“They charge that the foundation ignored Peggy Guggenheim’s last wish for the collection, which consists mainly of Cubist, Surrealist and abstract postwar art: that it be displayed in the palazzo in its entirety and without additions.” More generally, they’re furious over the expansionist, corporate character of the foundation’s current activities.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Jennifer Weiner Wants Critics To Take Female Genre Authors Seriously – So Laura Miller Gives Her A Serious Review
“[Weiner] doesn’t need the New York Times; she doesn’t respect its literary standards; her readers don’t care about it; and yet she craves its validation. … An obsession with prestige and exclusion haunts her characters and her fictional universe, but as much as they (and Weiner herself) resent all the people they imagine to be looking down on them, they can be dismayingly ready to turn the tables and partake of the same arrogance themselves.”
Daily Mail Pays Damages To J.K. Rowling Over False Story
“Rowling sued the [British tabloid] newspaper for libel in January over the piece which suggested she had told a false ‘sob story’ about being stigmatised by churchgoers” because she was a single mother at the time. The Mail has published an apology and retraction and paid “substantial damages”.
Supertaskers (Some People Really Can Multitask)
For years, researchers have reported that humans cannot truly multitask and that performance suffers when they try. Yet there seems to be “a tiny but persistent subset of the population – about two per cent – whose performance does not deteriorate, and can even improve, when multiple demands are placed on their attention.”
Where Are Stressed-Out South Koreans Going To Regroup? Prison Cells
“In the middle of nowhere on the outskirts of Hongcheon, 58 miles northeast of Seoul, Kwon Yong-seok runs ‘Prison Inside Me,’ a stress-reduction center with a penal theme. A meditation building, auditorium and management center sit on a 2-acre piece of land” – along with twenty-eight 60-square-foot prison cells.
A Stage ‘1984’ For The WikiLeaks-Facebook-NSA Era
Co-adapter and -director Robert Icke: “[Orwell] thought that we would be reporting on ourselves, which is now obviously very true with Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and the fact that our phones now know exactly where we are … We are all completely self-reporting, which prompted us to switch round the words ‘Big Brother is watching you’ into ‘Big Brother is you watching’, which we’ve incorporated into our script.”
A ‘Baffling’ And ‘Dour’ Turner Prize Shortlist
Adrian Searle surveys “a Turner shortlist that’s intent on being more serious – or at least more difficult and demanding than usual. Apart from the work of Phillips, there are few concessions here to visual pleasure or the easy headlines the prize often attracts.”
BBC Classical Radio Host Antony Hopkins Dead At 93
While he was also a conductor, composer and accomplished pianist (he often accompanied his guests), he became an institution over 36 years as the host of Radio 3’s Talking About Music.
Why Atom Egoyan Is So Frustrated Over His West Memphis Three Film
Critics have suggested that, with three or four documentaries on the case already out there, Devil’s Knot didn’t need to be made. Says Egoyan, “Journalists forget people haven’t seen the documentaries and don’t need the documentaries. … For people who don’t know the case, it’s a powerful experience. And it’s a huge risk dramatically, using a huge number of genres to tell the story – murder mystery, courtroom drama, procedural … It’s all over the map.”
No One Ever Directs Ellen Burstyn
“Directors tend to kind of let me do what I want to do. As a matter of fact, when I was doing Law & Order: Special Victims Unit … the director came up and he gave me a direction. … But as he walked away, he said, ‘You don’t mind me saying that to you, do you?’ And I said, ‘Mind? It’s the first piece of direction I’ve gotten in ten years! I love it!'”