No matter that he doesn’t have the go-ahead yet for the downtown Los Angeles site. “Even as he continues to negotiate with city and county officials,” he is courting “blue-chip architects. Of the six architects asked to prepare preliminary museum designs this month for the site on the corner of Grand Avenue and 2nd Street, four are winners of the Pritzker Prize….”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
The Musical Instrument Museum’s Global Ambitions
“How can one capture the vastness of this subject in a single gesture? …. The very complexity of the venture is stunning. Consider the difficulties of acquiring items in Burkina Faso or Somalia, places with little technology or few modes of transportation, where shipping and political turmoil are both problematic.”
To Lure New Fans, Bollywood Tries A Remix
Indian audiences will see “the traditional cut of the romantic drama [‘Kites,’] a two-hour-plus movie filled with extended dance sequences.” Audiences elsewhere will get a version “recut by ‘Rush Hour’ director Brett Ratner, a fast-paced, more Westernized rendering … that largely excises the creative indulgences that distinguish many Bollywood productions.”
Barnes & Noble Gets Into The Digital Self-Publishing Biz
“The service, which will launch this summer, will allow authors and publishers to convert their digital files to the ePub format, which is used by Barnes & Noble’s Nook and other e-reading devices. PubIt! titles will be sold on BarnesandNoble.com’s e-bookstore, and will be available for browsing inside the brick and mortar stores through the Nook.”
Jerry Brown Backs Appeal Of Norton Simon Museum Win
“[T]he issue in the friend-of-the-court brief that Brown filed on behalf of Marei Von Saher” is “the constitutionality of a 2002 California law that would save her from having her case thrown out on the grounds that she failed to file her stolen property claim within the usual three-year statute of limitations.”
Allen Ginsberg, Shutterbug
“Knowing that [his friends would] one day be famous, Ginsberg documented their lives — their travels, late nights and meandering walks. And he did it all with a second-hand Kodak camera, using nothing more than the instructions on the film packets.”
For Some Strapped Museums, Universities Are Saviors
“[S]everal of the country’s small and medium-size museums have been turning to the art-world equivalent of a bailout. They are partnering with a university or other academic institution, in some cases handing over artworks and changing locations, in a last-ditch effort to keep their doors open and their collections intact and available to the public.”
This Isn’t New York Theatre’s Golden Age — But It Could Be
Michael Feingold: “The era of mega-profits, now apparently over, and of digitized communication, now degenerating into Tweeted triviality, have given us bad cultural habits. … The Golden Age we think we lack, and yearn for, the one granted public recognition, may be just around the corner. The ore is there, waiting to be mined.”
A Look At The Purloined Paintings
A slide show of the works by Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Modigliani and Léger that were reported missing this morning from the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, as well as news photos of the aftermath of the theft.
Stolen Paris Paintings An Unusually Well-Selected Group
“These five works together add up to a better choice of the best art of the 20th century than you could find in most modern art museums. A fine collection has been robbed in the most intimate and horrible way of its treasures, and the world has – temporarily, we must hope – lost sight of some of the truly great works of the modern age.”