The plaintiffs in the case include Thomas, Jaris and Peter Rockwell, the sons of Norman Rockwell, who object to the sale of two of their father’s works, Shuffleton’s Barber Shop (1950) and Shaftsbury Blacksmith Shop (1940), which the artist gave to the museum. Both paintings are due to be auctioned at Sotheby’s New York American art sales on 13 November, and are estimated to make a combined $27m to $40m.
Author: Douglas McLennan
Houston Post-Flood Update: The Opera In The Convention Center
“While the ballet, the symphony and the Alley were able to move this season’s performances to other concert halls around town, the Houston Grand Opera had to get more creative. The managing director, Perryn Leech, decided to build an entirely new venue, dubbed the Resilience Theater, inside the cavernous George R. Brown Convention Center. This presented a long list of challenges, including how to pacify season ticket holders (free Lyft rides to and from shows); where to place the orchestra (behind the stage); and how to finesse the acoustics (a work in progress).”
Prominent NY Art Dealer Sent To Jail
“As alleged in the indictment, the defendant used his industry experience to gain the trust of prospective art sellers, then betrayed that trust by pocketing the proceeds of those sales to fund his own lavish lifestyle,” Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance said in a statement. “Not only did victims lose millions of dollars, but many lost valuable pieces of artwork that had been in their families for generations.”
Anything To Be Learned From This Wildly Popular Event?
“Last year there were more than 140,000 applications for tickets to be in the 200-strong studio audience of what is often Ireland’s most watched television event of the year. Audience members get to see young Irish performers, enjoy the latest toys up close, and are guaranteed to leave with a large stash of goodies.”
The “Arts” Are Determined (And Controlled) By Too Few
“Just as foreign aid ends up in the pockets of tyrannical kleptocrats rather than reaching the desperate and the starving, so does art aid go to the arts rather than to artists. This is not to suggest that the arts nomenklatura peculates with the licence that politicians enjoy. Nor that it feeds its critics to crocodiles in the time-honoured manner. What it does suggest is that the fate of artists and of art itself is in the hands of too few persons, who share kindred tastes and cultish dogma.”
The Life-Cycles Of Magazines
“Our half-century intermezzo has witnessed the dominance of television, the Internet, and mobile, as well as changing taste and business models. Consequently, only three [magazine] titles appear on both lists. If nothing else, the shifts between ’67 and ’17 demonstrate how most magazines follow a life cycle: often-difficult births, brash youthfulness, midlife success, and retirement at the back of the newsstand rack—or solely in the archives.”
Are Big Brands The New Arts Patrons?
“Artists have always been the sort of R and D [research and development] department for advertising agencies. You go into agencies and what you see on the wall is artworks that then get transmogrified into advertising. What’s happening now is really fantastic, because it’s actually a much more direct conversation between the client and the artists. It doesn’t have to go through this extra layer of interpretation.”
The Case For Needing Mavericks
Nowadays scientists tend to shun the ‘maverick’ label. If you’ve hung out in a lab lately, you’ll notice that scientific researchers are often terrible gossips. Being labelled a ‘maverick’, a ‘crank’ or a ‘little bit crazy’ can be career-killing. The result is what the philosopher Huw Price at the University of Cambridge calls ‘reputation traps’: if an area of study gets a bad smell, a waft of the illegitimate, serious scientists won’t go anywhere near it.
Man Booker Winner George Saunders Talks About Writing:
“Two different hitters will generally talk the same game, but then one gets in and hits a homer and the other strikes out. (And that hitter is you, the writer, on different days, even.) So: an element of mystery has to pertain—which I really like…this idea of writing as more of a muscular, visceral act, in which the writer brings all that she is to that moment but can’t really explain what happens next.”
Why Teach The Humanities?
“To put books into English, the vulgar tongue, the language of the masses, was once radical. Teaching literature written in English is a recent innovation, historically speaking, and was long regarded in the more renowned institutions as a lowering of standards. It is still the case in some countries that the work of living writers is excluded from the curriculum, perhaps a sign of lingering prejudice against the vernacular, against what people say and think now, in the always disparaged present. In America this scruple is gone and forgotten. Writers not yet dead, in many cases only emerging, are read and pondered, usually under a rubric of some kind that makes them representative of gender or ethnicity or region, therefore instances of some perspective or trend often of greater interest to the professor than to any of the writers.”