“Over-identification with work is one of many culprits in the epidemic of recession-related anxiety and depression that mental-health providers are reporting. Fear of losing one’s house or failing to find another job are likely bigger contributors. But unlike those problems, the identity dilemma is within the individual’s power to address, requiring no lender mercy or stroke of job-hunting fortune.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
Underground, MoMA Saturation Campaign Targets Locals
The Museum of Modern Art’s “publicity campaign, one of the most ambitious it has ever undertaken in the city, will cover every ad space in [Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue and Pacific Street subway stations], spaces normally given over to plugs for movies, beer and podiatry treatments. In their place will be reproductions of works drawn from all parts of the museum, both well-known and more contemporary, by artists like Matisse, Hopper, O’Keeffe, Marlene Dumas, Cindy Sherman and Martin Kippenberger.”
Alice Tully’s New Look Animates A Broadway Dead Zone
“After $360 million of renovations, the gloomy fortress housing Alice Tully Hall and the Juilliard School in New York have gained light and sparkle. … The Juilliard building used to sit dourly on Broadway like a travertine-marble aircraft carrier.” Its sleek new appearance is “traffic-stopping, as it’s meant to be.”
Watchdog: Scholastic Book Clubs Abuse School Access
“Scholastic Inc., the children’s publisher of favorites like the Harry Potter, Goosebumps and Clifford series, may be best known for its books, but a consumer watchdog group accuses the company of using its classroom book clubs to push video games, jewelry kits and toy cars. The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood” charges that one-third of items sold through Scholastic’s monthly fliers “were either not books or books packaged with other items.”
Losses May Push Sotheby’s Credit Rating To Junk
“Sotheby’s credit rating may be cut to junk as the 265-year-old auction house’s revenue falls and its leverage increases amid what it calls ‘significant’ losses from guarantees. ‘We believe that revenues will decline substantially over the near term due to the decline in the worldwide art auction market,’ Standard & Poor’s said in a statement yesterday, when it disclosed the possible downgrade.”
Tea and Sympathy Playwright Robert Anderson Dies At 91
“Robert Anderson, the American playwright and screenwriter whose popular plays explored relationships between men and women and children and parents — in Tea and Sympathy, I Never Sang for My Father and You Know I Can’t Hear You When the Water’s Running — died Feb. 9 at his Manhattan home.”
Will Networks Dump Local TV Stations For Cable?
“Local television stations … dominated the TV business for more than half a century.” No longer. “Now, with their viewership in decline and ad revenue on a downward spiral, many local TV stations face the prospect of being cut out of the picture. Executives at some major networks are beginning to talk about an option that once would have been unthinkable: eventually taking shows straight to cable, where networks can take in a steady stream of subscriber fees even in an advertising slump.”
Arts Are Education, Health Care And Infrastructure
“It is time for the American arts community to confront its stunning political ineptitude. … In less than 75 years, the arts have gone from the single largest priority in a government stimulus package to a toxic joke, with a popular special amendment keeping them out. It is a stunning turnaround. How did it happen? Somehow it has come to be broadly accepted that concrete, asphalt and medicine for the body (as distinct from the heart and soul) have greater moral worth.”
A Dispatch From The Fund-Raising Front Line
It’s not the society reporting we’re used to reading, but the Washington National Opera Midwinter Gala is hardly alone in deglamorizing itself this year. “After Wall Street tanked and corporations stopped writing checks, gala organizers were forced to scale back everything from ticket prices (slashed from $1,000 to $500) to decor and centerpieces: flickering lanterns and artful veggies — headed to a food bank at the end of the night — instead of fresh flowers.”
Bolshoi Theatre To Reopen In Mid-2011
“A series of setbacks in the £400m refurbishment of the Bolshoi theatre has put back its reopening by at least another two years, it emerged yesterday. The legendary [theatre], home to the Bolshoi opera and ballet companies, closed in 2005 for a total overhaul after decades of neglect turned the building into a fire hazard with a decaying structure and basements crumbling into an underground stream. The Moscow venue was supposed to reopen in spring last year.”