/19/01

THE GM SMITHSONIAN? The Smithsonian, criticized recently for giving large donors major influence over projects they have funded, is in negotiations with General Motors for a $10 million contribution to “expedite a major exhibition called America on the Move and allow the museum to redo its sprawling transportation hall, which hasn’t been refurbished since the museum opened in 1964.” Washington Post 07/19/01

Wednesday July 18

GREAT HANDEL’S GHOST! Workers preparing to turn a house where Handel once lived into a museum say they have seen ghosts in the house. So they’ve ordered up an exorcism. “We weren’t sure whether having a ghost would attract or deter customers, but with all the valuable objects we have coming into the house we felt it might be safer to get rid of it.” Sydney Morning Herald 07/18/01

WHY LIBERAL ARTS MATTER: “The liberal arts have been ravaged by managers, government officials, and taxpayers looking for ‘measurable’ results. But all such measures in our era are inextricably linked to corporate bottom lines. And few things could be more inimical to the spirit of liberal arts than to turn education in philosophy, sociology, and history into a seamless fit for corporate career climbing.” Christian Science Monitor 07/17/01

OWNING HISTORY: “As the years lengthen and survivors die off, the memory of the Holocaust is increasingly embodied in written accounts and artifacts. But who owns this physical evidence?” The New York Times 07/18/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Tuesday July 17

MORE CENTRALIZED ARTS: The British government is restructuring the Arts Council of England. “The new body will combine the Arts Council and the ten Regional Arts Boards, saving up to £10 million a year from the £36 million operating costs.” The savings will be distributed directly to artists, but some critics worry that a centralized organization will diminish regional flavor. The Times (UK) 07/17/01

RAVING MAD: A number of cities are moving to shut down all-night rave parties, citing them as “one-night-only parties…often held in warehouses or secret locations where people pay to dance, do drugs, play loud music, and engage in random sex acts.” Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daly: “They are after all our children. Parents should be outraged.” Reason 07/16/01

Monday July 16

PROMOTING GERMAN CULTURE: Germany’s Goethe Institute is 50 years old. “With some 3,000 staff members, 2,350 of whom work abroad, the 126 affiliates scattered throughout 76 different countries not only teach German, but also endeavor to export at least some sense of what intellectual and cultural life in Germany is all about.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 07/16/01

Sunday July 15

DON’T JUST MAKE NICE: About the only public words George Bush has spoken about the arts was last month at Ford’s Theatre, when he quoted Lincoln: “Some think I do wrong to go to the opera and the theater. But it rests me. A hearty laugh relieves me and I seem better after it to bear my cross.” So there it is – fun, amusing, a diversion. Certainly that’s the conservative vision of art, and one that attracts public funding in the US these days. But isn’t it possible that “going to the theater, despite Bush’s quotation of Lincoln, might be something more than a way to get some rest?” Los Angeles Times 07/15/01

HOW TO EXPLAIN? “We talk about art – and write about art – so poorly. If you eliminated all the easy, lazy superlatives – beautiful, wonderful, powerful, amazing, incredible – from use in any context relating to art, the silence would be deafening. People would stare at each other and stammer and gesticulate, and feel utterly at a loss to describe what they just experienced. This is all the more a problem when the art form, such as music or dance, has no verbal element.” Washington Post 07/15/01

Friday July 13

THE NEXT NEA CHIEF? Who will President Bush appoint as the next chair of the National Endowment for the Arts? There is lots of speculation, but some arts advocates are urging Bush to appoint a businessperson with an interest in the arts rather than an artist or arts administrator. Washington Post 07/13/01

  • THE NEW YORK LOBBY: New York Republican state senator Roy Goodman is said to be lobbying hard for the job. He has many advocates in the New York cultural world, but conservative Republicans are fighting against his nomination. The New York Times 07/13/01 (one-time registration required for access)

STOLEN LIABILITY? A man sends a note to the Museum Security Network alleging that a California woman has a stockpile of art looted by the Nazis. The MSN, published in the Netherlands, publishes the allegations in its newsletter. The charges were false, and now the target of the allegations is suing. How much responsibility does the small internet site bear? Salon 07/13/01

Thursday July 12

THE SMITHSONIAN TRIES TO BALANCE AUTONOMY AND FUND-RAISING: “At issue is money and influence, and whether the Smithsonian, in securing the largesse of multimillionaires, has ceded intellectual control to donors. Cash-strapped museum directors around the country, striving to meet the demands of a growing public, are closely watching how the institution reconciles its needs and traditions with donors’ desires.” Minneapolis Star-Tribune 07/12/01

Wednesday July 11

WHAT HAPPENED TO “FOR THE GOOD OF MANKIND?” The author who was first responsible for shining the international spotlight on the issue of looted Nazi artworks now in the hands of private collectors is suing the family of a French art dealer whom he assisted in recovering several paintings. Hector Feliciano claims he was “deprived of a finder’s fee.” The New York Times 07/11/01 (one-time registration required for access)

ORGANIZED LEARNING: This is the year of the T.A. (teaching assistant). At universities all over the US, TA’s are forming unions and demanding better conditions. But “while the movement is gaining strength – nearly 40,000 graduate students are now union members – administrations are hardly rolling over.” Chronicle of Higher Education 07/09/01

PHILLY HALL ALMOST PAID FOR: “With a $2 million conditional pledge from the Kresge Foundation, the campaign to build [Philadelphia’s] Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts has reached $254 million – or almost 96 percent of a $265 million goal.” Philadelphia Inquirer 07/11/01

Tuesday July 10

ONE GREENBERG = A THOUSAND TASINIS: A US Court of Appeals has ruled that “the National Geographic Society violated the copyrights of freelance photographer Jerry Greenberg by republishing his photos on a CD-ROM set without his permission.” The Society plans to appeal to the Supreme Court, arguing that their CD is a digital replica, not a republication; therefore, this case is unlike the recent Tasini suit, in which the Supreme Court ruled in favor of free-lance writers. Wired 07/09/01

FINDER’S FEE: Author Hector Feliciano, who wrote a book about art thefts by the Nazis, is suing the estate of dealer Paul Rosenberg for $6.8 million, a “17.5% fee based on ‘the standards of the art industry for the recovery of works of art,’ and is applied to a value of $39 million worth of paintings which Mr Feliciano says he helped recover through extensive work ‘under the promise to be paid’.” The Art Newspaper 07/08/01

Monday July 9

CENSORING STUDENT ART: A Texas art teacher has filed a lawsuit against the administration of the school that fired him last year after he defended the work of some of his pupils. The controversy arose from a mural painted by students which depicted, among many other images, two men kissing. Despite a unanimous vote of support for the mural from the school’s faculty, the school’s administrator had the wall with the mural whitewashed, and fired the art teacher after he publicly stood up for his students. Dallas Morning News 07/09/01

Sunday July 8

WATCH OUT FOR SERGEANT EBERT: It’s known as boot camp for critics. But the O’Neill Critics Institute is much more than a drill session for the folks who review the nation’s performers. “The mission of the OCI is to raise the level of American film and theater reviewing – and cultivate the skills of individual critics – by plunging arts-minded journalists into an intensive summer of viewing, thinking, discussing, and writing, writing, writing.” Nando Times (Christian Science Monitor Service) 07/07/01

CANADIAN CHARISMA: Sotheby’s, it can safely be said, has had a truly bad year. Price-fixing scandals, disappointing auctions, and general chaos have plagued the auction house in recent months. But in Canada, the local Sotheby’s has new leadership in the form of a couple of aging art enthusiasts with limited auction experience, but an undeniable passion for art collection. The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 07/07/01

BARENBOIM DEFIES WAGNER TABOO: Richard Wagner was a celebrated composer, a brilliant musician, and a vicious anti-Semite whose writings excoriating Jews were often invoked after his death by the leaders of Germany’s Third Reich. Understandably, the nation of Israel has never been particularly interested in having Wagner’s music performed there, although the unofficial ban has faced intense opposition in recent years. But this weekend, conductor Daniel Barenboim shocked concertgoers by leading the Berlin Staatskapelle in a surprise encore from “Tristan and Isolde.” BBC 07/08/01

  • MAYOR THREATENS BARENBOIM BAN: “[Jerusalem] Mayor Ehud Olmert said the city will have to re-examine its relations with world-renowned conductor Daniel Barenboim after he performed the music of Richard Wagner, Adolf Hitler’s favorite composer, at the Israel Festival on Saturday night. ‘What Barenboim did was brazen, arrogant, uncivilized and insensitive,’ Olmert told Israel’s army radio.” Nando Times (AP) 07/08/01

Friday July 6

STATE OF INDIANA V. GAY CHRIST: “A group hoping to block performances of a college play featuring a gay Christ-like character filed a lawsuit in federal court Thursday. The play features a character named Joshua who is growing up gay in modern-day Texas. The story parallels parts of the Gospels, and some of the 12 other male characters bear the names of Christ’s disciples.” Nando Times (AP) 07/05/01

ALL ABOUT THE TOOLS: “Will new media art be limited and shaped by the commercial software usually used to created it? Or by the conventional Web site and interface formats that predominate among artworks online?” MediaChannel 07/01

Thursday July 5

ENGAGING THE INTELLECT: “When was the last time a political party produced an unashamedly intellectual document which dared to use big words and invited debate and critique before decisions on priorities and how to pay for them were made?” Australia’s Barry Jones has put up such a platform. So how come the media are sniggering? Sydney Morning Herald 07/05/01

POINTING OUT THE PROBLEM: For more than two decades, Boston’s Fort Point neighborhood has been home to the largest concentration of artists in New England. But rising rents and real estate costs are forcing artists and galleries out at an alarming rate. Tired of waiting for the city to do something, a handful of artists have put their message where their art is, and taken the cause public. Boston Herald 07/05/01

Wednesday July 4

AMERICA’S BEST ARTISTS: No kidding. These are the best, certified by Time magazine. The best young classical musician, Hilary Hahn; best playwright, August Wilson; best novelist, Philip Roth; best movie director, Ang Lee; best artist, Martin Puryear; best architect, Steven Holl; best actor, Sean Penn; best Broadway director, Susan StromanTime also lists the best rapper, best clown, best talk show host, etc. Your milege may vary. Void where prohibited by law. CNN 07/04/01

I’D RATHER BE IN PHILADELPHIA (FINALLY): Even cities with well-established arts activity can be dazzled by the potential a new performing arts center promises. Philadelphia may have prominent home-grown talent and a busy art community, but for many years hasn’t had a place to bring out-of-town performers. The new Kimmel Center promises to change all that. Philadelphia Inquirer 07/03/01

Tuesday July 3

BOUGHT AND PAID FOR: “How much corporate sponsorship is too much? As the Government stages a tactical retreat on the arts funding front, the business dollar has flown in to fill the void, funding everything from the purchase of a rare $650,000 Guadagnini violin for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra to the sponsorship of instruments, chairs, artists, performances, costumes and soloists. Sydney Morning Herald 07/03/01

ENGLAND’S NEW CULTURE MINISTER: “Tessa Jowell moves quickly to dispel any notion that she will be the sort of culture minister who can’t quite remember whether Jackson Pollock is a merchant bank or a heavyweight boxer. ‘I believe passionately in our artistic heritage, in investment in the arts, in opening access to great art for the widest range of people,’ she trills, as if reciting the Creed in St Tony’s Parish Church.” The Times (UK) 07/03/01

Monday July 2

STRUGGLING FOR THE SOUL OF A TOWN: “A proposal for a huge new cement plant, in a town where cement-making roots run deep — but where art galleries and antiques shops drive the new economy — has deeply divided Hudson along lines of class, culture and, to no small degree, aesthetics. Would the plant destroy the town’s charm, and so too its emerging tourist economy, or would the return of big cement be a restoration, a sign that old heavy-industry Hudson is on its way back?” The New York Times 06/30/01 (one-time registration required for access)

THE DEVIL AND THE MILLIONAIRE: Who Wants to be a Millionaire is popular in Egypt, as it is everywhere. But now the Supreme Mufti’s office in Cairo has issued a fatwa, or religious edict, calling the game show sinful and a form of gambling. The fatwa quotes from a verse in the Holy Koran which calls on all Muslims to avoid gambling as an abomination and Satan’s handiwork. BBC 07/02/01

Sunday July 1

“THIS WASN’T SUPPOSED TO BE WAR”: When Patti Hartigan began covering the arts for New England’s leading newspaper in 1990, she didn’t expect the firestorm that was about to descend on the heads of artists and their supporters. But ten years after the Congressional dust-ups over Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, and federal arts funding in general, the echoes of what became a full-fledged culture war still resound. The American arts world has changed immeasurably in the last decade, and countless artists and organizations have long since given up trying to get public support for their work. The next ten years will tell much about what remains of America’s commitment to art, but they could never be as telling as the last ten. Boston Globe 07/01/01

STRIKE HAS AN IMPACT: “Two exhibitions scheduled for this summer at the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography have been postponed indefinitely because of the continuing strike by workers at that museum and its parent organization, the National Gallery of Canada.” Ottawa Citizen 07/01/01

Visual: July 2001

Monday July 31

  • I LEFT MY ART IN SAN FRANCISCO (AT GATE B-2): Thanks to San Francisco’s percent-for-art ordinance, $11.1 million of the $840 million main terminal expansion project will go to commissioning original artwork in the airport. Sponsored by the San Francisco Public Art Commission, many of the works deal with “the romance of travel, with themes such as meeting and greeting loved ones, saying goodbye, facing the unknown and the technology of flight.” San Jose Mercury News 07/31/00
  • VIRTUAL ART FLEA MARKET: What kind of art can you buy online these days? “Curious about the growing and radical phenomenon by which people are buying art they can’t see from sellers they can’t see, I decided to shop for art online and assemble my own art collection. My budget: an even $1,000.” New York Times 07/31/00 (one-time registration required for entry)
  • PAINTING THE ROYALS: For only the second time ever, the British Royal Family has its portrait painted as a group (in honor of the Queen Mum’s 100th birthday). “It soon became clear it would be impossible for six people with engagement diaries as full as those of his sitters to pose together. Therefore, he was obliged to draw them separately.” The Telegraph (London) 07/31/00
  • ALWAYS SIGN THAT CONTRACT: A competition to design Sydney’s new Museum of Contemporary Art prompted confusion from the Japanese architect who thought she had been the job three years ago. Instead she got this reply: “I am concerned that Sejima does not know. If she is not being proceeded with, I think she should be encouraged not to abandon Australia altogether and perhaps consider the invitation to continue with a different employer.” Sydney Morning Herald 07/31/00
  • NAKED ART: “Performance artists” Yuan Cai and Jian Ji Xi walked naked across London’s Westminster Bridge with slogans written all over their bodies. The pair last “performed at the Tate earlier this year when they jumped onto Tracey Emin’s bed. BBC 07/31/00

Sunday July 30

  • OUTSIDE THE BOOM: London’s museums are booming these days. But outside the capital it’s quite a different story. “It is no secret that many of our large regional museums – Bristol, Exeter, Cheltenham, Leeds, Leicester and, most important of all, Glasgow – are in serious financial difficulties, as indeed are many university museums.” The Telegraph (London) 07/30/00
  • ONLINE ART REVOLUTION STALLS: It’s been about a year since the online art-selling companies launched in a big way, promising to revolutionize the way is sold. How’s business? “Looking back one year later, that boat looks something like the Titanic: imposing but doomed.” Auctionwatch.com (Art & Auction Magazine) 08/28/00
  • THE REBIRTH OF ART: “All over London, the words ‘make it new’ have lately been applied to museums.” Art has the new buzz of the 21st Century. New York Times 07/30/00 (one-time registration required for entry)

Friday July 28

  • ON BOARD AT THE KIMBELL: Fort Worth’s Kimbell Museum has a stellar collection and reputation. But two of its board members have managed to pocket a rather large share of the museum’s money, paying themselves about $1.5 million a year for their board services. “At $750,000 and $747,000 each, as reported on the private foundation’s 1998 tax return, the Fortsons are paying themselves far more than they pay their museum director. They list their hours on the job as ‘full time’ even though they have a full-time and well-paid director in Potts, and Ben runs an oil business (albeit one that’s not doing too well these days).” FW Weekly 07/27/00
  • FLORENTINE DILEMMA: Discovery of a long-hidden Leonardo fresco behind a Vasari painting in the Palazzo Vecchio has  put Florence’s art solons in a difficult spot. “Councillor for culture, Rosa di Giorgi, is not planning to rip the later fresco off the wall without strong evidence that the Leonardo is in good condition, for as she said ‘Vasari may not have been Leonardo, but he is still Vasari’.” The Art Newspaper 07/28/00
  • GONE TO THE DOGS (ER, COWS?): The most visible art in New York this summer is of the animal kind – from the Koons giant dog to cows on parade. New York Times 07/28/00 (one-time registration required for entry)

Thursday July 27

  • THE “MIGHTY HANDBAG”? London’s Victoria and Albert Museum has seen a dramatic fall-off in attendance in recent decades and it’s been overshadowed by the city’s other museums. Now it’s being criticized for its plans for a dramatic £80 million extension designed by Daniel Libeskind. One critic likens Libeskind’s revolutionary design to “the Guggenheim in Bilbao turned on its side and then beaten senseless with a hammer” (it is nothing of the sort)” Other “stick-in-the-muds will feel all the more justified in their belief that the V&A will be, as Dorment puts it, ‘visually raped’.” The Guardian (London) 07/27/00
  • THIS IS A PROBLEM? The Guerrilla Girls – those champions of getting women some power in the artworld – come to Philadelphia. “There’s just one problem. More so than probably any city in the country, Philadelphia has an art world run by women.” Philadelphia Inquirer 07/27/00
  • KNOW YOUR CLIENT: In the late 19th Century one of the greatest forgers of antiquities set up shop in Jerusalem. “The late 19th century was the beginning of modern tourism, following the invention of steamships, and it was also the beginning of archaeology. Wilhelm Moses Shapira was the first to recognize that archaeology could be a profitable business.” His career was derailed when he attempted to sell the British Museum what he claimed to be ancient Torah scrolls, and was exposed as a fraud. He killed himself soon after. The Jerusalem Report 07/31/00
  • APOLITICAL COWS ONLY: A federal US judge has allowed the rejection of a decorated art cow proposed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). The animal rights group wanted to enter its cow – bearing anti-meat messages – from New York’s art-cow parade currently on view in the city. Yahoo! (Reuters) 07/16/00
  • THE LOST CITIES: The waters of Abu Qir, off Egypt are yielding amazing archeological treasures this summer. “A team of French underwater archaeologists working in conjunction with the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) has uncovered two sunken cities, believed to be the legendary Herakleion and Menouthis. ‘This city is absolutely untouched. It’s the first time it has been seen, that somebody could dive on it. You can see that everything remains as it was.’ ” Egypt Today 07/00
  • RESTORING THE TAJ’S GARDEN: A garden that flourished 350 years ago when India’s Taj Mahal was built may be rebuilt as a way of protecting the Taj from development. The big question is: what exactly, did the garden grow? Chicago Tribune (NY Times News Service) 07/27/00

Wednesday July 26

  • COMBATING LOOTED ART: A committee of MPs in the English Parliament proposed laws yesterday to make it a criminal offense to trade in looted artifacts and stolen artwork. The move is to combat the growing illicit market for illegally exported objects, estimated at between £150 million and £2 billion a year. Suggested measures included setting up a national database of stolen art, expediting legislation to facilitate the return of Nazi-looted art, and allowing museum trustees to return human remains on display in British museums. The Guardian (London) 07/26/00
    • NEED HELP: “At present, there are no import controls on cultural property entering Britain unless they are subject to other controls, for example in relation to firearms – a position that many in the museums trade find untenable.” The Independent (London) 07/26/00

Tuesday July 25

  • ROCKWELL REVISITED: While he was wildly successful as a commercial illustrator, Norman Rockwell was almost universally dismissed in his day as a shallow artist. So what are we to make of the current campaign to rehabilitate his reputation as a painter? “The present attempt to add Rockwell to the canon of American art is almost exclusively the work of critics. It is not the artists who have adopted Rockwell, but museum directors, curators, and writers on art.” New York Review of Books 08/10/00 

Monday July 24

  • A LITTLE-KNOWN PICASSO MUSEUM north of Madrid has sixty of the master’s artworks – all of which were donated by Eugenio Arias, the Spanish barber who cut Picasso’s hair for 26 years while both men lived in the south of France. It pays to barter – Arias always took his payments in trade. The Age (Melbourne) 07/24/00 (AP)
  • A HISTORY OF LOOKING AT SCULPTURE: “Most modern sculpture – and its sidekick, installation – occupies space in a quite aggressive way.” Historically, sculpture didn’t always do that. “From the Renaissance until the 19th century, statues tended to be placed flat against walls or in niches that neatly framed them. Viewers were expected to contemplate them from a relatively fixed position, as if they were pictures.” New Statesman 07/24/00
  • ART IN PUBS? The chairman of Britain’s Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries says British museums need to loosen up. “Pointing out that museums across the country have an average of 75 per cent of objects in store, he advised them to be ‘less precious’ about deaccessioning. Lord Evans congratulated the Museum of London, which has given boxes of Roman artifacts to primary schools. In answer to a query about his earlier suggestion that museums should lend to pubs, he argued that this might sometimes be appropriate for sturdy objects, such as agricultural equipment (“but not Canalettos”, he quickly added).” The Art Newspaper 07/23/00
  • EMBASSY ENVY: Why do embassies have a way of always bringing out the worst in architects? Britain’s newest embassies in Berlin and Moscow are leaving critics (not to mention the Queen) numb. “What is it that makes these buildings second rate? Is it the architects’ failure of nerve, or the clients’ desire for nothing too difficult or arty? Is it a bout of poet laureate syndrome when faced with designing for Britain?” The Guardian (London) 07/24/00

Sunday July 23

  • HERE FOR THE TINTORETTO: A Tintoretto painting is discovered in small town Pennsylvania. “From an art-historical standpoint, the discovery of the Tintoretto in Wernersville is not quite as significant as the discovery of Caravaggio’s “Taking of Christ” in a Jesuit residence in Dublin in 1990. Yet the story of the Tintoretto painting is intriguing and involves several figures of ecclesiastical and historical prominence.” New York Times 07/23/00 (one-time registration required for entry)
  • VISITING DANIEL LIBESKIND: Libeskind’s proposal of a crumpled spiral addition between the thoroughly Victorian buildings of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum was something of a scandal when it was unveiled in 1996. Now it looks like it may compete with the Bilbao Guggenheim for attention.” The Telegraph (London) 07/23/00
  • A NEW KIND OF LIBRARY: Rem Koolhaas’s design for a new Seattle Public Library has people talking. “The library is an audacious reworking of the conventional library, that archaic monument to civic glory.” Los Angeles Times 07/23/00
  • ALL ROADS LEAD TO THE BLOB? “Computer technology is rapidly changing the environment for architects as well as for businesses and nations. How are they adapting to it? In what form will architecture survive?” New York Times 07/23/00 (one-time registration required for entry)

Friday July 21

  • GOING FOR VAN GOGH: “In the last decade, according to an ARTnews survey of scholars, museum curators, and art dealers in Europe and the United States, suspicions about fake van Goghs have tainted some of the most expensive paintings in the world, including the Yasuda ‘Sunflowers’, purchased in 1987 by the Yasuda Fire and Marine Insurance Company of Japan for $39.9 million, at the time the highest sum ever paid for a work of art.” ArtNews 07/00
  • SERIOUS ABOUT STOLEN ART: The World Jewish Congress says it will step up its efforts to recover artwork stolen by the Nazis and never returned to rightful owners. “The WJC says it plans to claim thousands of works of art from American museums using lists that were made by the U.S. Army after the Second World War.” CBC 07/20/00
  • THE ANNUAL ARTNEWS LIST of the world’s biggest collectors of art is out. “The market is very much dominated by Americans. What’s especially healthy is that the whole speculative element of the ’80s is gone. Now the buyers want to keep the works. They’re not going into bank vaults.” ArtNews 07/00
  • DON’T BE DISSING GRANDPA: Turns out Stalin’s 28-year-old grandson is an artist – a painter – and judged a good one by those who have seen his work in London and Glasgow. Just one problem – what about those views of history he’s all too happy to share? “Stalin was a truly great man,” he says. “He was a great ruler like Napoleon, Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar. He cannot be erased as if he did not exist. I do not like it when people pretend he did not really happen in history.” The Times (London) 07/21/00
  • SOME FUTURE: Venice’s Architecture Biennale is imagining the future. “The theme of this year’s exposition is the deep sense of disorder affecting a society in rapid transformation, where the architect’s reference points have been changed completely.” Wired 07/20/00

Thursday July 20

  • READ THIS IN CZECH AND GET IN CHEAP: Several Prague museums charge foreigners between two and five times more for admission than they do local Czechs. The practice is against rules of the European Union and officially discouraged. But special signs written only in Czech signal that discounts are available. Prague Post 07/20/00
  • FINDERS, KEEPERS… In a victory for all museums hoping to borrow works of art from foreign museums, a federal judge has ruled that the U.S. government cannot force Austria’s Leopold Museum to forfeit an Egon Schiele painting that’s been proven to have been stolen from a Jewish family by the Nazis. On loan to New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the painting had been seized in September under a new state law allowing prosecutors to seize artwork on display while its provenance is under investigation. MSNBC 07/19/00
  • HAVING A COW: Improbably, the 300-plus decorated cows that spent last summer on display throughout downtown Chicago raised some $3.5 million when they were auctioned off for charity. So much money was raised, the decorated fibreglass animals-on-parade thing has swept dozens of other cities this summer. Just what became of the Chicago art-cows that were sold last summer? Chicago Tribune 07/20/00
  • RECORD YEAR FOR MINNEAPOLIS MUSEUMS: The Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts had record attendance this year. Shows of Andy Warhol drawings and Man Ray photos ranked “in the top 10 in all-time attendance” at the Walker. Minneapolis Star-Tribune 07/20/00

Wednesday July 19

  • THE RIGHT RUN MUSEUM: Metropolitan Museum director Philippe de Montebello sits down with Anna Somers Cocks to talk about the changing roles of curators, museums and collecting art. “We have a pretty good sense what people want in the museum.” The Art Newspaper 07/19/00
  • CUSTOMS AGENTS WHO AREN’T ART EXPERTS: The export of art – any art – out of St. Petersburg, Russia has stopped because customs officials at the airport there say the value of artwork leaving is too difficult to determine and therefore too tough to figure the taxes owed. St. Petersburg Times (Russia) 07/18/00
  • ARCHITECTURE’S BEST POLITICAL FRIEND? In his 24 years in Congress, Patrick Moynihan helped allocate billions of dollars to important building projects. He helped create the Pennsylvania Avenue Redevelopment Corporation, save Walt Whitman’s Long Island birthplace, and restore New York City’s Grand Central Station. But his crowning project is getting underway just as he is retiring from the US Senate – the conversion of New York’s Central Post Office building to the new Pennsylvania Station. Architecture Magazine 07/00

Tuesday July 18

  • IN THIS CORNER LEONARDO… Experts believe they have discovered a long-lost Leonardo fresco on a wall in in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio. Problem is, there may be another wall in front of it with a Vasari fresco on it. Scientists are using thermographics to pinpoint the Leonardo, but if it’s really there and in good shape do you remove the Vasari in front of it? The Age (The Telegraph) 07/18/00
  • PLAYING WITH THE RULES: Britain has rebuilt its embassy in Berlin now that the capital has moved back there. But Hans Stimmann, Berlin’s chief architect laid down very conservative architectural rules (no wonder Norman Foster dropped out of considering the project). The structure that has emerged, however, ” pays formal lip-service to Stimmann’s concerns but then deliberately subverts them by cutting a great hole in the centre of the façade and projecting through it an angular glass box and purple drum.” The Telegraph (London) 07/18/00
  • VALENCIA’S MULTI-BILLION-DOLLAR INVESTMENT IN CULTURE: The Spanish city of Valencia is building Europe’s most ambitious millennium project. “At an all-in cost of £2 billion the project eclipses the Dome in Greenwich and even the Getty in Los Angeles. The prodigious investment provides Valencia with a spectacular new Science Museum, an IMAX cinema, a music school, a magnificent new 1,800-seat opera house, seven kilometres of promenades and two streamlined road bridges.” The Times (London) 07/18/00
  • MORE OBJECTIONS TO WWII MEMORIAL: National Park Service studies show that the site of a proposed $100 million memorial to veterans of the Second World War on the Mall in Washington DC is part of the historic grounds of the Lincoln Memorial. Washington Post (LA Times) 07/18/00

Monday July 17

  • GAMBLING ON ART: The Bellagio Hotel may have closed its art gallery and sold the art, but maybe the peripatetic Guggenheim believes in the culture of Las Vegas? Reportedly, the Venetian Hotel is talking with the Goog about building a branch next to the hotel. The museum is already sending a show to Las Vegas next year. Meanwhile, the Philips Collection is negotiating with the Bellagio. “I think Las Vegas could use a little culture.” The Times of India (AP) 07/17/00
  • HERITAGE ON SALE: The theft and destruction of Cambodian artifacts is massive. Reporters come across a man in the jungle selling green ceramic bowls. “They were 1,000-years old and from a kiln on top of the mountain. The seller wanted 10,000 riels for each bowl – a mere $2.50. We asked the seller whether he was afraid of breaking the law, and he said he didn’t know there was any law. He had just dug them up in the jungle.” Time Asia 07/12/00
  • BUILDING ON ART: Shanghai is in the midst of a massive rebuilding effort trying to regain its center as the intellectual capital of China. And what about art? “A prickly individualism means Shanghai artists never banded together like those in Beijing, so what ‘art scene’ there is lies on the fringes of a more generalized underground. Artnet.com 07/14/00
  • BEAR WITNESS: In recent years numerous museums and exhibitions commemorating the Holocaust have sprung up. But some argue that attempts to represent the Holocaust falsify it, making it an aesthetic rather than a history. “On the other hand, however uncomfortable academics may be with some of the popular representations of the Holocaust, few would question that films such as ‘Schindler’s List’ and ‘Life is Beautiful’ have done more to raise public awareness of the Holocaust than a thousand scholarly tomes.” New Statesman 07/17/00

Sunday July 16

  • THE ART OF COLLECTING: Collecting art for a museum is an “exhilarating, suspenseful, satisfying and frustrating” game. Some of the more interesting acquisitions come through unlikely means… Chicago Tribune 07/16/00 
  • ADDING ON TO DENVER: The Denver Art Museum wants to add to its building. But the challenge is how to make the $62 million addition fit in between its neighbors – the aggressively-profiled Gio Ponti main building and the Michael Graves-designed addition to the public library. Three finalists for the job present their ideas this week. Denver Post 07/16/00
  • NEW PROFILE FOR THE MENIL: People travel from all over to Houston to see the famed Menil Collection. But the museum has always thrived on being low profile. Now a new director and a new attitude. “Cab drivers don’t even know where we are. What’s wrong with publicizing the place? Maybe we’ll get twice as many people in the galleries, which may mean 30 instead of 15.” Dallas Morning News 07/16/00
  • REMEMBERING RUSKIN: What was it that made John Ruskin the greatest art and social critic of the Victorian age? A new book is great at exploring his life; less successful at capturing his rhetorical lightning. Boston Globe 07/16/00
  • NEW PLANS FOR BERLIN: The rebuilding of Berlin is apace. But the new structures are directed to fit into tradition, not reach for grand contemporary gestures. “But this is not the city that the Prussian monarchs built with the help of Karl Friedrich Schinkel; it is the product of developers led by Sony and Mercedes stumbling to fill the vacuum left by 50 years of uncertainty.” The Observer (London) 07/16/00

Friday July 14

  • WHY DOES ART COST WHAT IT COSTS? “Art has always been a cyclical market. This is hardly surprising: the products may be beautiful, but can rarely be considered essential and are often driven by fickle taste. According to art-sales-index.com, the value of paintings sold peaked in 1990 at $4.5 billion dollars. From there, economies around Europe and America shrank by less than one percent, but art sales collapsed to less than $1.5 billion in less than two years.” So what’s driving today’s prices? The Art Newspaper 07/14/00
  • VIRTUAL TATE: The Tate Modern takes to the internet with a commissioned piece that sets up a parallel Tate website universe. “Follow a link to the Tate Britain – a branch of the museum dedicated to 500 years of British art – and instead of grand Turner seascapes and Hogarth portraits, you’ll see close-ups of canvases collaged with mud, scabby skin, and baggy eyes.” Wired 07/14/00
  • TAX DISPUTE: The British Museum threatens to institute a £1 admission charge to compensate for taxes it loses on its operations. The British government threatens to reduce the museum’s support if admission is charged. The Art Newspaper 07/14/00

Thursday July 13

  • CULTURAL BUYBACK: Chinese artifacts have been leaked illegally to the West for years, ending up in museums and collections around the world. Now “the Shanghai Museum has been quietly buying back treasures from dealer showrooms, mainly in Hong Kong. Nearly one third of the museum’s famed collection of bronzes was acquired over the past 10 years through purchases and donations.” South China Morning Post 07/13/00
  • THE ART OF NAZI FINANCING: Did Chase Manhattan bank help the German ambassador to France steal Jewish-owned artwork during the Second World War? The World Jewish Congress thusly accused the bank on Wednesday, saying that according to a U.S. Treasury Department report, Chase’s French branch was actively aiding Nazi Germany in securing assets. “There is evidence that German assets were placed at Chase, which were used in transactions involving Jewish looted art.” Yahoo (Reuters) 07/12/00
  • TOXIC PARKECOLOGY: Who says parks have to be in beautiful idyllic places? Artist Julie Bargmann creates parks on land no one would ever call pretty – on the site of a befouled abandoned mine. “Its central feature will be a stream of acidic water that will percolate out of the mine and course down a limestone-lined canal into aerating basins and finally to a wetland for a final rinse.” Time 07/10/00
  • BUSY SIGNAL: Scotland is testing an ambitious new plan to make “information about almost every Scottish monument, museum exhibit or work of art available via mobile phones. All the background and trivia they ever wanted to know about a particular place or object will appear on the screens of their handsets.” BBC 07/13/00
  • FOUNDING FATHER: It’s been called Ontario’s longest-running “culture war.” A collector amassed a gallery of Group of Seven paintings and gave them to the province of Ontario in 1965. But gradually the patron was forced out of control of the collection, the gallery collected new work and became an important Canadian collection of contemporary art. Now the province’s premier wants to give control back to the patron and let him do away with the contemporary work. Critics are “going ballistic.” Toronto Globe and Mail 07/13/00
  • OUTLIVING ITS TIME: A statue erected 100 years ago of composer Stephen Foster in his hometown of Pittsburgh shows him with a slave sitting at his feet. Now a campaign to either remove or explain the statue. CNN 07/13/00 

Wednesday July 12

  • WALL RENOVATION: When the Berlin Wall came down 11 years ago, artists from around the world quickly covered what was left of the eastern side with more than 100 paintings, creating “the world’s longest open-air gallery.” Now that most of the artwork has deteriorated, city officials want the remaining wall torn down. But the artists have banded together to lobby for its restoration: “It is symbolic that when the wall fell the artists could paint in the east. It is necessary for a new generation to see this history of the division of the city.” ABC News (Reuters) 07/11/00
  • WHEN EVEN THE CAPITAL DECAMPS: “For almost 30 years, 420 Broadway served as Soho’s capital of contemporary art, headquarters for Leo Castelli, Ileana Sonnabend, and John Weber, as well as a string of other important dealers.” But with most of the important dealers having folded their tents and headed to Chelsea, now the building “stands empty, with demolition crews tearing out the ghosts of exhibitions past to make way for luxury co-ops.” Village Voice 07/11/00
  • RAINING ON THE COW PARADE: The 500 New York painted fiberglass cows and their “suburban cousins” in New Jersey and Connecticut won’t be off the streets until fall, when they’ll be auctioned off for charity. Here are seven reasons why that’s way too long a wait. New York Times 07/12/00 (one-time registration required for entry)
  • A TRUNK FULL OF ART: For years a Minneapolis woman guarded a trunk full of old photos taken before World War I without caring much what they were.  When she finally went searching for their history she was “rewarded with a family story that involves murder, prison, an earthquake, royalty, musicians and the photographer’s affair in Vienna with an Italian count.” Minneapolis Star-Tribune 07/12/00
  • NOW THERE’S A THESIS TOPIC FOR SOMEBODY: “In March, Christie’s Auction House of New York City unloaded all of the 60 paintings created by artists that happen also to be elephants, including Sao (a former log-hauler in Thailand’s timber industry), whose work was likened by Yale art historian Mia Fineman to work of Paul Gauguin for its ‘broad, gentle, curvy brush strokes’ and ‘a depth and maturity.’ Fineman said she is writing a book on the three distinct regional styles of Thai elephant art.” Cleveland Plain Dealer 07/12/00

Tuesday July 11

  • INSIDE JOB: At least 150 rare antiquarian books and artworks were stolen from the Japanese embassy in London, by the very man employed over the last three years to organize the valuable collection. Recovery will be difficult since the discovery came months after the collection had already been sold through auctions at Christie’s. Japan Times 07/11/00
  • ART IN PICTURES: Until very recently, photography in Russia was regarded as a documentary exercise rather than an artform. Now the Hermitage has appointed its first curator of photography, and the daunting task of sorting through thousands of photos – just to see what’s there – begins. Chicago Tribune 07/11/00
  • RESTORATION FOR THE REAL WORLD: The former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan is restoring Bukhara, a stop on the ancient ‘Silk Road’ trading route that became an Islamic center of learning. “Restorers desperately want to maintain the city’s vitality and avoid the mistakes that turned the historic center of Samarkand, a Silk Road city 150 miles to the east, into a gleaming, but lifeless museum piece.” CNN 07/10/00
  • HIRSHHORN’S NEW CURATOR: Washington’s Hirshhorn Museum picks a new chief curator –  Kerry Brougher, an American who is director of the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, England. Washington Post 07/11/00

Monday July 10

  • FROM PAPER TO THE REAL WORLD: He’s one of the world’s most celebrated architects, but so far he hasn’t had much built to show for it. Now Rem Koolhaas’s buildings are starting to pop up everywhere and he’s at the forefront of what has become “arguably the most exciting branch of culture.” New York Times Magazine 07/09/00
  • MASTERFUL SALES: Usually London is not where the major action in Old Master paintings is to be found. But last week’s sales racked up record after record. The Telegraph 07/10/00 
  • BEHIND THE BUBBLE: At a cost of $360 million, Beijing’s Grand National Opera House, now under construction, figured to be controversial. Its bubble shape and the fact it wasn’t designed by a Chinese architect makes for a triple whammy. But the real battle here is for the soul of the capital – protests erupt as old Beijing is cleared away to make room for the new. Washington Post 07/09/00 
  • GAUGUIN BY A HAIR? A New Zealand family contends it has a painting by Gauguin that the artist gave to one of their ancestors. Guaguin experts doubt the claim so the family is having four hairs embedded in the canvas tested for DNA to prove their case. Wired 07/10/00 

Sunday July 9

  • TOWERING AMBITIONS:“After a quarter of a century in which high-rise architecture was completely off the agenda, we have embarked on an unprecedented bout of skyscraper building. Cities determined to make their mark have decided that a crop of new towers, preferably as exhibitionistic as possible, is the way to get noticed. In urban-renewal projects, a conspicuous high rise is now regarded as one of the most effective ways to make the middle of nowhere feel like somewhere.” The Observer (London) 07/09/00
    • THE MAN REMAKING LONDON: Architect Norman Foster got his “gherkin” tower approved by the City of London last week. “Foster is a tough cookie; some of his competitors might go as far as to say he is ruthless. None doubts his genius as a designer.” The Independent (London) 07/09/00
  • LOOKING BACK AT WHAT? After years of indifference about its architectural past, Los Angeles is looking backwards. But how to preserve and protect? And what? “In the end, a city should be a repository of memory but not a graveyard for buildings. As Los Angeles grapples with what to preserve and how to preserve it, it must also preserve the openness of spirit that created the great architectural experiment that runs from Gill to Gehry.” Los Angeles Times 07/09/00
  • SAME ARCHITECT/DIFFERENT VISION: Twelve years ago David Childs designed a vast new project for New York’s Columbus Circle. But the version he redesigned which is now being built differs substantially. “There is more than one way to interpret this difference: public opinion could be changing; Mr. Childs could be changing his aesthetic; or the difference could mean less than meets the eye.” New York Times 07/09/00 (one-time registration required for entry)

Friday July 7

  • TELL ME MORE: Tate Modern has been harshly criticized by the director of another London museum for relying on insider jargon, failing to coherently contextualize its work, and explaining very little in fact about modern art. “I went to Tate Modern as someone who knows very little about modern art but is keen to learn. I left in exactly the same state. Why doesn’t Tate Modern try to help its visitors learn techniques for assessing a piece of modern art instead of plonking the art in a gallery and hoping for the best?” The Independent 07/07/00 
  • THE SEARCH FOR KHAN: A Chicago attorney who has spent more than 40 years studying Genghis Khan, “claims to have found in an ancient book a vital clue that will take him to the tomb’s location” and will lead a team to look for it. The whereabouts of the Khan’s final resting place somewhere in Mongolia has been an enduring mystery. Discovery 07/06/00
  • EVERYONE LOVES A WINNER: The Art Gallery of Windsor in southern Ontario made a deal with the provincial casino. In return for renting the museum’s old space, the casino paid $8 million in rent and built the museum a new $20 million home. Now the city council, eyeing the museum’s good fortune, wants to discontinue the museum’s annual $500,000 city support. CBC 07/07/00
  • A BIG NIGHT AT AUCTION: A rare collection of old master paintings, French furniture, silver, and sculptures from the collection of diamond merchant Julius Wernher (former governor of the South African conglomerate De Beers) sold at Christie’s in London Wednesday night for $30.4 million, twice its $15 million estimate. New York Times 07/07/00 (one-time registration required for entry) 
  • AND THE JOKE IS ON… A lecturer who dislikes modern art decided to make his own. “He found a piece of scrap wood with grooves in from a cutting machine, painted it white and called it Millennium Dawn” and entered it in an art competition. Judges at Nottingham University awarded it a prize. Ananova 07/07/00

Thursday July 6

  • A LOGICAL APPROACH: The Art Loss Register, a private organization dedicated to recovering art looted during WWII, has located and returned art valued at $100 million. How? “The first is the moral argument, the second is the threat of embarrassing negative publicity, which affects both individuals and institutions, and the third is the claim that the work has become completely worthless from a financial standpoint because it can never be sold on the market as long as it remains on the list of looted Holocaust art.” Ha’aretz 07/05/00
  • NO PAIN NO GAIN? Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence Small is in the middle of two more controversies – over the closing of a popular Woody Guthrie folk music exhibition, and over the possible confiscation of $16 million in research funds. In office only six months, Small has been controversial himself as he attempts a thorough shakeup of the institution. Chicago Tribune 07/06/00
  • MUSEUM TAKES RISK, LOSES: After the heirs of one of its patrons decided to sell a Picasso to another buyer, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art sued the family for $18 million. Now a judge has thrown out the museum’s claim (and other donors and potential donors have got to be feeling a creeping chill). San Francisco Chronicle 07/06/00
  • ART FOR ALL THE PEOPLE: On the tenth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Museum of American History stages an exhibition complete with aids for those with disabilities. “The exhibit includes a telecaptioner for TV, a note-taker for the blind that uses the Braille alphabet, a CD for access to the Internet and two kiosks with computer monitors.” The Times of India (AP) 07/06/00

Wednesday July 5

  • RECREATING CONTEXT: How faithfully should a museum try to reproduce the historical context in which pictures were originally made and shown? Do you distort or diminish a work of art by showing it in a way that the artist never intended? A new exhibition of Turner at the Tate Gallery tries for recreation but betrays the painter. The Telegraph (London) 07/05/00
  • MICHELANGELO DRAWING which inspired his statue of the risen Christ sold at auction Tuesday for a record $12 million. The Times of India 07/05/00
  • MODEL ARTISTS: Young good-looking 20- and 30-something American artists have been turning up in the pages of glossy magazines in the past few months. “Some people want to take these images as signs of the non-art world media’s renewed interest in the art world, and therefore of the return of an 1980’s-style art boom. But the glossified 80’s artists were overwhelmingly male. The mediagenic artists of the oughties, as the current decade is sometimes called, are often women.”  New York Times 07/05/00 (one-time registration required for entry)
  • MERMAIDS IN NORFOLK, GIANT CORN IN BLOOMINGTON: Some three dozen US cities have deployed art on their downtown streets after Chicago reported a hit with its art cows last year. Now Chicago is talking about putting a twist on the idea next summer. “If Chicago can reinvent itself and come up with something even more inventive, I’d say we’re up for a decade of things on parade.” CNN (AP) 07/04/00
  • UNDERWATER TRANSPORT: Singapore plans a new underwater subway station under the Singapore Art Museum. The roof of the station will allow sunlight to filter through into the 10-storey-deep Museum station. Those viewing the water from above can see the reflection of the museum in it. Singapore Straits-Times 07/05/00

Tuesday July 4

  • LOOKING FOR LEONARDO: In 1503 Leonardo da Vinci was commissioned to paint a mural in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio. But the image disappeared and conjecture is that rather than being destroyed the mural was obscured when a wall was built in front of it. Now scientists are on the hunt. “We will look through ancient walls using the most advanced technologies.” Discovery.com 07/03/00
  • COME IN FROM THE LIGHT: The art world loathes Thomas Kinkade’s precious paintings. But America’s mall-goers can’t buy them fast enough and have made Kinkade a wealthy man.  Reviled by the critics and scorned by galleries and agents, his work has been described as everything from ‘pseudo’ to ‘a damning indictment of our society’. Some question whether what he does is art at all.” Now Kinkade’s taking his show to England. The Telegraph (London) 07/04/00
  • A SIDE OF BACON: Vanity Fair is said to be publishing a story claiming that painter Francis Bacon, who died in 1992 aged 82, was a tax dodger. The magazine alleges that Bacon avoided paying tax in Britain by failing to declare payments made by his dealers Marlborough Fine Art to a Swiss bank account. London Evening Standard 07/04/00
  • DOT-COM CRASH IMPACTS ART SALES: With much of Seattle’s new wealth built on the dotcom boom, the recent downturn in the market has affected gallery art sales. “Everybody’s afraid to bring it up, because everybody wonders at first if it’s just us, if our business is down and everybody else is doing fine.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer 07/04/00

Monday July 3

  • STOLEN ART IN BRITISH MUSEUM: A 12th Century manuscript in the British Museum is shown to have been looted from Italy. “The missal, from the chapter library of Benevento, was acquired by a UK army captain during World War II and bought by the British Museum library (as it then was) at Sotheby’s in 1947.” The Art Newspaper 07/03/00
  • LOOKING BACK FOR THE FUTURE: The latest style in Moscow is what might be called reconstructivism. Wherever a historic building once stood but was destroyed, a more or less exact replacement now seems to be called for. Although not official policy, this growing attempt to re-create pre-revolutionary, pre-Stalin Moscow is largely driven by the office of the capital’s mayor, Yuri Luzhkov. The Guardian 07/03/00
  • TAXMAN MAKES ARTISTIC DEAL: Instead of being the only Cimabue to ever have been auctioned, the rare panel painting will be accepted by the British government to pay the estate taxes of the current owner. The painting will join the collection of the National Gallery. The Art Newspaper 07/03/00
  • LADY DIANA IN A JEEP? When attempts to place statuary atop Trafalgar Square’s fourth vacant plinth began last year, officials were surprised by how seriously Londoners took up the task. Suggestions ranged from a statue of Princess Di to a giant pigeon. A year of trading art on and off the pedestal has suggested a plan for the future. London Times 07/03/00
  • INDEPENDENCE TOUR: Norman and Lear and a partner who bought a copy of the Declaration of Independence on the internet last week, plan to tour it. “I don’t want to see it sitting on a wall, I want to take it where Americans can see it. I made a film in Greenfield, Iowa, and that’s a place I know well. If that living document came to Greenfield, people would come by the busloads.” Los Angeles Times 07/03/00
  • STROKE SENDS ARTIST’S CAREER SOARING: Artist Katherine Sherwood was always an artist. But a debilitating stroke at the age of 44 transformed her career.  “Critics see a huge change in Sherwood’s work. From the restricted, analytical style of the art professor she once was, she has been transformed into a vibrant, free-flowing painter. She has just finished a show at New York’s prestigious Whitney Museum, and her abstracts sell for $10,000. “I have sold more paintings in the past few months than in 25 years as an artist,” she says with a smile. The Times (London) 07/03/00

Sunday July 2

  • CRUMBLING TREASURES: Italy has a wealth of art treasures. But how to take care of it? “Art restoration in Italy is in a mess. It’s not that we lack restorers of the highest ability. It is rather that the organisation of the whole, and the role of the government, is chaotic… The government may get involved when some world-famous building has collapsed, or a world-famous fresco starts peeling off its wall. But there’s no interest at all in the thousands of buildings and churches that are quietly crumbling, along with the objects inside them, in the centres of Italy’s ancient cities.” The Telegraph (London) 07/01/01

Publishing: July 2001

Tuesday July 31

PENNY PINCHING: Just how bad are Canadian book superstore Indigo/Chapters’ finances? The company has pulled its annual sponsorship of this year’s Word on the Street literary festival, held in four cities. CBC 07/30/01

CLASSIC IGNORANCE: the absence of classical studies from contemporary education is a bad thing, and it is time to argue that they should be restored to a more salient place in the curriculum. Western culture is so deeply imbued with its classical origins that a proper appreciation of it is impossible without some knowledge of these origins.” New Statesman 07/30/01

ABOUT ONE’S SELF: “The subject of autobiography is always self-definition, but it cannot be self-definition in the void. The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage with the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it’s the wisdom – or rather the movement towards it – that counts.” Chronicle of Higher Education 07/30/01

HUGHES ANTHOLOGY COMING: “[T]he University of Missouri Press is placing a claim on its native son by publishing for the first time the complete ‘Collected Works of Langston Hughes’ in 18 volumes. The first three volumes were published in June. The entire set will be available in time for the centenary of his birth, Feb. 1, 2002.” The New York Times 07/31/01 (one-time registration required for access)

STILL GOING STRONG: “Agatha Christie’s name is synonymous with the arsenic-and-old-lace school of whodunits. Modern mystery writers rarely praise her or cite her work as an influence. She is not as writerly as Dorothy Sayers or Robert Goddard, and her plots – often unfairly lumped together – seem to boil down to ‘Colonel Mustard with a candlestick in the drawing room.’ But in Great Britain she remains the best-selling writer of all time, save for one William Shakespeare and God Herself, author of the Bible.” Boston Globe 07/31/01

Monday July 30

THE AMAZON PROBLEM: “The reason people my age are not ordering more books on-line may have a purely mathematical explanation. The number of books that we own, but have not yet read, and the number of years we might reasonably expect to have left to read them, do not quite add up.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 07/30/01

Sunday July 29

TOP SHELF: Want to get bookstore shelf space for that book you’re writing? Managers of the book retailer WH Smith have some advice: “Jacket design and presentation matter in the modern book market as they never have before. Publishers used to use jacket design to denote their own particular brand, in the way that Penguin still do with their Classics series. These days, though, jacket design is more likely to identify the genre than the publisher.” The Observer (UK) 07/29/01

Friday July 27

BLACK NOVELISTS HITTING THE BEST-SELLER LIST:“African-Americans buy books that are relevant to their experience in greater numbers than have ever been imagined by most publishers. It also appears that book consumers are becoming more sophisticated, that they want a good yarn well told, and that’s more important than whether the characters are black or white. So there’s more and more crossover readership.” The New York Times 07/26/01 (one-time registration required for access)

THE FIRST INFO AGE: The digital revolution of the Information Age is changing the way we communicate and transmit information. But arguably the first “Information Age” was more than two millennia ago with the establishment of the great ancient libraries… International Herald Tribune 07/26/01

IT’S STORY TIME. BRING YOUR OWN LAWYER: The intellectual rights arguments have centered lately on e-books and Napster, but the next arena may be your friendly neighborhood public library. Libraries see the digital rights revolution as a limitation on their ability to serve the public; publishers see it as an intrusion on their copyrighted material. “As the two sides circle each other warily, each is awaiting guidance from that long-delayed Copyright Office study.” Time 07/24/01

REYNOLDS PRICE, ON EUDORA WELTY: “Her main pleasure toward the end was the company of her friends. Surprisingly, for one whose work is so marked by the keen double knife-edge of satire and remorseless honesty, she was treated as the genial and polite Honorary Maiden Aunt of American letters. No other maiden aunt in history can have been, in her heart, less a maiden and less like the greeting-card aunt of one’s dreams. To almost the end, Eudora Welty was both a fierce observer of the wide world around her and its loving consumer.” The New York Times 07/27/01 (one-time registration required for access)

THE CHIEF LEGAL COUNSEL DONE GONE: As chief legal counsel for CNN, Eve Burton joined The New York Times and Dow Jones filing a brief in support of a recent Houghton Mifflin book, The Wind Done Gone. However, AOL-TimeWarner, which owns CNN, has come out in opposition to publication of the book. Eve Burton is now the former chief legal counsel for CNN, and the network’s staffers aren’t happy about it. The New York Times 07/27/01 (one-time registration required for access)

DEPRESSION CAN BE, WELL, DEPRESSING: Being published to high critical praise and still being unknown might affect your outlook, as seems to be the case with novelist Hugh Nissenson, who has battled severe depression throughout his career. His latest work is a tale of an artist who has had his destiny forced upon him by a world that confuses technology with humanity. The New York Times 07/26/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Thursday July 26

THE ILIAD FOR REAL? An expert on ancient Greece “combines archeological evidence with hypotheses from various disciplines and attempts to prove that Homer’s Iliad was not the product of one man’s poetic imagination, inspired in the eighth century B.C. by a few mysterious ruins from the dim and distant past.” Instead, he claims it is “the first written record of an unbroken chain of oral tradition passed down in hexameters, preserving the memory of a historical Trojan war that occurred during the Bronze Age.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 07/26/01

IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME: In the age of Amazon, Borders, Chapters, and other chain book superstores, consumers have become trapped between their desire to support local independents, and their desire to find the book they want, in stock, right now. Author Larry McMurtry is hoping to create the best of both worlds when he opens his store in Archer City, Texas: “Booked Up” will contain hundreds of thousands of books, all hand-picked for quality, and will have a decidedly independent flavor. National Post (Canada) 07/26/01

BEAUTIFUL WRITERS WANTED, NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY: “Increasingly often, it would seem, attractive young writers are offered huge advances for their books. Publishing today seems to be as much about who you are, as what you write. But where does that leave older writers?” BBC 07/26/01

Wednesday July 25

AOL COULD BUY AMAZON: “AOL Time Warner would be allowed to propose a takeover bid for Amazon.com — as long as it did so quietly — under the terms of a $100 million investment AOL made in Amazon Monday. According to records filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and reported by Dow Jones Newswires, AOL could propose a buyout, but not publicly and not without the approval of Amazon.com.” The New York Times (AP) 07/25/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Tuesday July 24

EUDORA WELTY, 92: “She was one of the finest Southern writers of the 20th century. She could be as obscure as William Faulkner. As violent as Flannery O’Connor. As incisive as Richard Wright. But more genteel and straightforward than just about anyone. And at 92 she outlived them all.” Washington Post 07/24/01

Monday July 23

BEST-WHAT? Does anybody really pay attention to Bestseller lists? “Nowadays a ‘bestseller’ is more normally one of three things: a how–to — usually, either about how to more efficiently grub for money or how to lose weight while eating without pause; a memoir by somebody really despicable; or a barely literate thriller where gruesome things happen to people while they’re having sex just after drinking brand–name beverages.” MobyLives 07/23/01

TYPECASTING: Why do books have to conform to a genre, to be assigned to a category? “Surely a piece of writing ought to be allowed to convey its own generic intentions, and surely readers can be expected to divine them without help?” Poets & Writers 07/01

Sunday July 22ENGLAND AS A STATE OF MIND: George Orwell railed against the mid-20th-century obsession with utopias. But ironically, “he appears today – more than 50 years after his death – as one of the most persuasively utopian writers who ever put pen to paper.” Financial Times 07/20/01

Thursday July 19

THE BANISHING BOOKS: The San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, the San Jose Mercury News, the Chicago Tribune, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Boston Globe “have all put their papers on a diet by cutting back on book reviews. Even the nation’s most influential Sunday book supplement, the New York Times Book Review, killed two pages.” Do the papers think no one cares about reading about books? Salon 07/19/01

FBI ARRESTS RUSSIAN FOR COPYRIGHT VIOLATION: Russian cryptographer Dmitri Sklyarov, “one of the authors of a software package released in June that breaks through e-book encryption developed by Adobe Systems,” was arrested in Las Vegas and charged with violating copyright law. In Sklyarov’s defense, the head of his company claims that “distributing Adobe’s eBook software is illegal in Russia, since Russian law requires that the software permit the purchaser to make at least one legal copy.” International Herald Tribune & Electronic Frontier Foundation 07/18/01

THE PEN MAY NOT BE MIGHTIER THAN MEMORY OF THE SWORD: The new book Ghost Soldiers, about the rescue of US prisoners being tortured by Japanese during WW2, is a best seller in the US. In Japan, the book is a pawn in “the tug-of-war between intellectuals and internationalists who want Japan to own up to savage incidents by its army, and nationalists and bureaucrats who seek to protect the national psyche.” Japan Today 07/19/01

Wednesday July 18

E-OWNERSHIP: Publisher Random House is appealing last week’s court ruling that said the publisher did not own e-book rights to books it publishes on paper. “To demonstrate its confidence in its position, Random House simultaneously announced that it would soon be releasing e-book versions of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, as well as nine Raymond Chandler novels.” Inside.com 07/18/01

FOR THE LOVE OF LEARNING: It’s assumed today that the great working class masses have little use for literature and intellectual pursuits. A new book suggests that wasn’t always the case. A century ago “the working-class pursuit of education was not an accommodation to middle-class values, a capitulation to bourgeois cultural hegemony. Instead, it represented the return of the repressed in a society where the slogan ‘knowledge is power’ was passionately embraced by generations of working-class radicals who were denied both.” The Telegraph (UK) 07/16/01

Tuesday July 17

INTELLECTUAL LIFE, UP IN THE TOWER AND DOWN IN THE MINES: We know what people in the ivory tower want to read, but how about the – ahem – working classes? Apparently they’d choose “exactly the same Great Books to canonise, from the Odyssey to Dickens. Indeed, on the evidence of the borrowing records from Welsh miners’ libraries, the only books that no one wants to read are the works of the literary modernists.” The Guardian (UK) 07/14/01

IT’LL BE A BEST-SELLER. NO, MAYBE IT WON’T. BUT ON THE OTHER HAND… One of the mystic joys, and constant frustrations, of book publishing is that “it’s a business used to operating in the dark. It’s the only business I know of in which market research is virtually nonexistent. Every newspaper reader knows that A.I. sold $30 million in tickets the weekend it opened. Magazines are audited; television shows get Nielsen ratings. Why not put the book business on a realistic footing?” The New York Times 07/17/01 (one-time registration required for access)

HOLDEN CAULFIELD ON SOCIAL SECURITY: Holden Caulfield is 66, an age not often considered a landmark. But that means Catcher in the Rye is now 50, which is a landmark. Holden seems to be holding up well; a quarter-million copies of the book are sold every year. We guess that’s good news for the author, J D Salinger, but he’s not the sort to talk much. USA Today & The Guardian (UK) 07/16/01

Monday July 16

CS LEWIS – MASTER FRAUD? A new book about C.S. Lewis “contends that several literary and theological works attributed to the British author are, in fact, the product of systematic forgery. Her arguments are well-known in Lewisian circles, where they have provoked intense scholarly discussion, not to mention a certain amount of litigation.” Chronicle of Higher Education 07/16/01

  • THE THREE FACES OF CS: Lewis was a prolific author, publishing 40 books. “Indeed, his published output sometimes appears to be the work of at least three different authors.” Chronicle of Higher Education 07/16/01

THE TALE OF TINA AND HARRY: It’s not long ago that Tina Brown and Harry Evans were the power literary couple in New York, she running The New Yorker, he steering the fates of Random House. A new book that hit bookshelves this weekend chronicles the couple’s rise to power: “they emerge from the book as a couple so consumed by the naked ambition of the American arriviste, and so willing to consume others as fuel for their flight, that their crash from the heights of the sun became inevitable.” National Post (Canada) 07/16/01

LOOKING GOOD: “Are an author’s looks alone worthy of a half-million dolllar advance? Do people really buy books — or magazines — because the authors are young and skinny and resemble movie stars? Well, they may get what they pay for if they do…MobyLives 07/16/01

Friday July 13

FEDERAL JUDGE SAYS AUTHORS RETAIN E-BOOK RIGHTS: Citing “myriad differences between traditional book publishing and publishing in digital form,” a US District Court judge has ruled, in effect, that Rosetta Books is free to issue in e-book form works by William Styron and Kurt Vonnegut. Random House, which holds publication rights to the two authors, had asked for an injunction against Rosetta. The ruling has potential for wide impact in the publishing industry. New York Law Journal 07/12/01

  • Previously: E-BOOKS LAWSUIT: “Authors and agents say what’s at stake in the upcoming lawsuit over interpretation of book contracts is the entire future of the electronic publishing industry. In Random House v. Rosettabooks…Random House alleges it owns the electronic titles based on a clause in the author’s original contracts that gives the publisher the right to ‘print, publish and sell in book form.” Wired 04/17/01

THE ILIAD – TOO BORING? A British lottery-funded project to donate a library of classic Great Books worth £3,000 to every school in he country has hit an unexpected snag. Eleven schools have refused the gift on the grounds that the books are either too difficult or too boring. “One Edinburgh teacher complained publicly that an early title, by the Greek historian Herodotus, was ‘far too boring’.” The Guardian (UK) 07/13/01

DEFENDING THE WIND: Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone will show up on The New York Times bestseller list this weekend. This week she made an appearance at the Margaret Mitchell House in Atlanta and got into an argument with an African American member of the audience who tried to dispute Randall’s assertion of Mitchell’s racism. Randall shouted at the woman: “My own mother was damaged by this book and has all kinds of problems with racial identity. You are my example of another generation of black women damaged by Gone With the Wind!” Atlanta Journal-Constitution 07/13/01

Thursday July 12

BUY AUSSIE: “Between July 1988 and last December, Australians paid about 44 per cent more for fiction paperbacks than US readers and about 9 per cent more than British readers.” But proposed legislation to allow the free importing of books is opposed by much of the Aussie book industry. Wonder why? Sydney Morning Herald 07/12/01

THE DISAPPOINTMENTS OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION: Modern novelists seem to have lost – or quickly to lose – the basic skill of telling a common story to common readers. When good story-tellers become successful, their work “becomes thinner and thinner, more and more calculated to appeal to that narrow and treacherous audience of critics, booksellers, publicists and partygoers.” The Guardian (UK) 07/08/01

BOOKS – THEY’RE NOT JUST FOR GROWN-UPS ANY MORE: Know what kids are doing more of these days? No, besides that. They’re reading. A new study shows them reading more than a book a month, on average, and “minority teens may be reading the most of all.” One of the books they’re reading may be the old sword and sorcery stand-by Lord of the Rings. Sales of Tolkien’s classic are four times what they were last year, probably because of hype for the movie, which is not due out for another five months. Inside.com & Nando Times 07/11/01

“MP3” IS OFFICIALLY A WORD. “RUOK” MAY BE NEXT: The latest revision of the Concise Oxford Dictionary includes – and thereby recognizes as words – “e-book” and “MP3” and “i-Mode.” It also includes – so far only in a separate appendix – abbreviations used in mobile-phone text messages, and smiley-face emoticons. Salon 07/11/01

SHORT LIST FOR FORWARD PRIZE: Five poets have been short-listed for the Forward £10,000 “Best Collection” poetry prize, largest of its kind in Britain: Anne Carson, Douglas Dunn, Matthew Francis, James Lasdun, and Sean O’Brien. Ten others are on “Best First Collection” and “Best Single Poem” lists, with smaller prizes. The Guardian (UK)

A CHAPTER OF ULYSSES FOR $1.2 MILLION: James Joyce’s multi-colored hand manuscript of the “Eumaus” chapter of Ulysses was auctioned at Sotheby’s for £861,250 ($1,216,360). That was less than had been projected, based on last December’s sale of another draft chapter, which went for $1.5 million. The Guardian (UK) 07/10/01

Wednesday July 11

THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THAT GUY FROM MARKETING: With the success of the Harry Potter franchise, the folks who hold the rights to C.S. Lewis’s classic “Narnia” series have begun to think about new ways of marketing the series, which is filled with magic and Christian imagery. But fans of Aslan and the White Witch are appalled at what they see as a naked effort to strip the “Narnia” books of their childish charm and to remove as much of the religion as possible. Minneapolis Star Tribune (NYT News Service) 07/11/01

NEW WORK FROM AN OLD DISSIDENT: “Along with other secrets about spies and agents and assassinations and conspiracies, the archives of the former Soviet Union may contain a literary secret: an unpublished novel by the Russian writer Isaac Babel. Babel, the author of the ‘Red Cavalry’ stories and ‘Odessa Tales,’ was arrested in 1939 and executed in the basement of the Lubyanka Prison in Moscow in 1940.” The New York Times 07/11/01 (one-time registration required for access)

POETIC OBSCURITY: The collapse of American poetry into the black hole of academic obscurity is a process that has been occurring for half a century. At the beginning of the 21st century, the contrast between the relative health of poetry in Britain and its dire condition in the US is striking.” Prospect 07/01

TOUGH E-SELL: “For a variety of reasons, some of journalism’s biggest names are entering the e-book market.” But publishers are finding it tough to make money from any of the books. Publishers Weekly 07/10/01

75 OF THE WORST WORDS EVER WRITTEN: The winner of this year’s Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which honors (intentionally) bad writing, is a 44-year-old secretary from Vancouver with what appears to be a fixation on small, yappy dogs. In keeping with the style of winners from past years, the winning entry is a ridiculous run-on sentence with more indecipherable metaphor than you can shake a stick at. Cleveland Plain Dealer 07/11/01

Tuesday July 10

MISSING HARRY: Barnes & Noble reports its sales are up 4.2 percent over last year for the first part of this year. But “although book sales are running well ahead of Street estimates for the quarter to date, the unfavorable comparison to last year’s Harry Potter phenomenon is expected to produce negative comparable sales for the month of July.” The New York Times 07/10/01 (one-time registration required for access)

MONEY ISN’T EVERYTHING. RELATIVELY SPEAKING, THAT IS: She’s written only one story. Must have been a good one; The New Yorker published it. Book publishers started throwing money at her – $500,000, in one case. She turned down the half million, and accepted a $100,000 offer from Ecco Press, which publishes such luminaries as Edmund White and Czeslaw Milosz. Inside.com 07/09/01

REALLY GOOD BAD WRITING IS AN ART: Every year the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest “honours the writer who comes up with the worst beginning to an imaginary novel.” This year’s winning entry describes Desdemona, who decides “(as blood filled her sneakers and she fought her way through the panicking crowd) that the annual Running of the Pomeranians in Liechtenstein was a stupid idea.”

Sunday July 8

SO, UM, MADONNA’S A POET? Ever since rock music began to get all heavy back in the protest era of the 1960s, the question of whether the lyrics of some songs can be counted as poetry has troubled musicians and poets alike. Norman Mailer says no, but the Beatles said yes, and these days, as poetry continues to experience an extended boom, the musicians may have won the argument simply by outlasting the naysayers. The New York Times 07/08/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Friday July 6

BIG IS BEAUTIFUL: If someone had described today’s book superstores 20 years ago, most book lovers would have thought it was a vision of utopia – long hours, tons of books, comfortable surroundings. So “why, then, the chorus of disapproval from the cultural elite? Why the characterization, spread by a vocal group of critics, of the chain bookstores as a sort of intellectual McDonald’s, a symbol of the dumbing-down and standardization of American life?” The Atlantic 07/01

NO SIGN, NO WORK: The National Writers Union plans to sue big publishers such as the New York Times challenging the “legality of the Times’s policy requiring writers to waive their rights as a condition of getting new work.” Inside.com 07/05/01

VARIATIONS ON A THEME BY TWAIN: “Mark Twain made a deal with the editor of the Atlantic Monthly more than a century ago: He would write a story, then ask other well-known authors to compose their own versions from the same outline. Editor William Dean Howells agreed to publish all of the stories in his literary magazine. No one took up the challenge — until now.” National Post (Canada) (AP) 07/06/01

Thursday July 5

OF E-LOANS AND INCENTIVES: A number of American public libraries have begun lending e-books. “The services may be every bibliophile’s dream, but publishing houses worry that the lending programs will cannibalize their revenue and destroy financial incentives for popular writers. Why would people want to pay for an e-book when they could borrow one free just as easily?” Washington Post 07/04/01

MAKE WAY FOR CONTROVERSY: “Young fans of Make Way for Ducklings are battling Dr. Seuss loyalists for the title of “official children’s book” of Massachusetts. In one corner is Robert McCloskey’s 1941 tale of a mother mallard shepherding her ducklings through Boston’s narrow cobblestone streets to safety in the Public Garden. In the other are devotees of Dr. Seuss’ whimsical neologisms and looping rhymes. Passions are running high on both sides.” Chicago Tribune 07/05/01

REMEMBERING MORDECHAI: Mordechai Richler’s books were selling briskly Wednesday as Canadians remembered one of the country’s best-known writers. “He gives you a nostalgic feeling of the good old days when immigrants were building up the city, building up the country.” Ottawa Citizen (CP) 07/04/01

  • IN HIS OWN WORDS: Mordecai Richler’s last column for a Canadian newspaper shows much of his trademark wit and self-deprecating attitude towards his chosen profession. National Post 07/05/01

Wednesday July 4

MORDECHAI RICHLER, 70: Mordechai Richler, one of Canada’s best-known writers, has died of cancer. “The Quebec author of 10 novels is best known for his works on Montreal Jewish life.” Ottawa Citizen (CP) 07/03/01

MEASURING BOOK SALES: A new more accurate measure of book sales is coming. That’s good, right? Maybe – but it’s likely to turn the book business on its ear. For example, romance novels, which don’t make it onto the Bestseller lists now, are likely to come roaring up as a category. And other categories…Sure you want to hear this? Inside.com 07/03/01

THE NAPSTER OF BOOKS: A week ago, “Barnes & Noble.com, the No. 1 U.S. online book store, halted the sale of electronic books after Russian company Elcomsoft began selling a program to illegally copy text.” Adobe, which makes software for e-books, put pressure on the Russian company. Result: the Russians quit selling their software. Now they give it away free. The Moscow Times 07/04/01

YOU GOTTA START SOMEPLACE. MIGHT AS WELL BE THE TOP: Nell Freudenberger got a job at The New Yorker. The magazine published one of her stories. Now she’s juggling six-figure offers for a collection of her stories. Her only problem seems to be that, so far, the published story is the only one she’s written. Inside.com 07/03/01

Tuesday July 3

THE FUTURE OF BOOKS MAY BE… BOOKS: E-books, beware. There’s a man out there with a machine that can print and bind and deliver a book in minutes. “The high-speed printer spits out double-sided pages in rapid succession. The sheets are clamped, glued, covered, and sheared. Watching the book move along is a bit like watching a doughnut go through a Krispy Kreme machine. In seven minutes, I am holding a finished book, its spine still warm from the hot glue. I fan the pages and giggle. ‘Yeah, it’s a book, a real book’.” Business2.com

USING NEW TECHNOLOGY TO STRENGTHEN THE OLD: “Instead of dampening the sales of books, the Internet actually has sparked interest, through the expansion of online book clubs and chat rooms. These clubs are fast becoming the author’s – and publisher’s – best friend, by combining the old-fashioned notion of word-of-mouth with high technology.” Atlanta Journal-Constitution 07/02/01

KNOW WHAT YOU WRITE:To write about life in a small village 330 years ago, it helps to know about life in a small village now. “I know the feel of a newborn lamb’s damp, tight-curled fleece and the sharp sound a well-bucket chain makes as it scrapes on stone. But more than these material things, I know the feelings that flourish in small communities.” The New York Times 07/02/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Monday July 2

WHAT’S WRONG WITH TODAY’S FICTION: BR Myers writes in the current Atlantic Monthly that stars of the contemporary writing establishment have lost their way [the piece is not online]. Critic Jonathan Yardley heartily agrees: “Myers looks back, as I too most certainly do, ‘to a time when authors had more to say than ‘I’m a writer!’; when the novel wasn’t just a 300-page caption for the photograph on the inside jacket.’ He notes with dismay the disdain in which such fiction is now held in proper literary circles, where the pretentious display of self-consciously ‘writerly’ prose is valued while plot, narrative and character are scorned.” Washington Post 07/02/01

LOOKING GOOD… Do an author’s looks sell books? “It’s a closed-doors secret in contemporary American publishing, but the word is leaking out. Not that you have to resemble Denzel Washington or Cameron Diaz, but if you can write well and you possess the haute cheekbones of Susan Minot, the delicate mien of Amy Tan or the brooding ruggedness of Sebastian Junger, your chances are much greater.” Washington Post 07/02/01

Sunday July 1

WHO SAYS YOU CAN’T BUY LOVE? “Basel, rich in art-loving patrons, offered a sum of 30,000 Swiss francs for a “modern city novel.” The only specifications were that it be written in German and reveal “intensive preoccupation” with the city. Some 107 authors, almost a quarter of them from Germany, submitted outlines and text samples. And the winner is…” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 06/29/01