“Is it or isn’t it a Michelangelo? That is the question being pondered by art experts after the Italian state spent 3.3 million euros, or $4.2 million, last year to buy a small wooden crucifix attributed to that Renaissance genius.” If it’s not a Michelangelo, “then the state may have squandered its dwindling resources” at a time “when more than one billion euros have been cut from the Culture Ministry’s projected budget for the next three years.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
Where A Coal Mine Once Was, Dream Sculpture Rises
“A new 66ft (20m) high public artwork on the site of a former coal mine has been officially unveiled on Merseyside. The £1.8m Dream sculpture, in the form of a girl’s head with her eyes closed, is on the site of the former Sutton Manor Colliery in St Helens. A group of local ex-miners chose the design, which is made from 90 unique panels of pre-cast concrete.”
Domingo At Its Side, Royal Opera Declines To Dumb Down
“With a reputation for expensive ticket prices and high production costs, the Royal Opera House is braced for a tough season in 2009/10. But despite planning the repertoire before the global financial crisis struck, it stuck to the original program. … Royal Opera House chief executive Tony Hall said the company’s reputation could suffer if audiences felt it was taking less risks and resorting to tried and tested hits.”
Bound For Bolshoi Ballet School, If Tuition Can Be Raised
“A Cheshire teenager has become only the third British boy to win a place at the elite Bolshoi Ballet School in the Russian academy’s 233-year history. Daniel Dolan, 16, from Widnes, started his dance career aged four when he swapped his rugby boots for ballet shoes, said his father Peter. … The dancer starts at the academy in August if he can find the £15,000 fees.”
Do Novelists Have A Duty To Illuminate The Social Order?
“Is the point of writing fiction in 2009 to represent, as accurately as possible, the way the world really works? And is there a meaningful distinction to be made between works of fiction that are overtly about actual places during actual moments in history (like Joseph O’Neill’s post-9/11 New York novel Netherland), and novels whose emphasis is elsewhere (like Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances, in which setting is incidental)?”
Theatre Historian Stefan Brecht Dies At 84
“Stefan Brecht, whose father was the playwright Bertolt Brecht and who added to the family’s theatrical legacy by fastidiously chronicling the rise of avant-garde theater, died on April 13 in Manhattan. … For decades, Mr. Brecht worked on a series of books, collectively known as ‘The Original Theater of the City of New York: From the Mid-Sixties to the Mid-Seventies,’ that described, in great detail, the work of the city’s seminal experimental theater artists.”
Duo Plead Guilty In Firebombing Over Jewel Of Medina
“Two men today admitted plotting to firebomb the home of the publisher of a controversial novel about the prophet Muhammad. … The building, the home and office of Gibson Square publisher Martin Rynja, suffered minor fire damage after fuel was poured through the letterbox.” Rynja had been “preparing to release The Jewel of Medina,” a novel “focused on Muhammad and the life of Aisha, his child bride.”
Ayckbourn, After A Stroke, Takes Broadway In Triplicate
“Alan Ayckbourn has written more than 70 plays, which makes him something like the Joyce Carol Oates of British theater. ‘If you didn’t write so much, they’d realize you were quite good,’ the director Peter Hall once told him wryly. But productivity has never really hurt Mr. Ayckbourn, who turned 70 on Easter Sunday and whose works are performed, seemingly continuously, across Britain and beyond.”
For Native Artists, A New Foundation To Aid Their Work
“Even as arts groups around the country are cutting back because of declining endowments and donations, a new foundation to support the work of American Indian, Native Hawaiian and Alaska Native artists is being established with an initial $10 million from the Ford Foundation. Called the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, the organization … says it will be the first permanently endowed national foundation of its kind.”
Touted Facebook Fundraising App Fails To Rake In $$$
“It seems foolproof: nonprofits using the power of the Internet to raise money through a clever Facebook application. … But it turns out that approach doesn’t always work. The Facebook application Causes, hugely popular among nonprofit organizations seeking to raise money online, has been largely ineffective in its first two years, trailing direct mail, fundraising events and other more traditional methods of soliciting contributions.”