“Elizabeth Murray’s death is enough to teach you how separate and undisclosing an artist’s work always is. And it reminds you how imperfect the very idea of artistic expression is. We know the work rises from within her, but it doesn’t describe her or capture her. Perhaps it’s best to say simply that it expresses what she thought it was possible to express with the tools she chose.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
Ford Foundation Picks Businessman To Lead It
“The Ford Foundation has selected a dark-horse candidate with little experience in institutional philanthropy as its new president. Luis A. Ubiñas, who has worked for McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm, for 18 years, will lead the organization, the nation’s second-largest foundation, with $11 billion in assets. Mr. Ubiñas’s appointment, to be announced today, is expected to stun the nonprofit world….”
What If We’re All Just Someone’s Cyber-Simulation?
“Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims. But now it seems quite possible. In fact … it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.”
NY Philharmonic Mulls Invitation From North Korea
“The New York Philharmonic is considering an official invitation from the North Korean government to perform in Pyongyang, the United States’ oldest symphony orchestra said on Monday.”
New Rules Yield Added Money For NYC Arts Groups
Many cultural groups have done quite well under New York City’s new arts-funding rules. “Arts groups that are not on city-owned land competed for $30 million in financing from the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs. And the 34 arts organizations on city-owned land, known as the Cultural Institutions Group, were allotted a total of $115.3 million, with an additional $4.4 million for ‘new needs.’ Last week arts organizations found out what those changes actually meant for them.”
Painter Elizabeth Murray Dies At 66
“Elizabeth Murray, a New York painter who reshaped Modernist abstraction into a high-spirited, cartoon-based, language of form whose subjects included domestic life, relationships and the nature of painting itself, died yesterday at her home in upstate New York.”
In S.F., A Startling Design Understands The City
“The competition to build a new transit center and skyscraper on Mission Street isn’t a beauty contest. It’s a gamble in city-making that could redefine San Francisco in the sky and on the ground. How fitting, then, that the tower best suited to replace the Transamerica Pyramid as the Bay Area’s tallest building is every bit as startling as that 35-year-old icon once was – and, at first glance to many eyes, every bit as harsh. The design comes from the firm of England’s Lord Richard Rogers, and it hums with surprising life.”
Why Do We Dis Shows After Masses Embrace Them?
“(I)s it hypocritical for those of us who love the theatre to rave about a production and campaign for its success, only to turn cold on it when it achieves the kind of mass appeal we always believed it deserved? … Does commercial success kill the soul of such shows or is it merely our restless quest for new ideas that makes them seem stale?”
Amy Bloom Trades Fiction For The Small Screen
Novelist and short-story writer Amy Bloom has gone Hollywood, creating and scripting a Lifetime series about therapists in a New Haven group practice. “She turned to what she knew, which included more than 20 years as a therapist (she has a master’s degree in social work) in a group psychotherapy practice in Middletown, Conn. … Ms. Bloom, 54, said goodbye in May to her writing students at Yale, found a small apartment in West Hollywood….”
On A Clearview Day, You Can See The U.S. Interstate
On America’s Interstates, replacing signs lettered in traditional Highway Gothic with those written in Clearview type “is a slow, almost imperceptible process. But eventually the entire country could be looking at Clearview.” The font’s designers “set out to fix a problem with a highway font, and their solution — more than a decade in the making — may end up changing a lot more than just the view from the dashboard. … Fonts are image, and image is modern America.”