The sermonizing over the New Museum’s upcoming show of a trustee’s collection is a bit much, Jerry Saltz writes. “I like that the art world isn’t regulated. I have seen [Dakis] Joannou’s collection, and it is incredible. And despite the way it looks, I think in the end the whole deal is for the best–given the state of the art world.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
Splitting Duties, NYC Ballet Names An Executive Director
Katherine E. Brown, currently WNYC’s chief operating officer, will “oversee all nonartistic matters” at the ballet, including “fund-raising, finances, marketing, media and education, responsibilities previously held by Peter Martins, the company’s ballet master in chief.”
New GM Is Proving City Opera Doomsayers Wrong
“The rabbit-out-of-the-hat success” that was New York City Opera’s season opener “was begun in late February, weeks after George Steel was appointed general manager and artistic director amid suspicions that he knew little about running an opera company.” But “so far, his decisions aren’t wrong.”
Nigeria’s Achebe Says He Isn’t Father Of Modern African Lit
“It’s really a serious belief of mine that it’s risky for anyone to lay claim to something as huge and important as African literature … the contribution made down the ages. I don’t want to be singled out as the one behind it because there were many of us – many, many of us,” said Chinua Achebe, who given the label by Nadine Gordimer.
Exam Software: Bad Prose, Churchill; You, Too, Hemingway
“The wartime leader had a style that was too repetitive, according to the computer being tested for the online marking of school qualifications. It rated Churchill as below average in the equivalent of an A level English exam.”
A First For Tate Britain: A Female Director
Penelope Curtis, 48, “the curator of the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, takes the helm from Dr Stephen Deuchar who will leave the gallery in December after 11 years in the role. The Oxford modern history graduate is an established scholar and author with an interest in 20th-century British art.”
Gore’s Current TV Shifts From User-Generated Content
“Current TV’s retrenchment shows the difficulty of grafting the freewheeling culture and sensibilities that have thrived over the Internet onto established mediums like television…. [J]ust as advertisers have shied from supporting websites that feature amateur video, so too they appear no more willing to support user-generated content on TV.”
Most Late-Night TV Watchers Are Women, The Writers Men
“In the 1980s, [David] Letterman pioneered the kind of college-age male humor that dominates late night. But now, his audience is almost 55 percent women; [Jay] Leno’s is more than 53 percent, and [Conan] O’Brien’s just over one half. Yet the writing room and sensibilities of the show itself remain largely male.”
Indie-Film History Goes Back A Hundred Years
“Nickelodeons were once as common as coffee shops, and the nickel-a-pop silent films they showed were as disposable as YouTube videos. That made for a lot of competition in the early days of the movie business — competition that fueled the rise of an indie-films culture as early as 1909.”
He Was Influential — But His Students Were Stars
Henry Cowell “was a prolific composer whose own music was eclipsed by the works of his students.” The director of a San Francisco organization that’s celebrating him this week “discovered Cowell through the pioneering percussion music of the composer’s famous pupils John Cage and Lou Harrison.”