Month: March 2006

Deceased MoMA Curator’s Inside Memoir

William S. Rubin, the longtime curator of the Museum of Modern Art died at the age of 78 in January. Before he died he wrote a memoir. “The 198-page typescript chronicles Rubin’s professional life, with particular focus on the museum’s complex relationships with dealers, trustees, collectors and artists. Few if any published accounts lay out these usually covert matters in such frank detail.”

(Inspired) By The Bard

One of the Shakespearean legends that has sprung up over the centuries is the existence of a lost play, The History of Cardenio, based on Don Quixote and lost to the mists of time since at least the 18th century. No one is certain what became of the original, but one scholar from Florida has been working feverishly to reconstruct the play from what little source material remains. It’s a controversial project, since the reconstructed play can never hope to be authentic, but some scholars say its worth some inaccuracy to get a glimpse of what Shakespeare might have written.

Smithsonian To Get Down With Its Bad Self

You would never mistake the staid and distinguished Smithsonian Institution for the Rock Hall of Fame, but “at an emotional and at times rowdy news conference yesterday at the Hilton New York, a group of hip-hop pioneers gathered beside the dark-suited, white-gloved Smithsonian staff to announce a plan for a major new collection devoted to the music. Called ‘Hip-Hop Won’t Stop: The Beat, the Rhymes, the Life,’ it is to be a broad sampling of memorabilia, from boomboxes and vinyl albums to handwritten lyrics and painted jeans jackets, as well as multimedia exhibits and oral histories.”

Yale Appoints Storr Art School Dean

Robert Storr has been named dean of the Yale School of Art. “Storr will have a five-year appointment, Yale said in a statement yesterday. He is a former curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and a contributing editor at Art in America magazine. Next year he will be the first American commissioner of the Venice Biennale.”

NY Library Buys Into Burroughs

The New York Public Library has purchased an extensive personal archive by the author William S. Burroughs. Burroughs is best known for the controversial novel, Naked Lunch, which was at the center of a landmark court case on censorship in the 1960s. The archive, which includes 11,000 pages of written material, will join Jack Kerouac’s papers in the library’s collection, making it “perhaps the premier institution for the study of the Beats.”