Friday’s damage to a Picasso recalls Stephen Wynn’s 2006 mishap. “But it is difficult to compare a 1932 Picasso with one painted in 1904-5. The early canvases are more delicate and the oil paint is thinner than the enamel-based kind the artist was known to have used later in his career. And then there is the question of whether there’s only one image involved.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
Why Don’t Book Reviewers Ever Cop To Boredom?
“[F]ew experiences carry more risk of active boredom than picking up a book. … A library is an enormous repository of information, entertainment, the best that has been thought and said. It is also probably the densest concentration of potential boredom on earth.”
Los Angeles, Too, Wants Eli Broad’s Museum
“Downtown L.A. is officially making a play, courtesy of the Grand Avenue Authority, which today authorized negotiations with Broad toward a possible deal that would wrest the museum from Santa Monica and Beverly Hills, which are also in the running.”
Fort Worth Opera, A Reality-TV Star In The Making?
“My wife and I met a group of people at a local winery,” producer Russ Johnson explains. “And they were very boisterous and fun. Eventually, the question came up, so what do you do? And they were like, ‘We’re opera singers.'” That’s when he started thinking what a great docu-soap subject an opera company could be.
Benedict Nightingale Is Retiring; Replacement Is Named
Nightingale, the chief drama critic of The Times of London, “is retiring after a monumental career, having spent 47 years writing theatre reviews.” Beginning June 1, his job will belong to Libby Purves, “a former Today programme presenter, Tatler editor and columnist for the paper since 1981.”
On A Shoestring, Making Good Architecture For The Poor
“Narrow Gate architects design only for low-income people. Their latest and biggest achievement is Dudley Village,” in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood. “Nothing about this architecture says ‘affordable.’ It isn’t at the cutting edge of design, but it is handsome background architecture.”
Some Readers Just Want To Be Alone
“Reading with a group can feed your passion for a book, or help you understand it better. … There is a different class of reader, though. They feel that their relationship with a book, its characters and the author is too intimate to share. ‘The pursuit of reading,’ Virginia Woolf wrote, ‘is carried on by private people.'”
LACMA Puts Rare Art Publications Online
“Dubbed the ‘Reading Room,'” the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new offering “is intended to make books, catalogs and other literature available that would otherwise be difficult to access.”
How To Restore A Ripped Picasso
“First, the conservator can line up the torn ends and affix them to a new piece of fabric that lines the back of the painting. She might also try to attach the torn ends to each other using a method called Rissverklebung, in which individual fibers are rewoven back into place.”
Load The 3-D Glasses Into The Dishwasher, Please
“What happens to all those 3-D glasses after they’ve been used to goggle at floating mountains and blue aliens? They usually get washed or recycled.” Unless, of course, they don’t.