“Vienna’s Albertina Museum, home to landmark Impressionist works by Monet and Renoir, will start removing 950,000 artworks from its leaking underground depot following some of Austria’s heaviest downpours in 50 years.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Frédéric Mitterrand Is France’s New Culture Minister
“He’s a TV personality with a trademark booming voice, a writer, film-maker and gay activist who is not only an expert on world monarchy but part of the closest thing the French republic has to a royal family: the Mitterrand clan.” (He’s François’s nephew.)
City Of Malibu Ends Up Buying Performing Arts Center
The complex, which was up for auction earlier this month after the church that owned it went bankrupt, was purchased by the government of the L.A. County beach town for $15 million. “The center will house the new City Hall, but the city plans to retain its cash-generating performing arts venue and recording studios.”
When Patti Talks, By Golly, We Respond!
“On Tuesday, Patti LuPone sent a note to Dave Itzkoff taking him to task for his coverage of her decision to stop a concert in Las Vegas to berate an audience member for using an electronic device. The post received an overwhelming number of readers’ comments (over 760 as of this writing). Theater coverage on NYTimes.com hasn’t been this animated since we posted a slide show of a shirtless Daniel Radcliffe in the London production of Equus.”
New Acropolis Museum Is Itself A Reason To Return The Elgin Marbles (Or Is It?)
Michael Kimmelman: “So the new museum that Bernard Tschumi, the Swiss-born architect, has devised near the base of the Acropolis is a $200 million, 226,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art rebuttal to Britain’s argument” that only the British Museum can take proper care of the Elgin Marbles. “‘But Greek archaeology has always been a kind of fantasy,’ Antonis Liakos, a leading Greek historian, noted the other day. The repatriation argument, relying on claims of historical integrity, itself distorts history.”
Utah Festival Opera ‘Saved From Financial Ruin’
“It’s not curtains after all for the Utah Festival Opera Company, according to founder Michael Ballam. Following a 6-1 vote by the Cache County Council to approve a ‘heroic’ $150,000 stimulus to save the company from financial ruin, Ballam told a reporter Tuesday that the 17-year-old company will be alive in 2010.”
A Spiritual Jihad, Via Hip-Hop
“Real hip-hop heads know that Islam and hip-hop have been longtime friends, feeding off each other’s energy. Muslim ideals of self-respect and social change have inspired some of the greatest emcees, and hip-hop is giving voice to the dreams and daily struggles of a generation of Muslims.” The new documentary New Muslim Cool looks at the phenomenon through a Puerto Rican-American drug dealer-turned-Muslim family man.
Do The Right Thing, 20 Years On
“The film’s fiery conclusion, with the Italian-American Sal’s Famous Pizzeria going up in flames after the police murder of Radio Raheem, was the perfect denouement, a catharsis for every slight at the hands of white people. […] Watching it this time around, I found myself wishing to the very end of the film that the inevitable wouldn’t happen, that Sal’s pizzeria would not go up in flames at the hands of a black mob.”
Spike Lee And His Woman Problem
“[W]hen it comes to his female characters, it’s as though Lee can’t decide whether to worship them or punish them. […] Lee’s latent misogyny stings because, from the very beginning, his was the voice of the black hipster intellectual … You expect a little more enlightenment from him than you would from, say, Ice Cube or from Tyler Perry with his scheming evil buppies.”
Down With The Michelin Guide!
A growing number of France’s gastronomes think that the once-all-powerful guide has “become a dead weight for French cuisine. It discouraged creativity, demanded a level of opulence that made fine dining appealing and accessible only to rich fogeys, and was unacceptably opaque about its reviewing methods.”