Author: Matthew Westphal

The Louvre’s Attempts To Get Works Loaned For Its Leonardo 500 Show Aren’t Going So Well

First of all, there’s the on-again, off-again attempt by Italy’s new-ish nationalist government to make da Vinci and the Louvre show a cultural battleground. But there are also the perpetually uncertain status of loans from the Hermitage (again, politics), the fact that works on wood are too fragile to travel, and the mysteriously missing Salvator Mundi. – The Art Newspaper

Germany Is Returning Stolen Papers Of Kafka Executor Max Brod To Israel

“[The handover] will end a decade-long struggle to retrieve the missing Brod papers which, according to Israel’s National Library, were stolen 10 years ago in Tel Aviv. The documents, letters and memoirs re-emerged in 2013, when two Israelis approached the German Literary Archives in Marbach, and private collectors, with a huge collection of unpublished documents belonging to Brod.” – Yahoo! (AFP)

The Man Who Used Culture To Transform Medellín’s Most Dangerous Slum Says He Can Do The Same With Paris’s Poor Suburbs

“Thirty years ago, Medellín was the most violent, the most dangerous city in the world. Nobody wanted to go there, not even Colombians,” says Daniel Carvalho, the urban planner who launched street-art and hip-hop programs to make the notorious Comuna 13 district attractive to visitors and locals (and keep give young people something to do other than joining gangs). Now officials from Paris are consulting him on similar ideas for the French capital’s poorest banlieues. – The Observer (UK)

Iran Sentences British Council Cultural Employee To Ten Years In Prison For Alleged Spying

Aras Amiri, a 33-year-old art student with Iranian nationality and British residence, worked for the British Council (roughly the equivalent of the Alliance Française or Goethe Institut). An Iranian official speaking on state television “claimed that she had confessed to working with Britain’s foreign intelligence agency on ‘cultural infiltration’ projects.” – Artforum

Mumbai’s Royal Opera House (Yes, It Has One), Restored To Splendor And Use As An Arts Venue

The theatre, completed in 1916, was built by British and Parsi businessmen and presented Western and Indian music and spoken theatre until the 1930s, when it became a cinema. The arrival of cable TV and VCRs killed its business, and it shut and went derelict until its owners, a former maharaja and maharani, had it restored in 2017. Once again, it hosts both Indian and Western classical music and dance as well as spoken theatre. – The Hindu BusinessLine (India)

The Good Knife

I’d never had a knife in my life like the new nakiri. It was crackling sharp (though not for long), but something else made it exceptional: the calm ease with which the knife held my hand, as well as the uncanny confidence it gave me. Once the blade came within range of a leek or rolling radish, it knew what to do. – Jeff Weinstein

A New Tool Links The Arts To Measurable Social Impacts

Americans for the Arts CEO Robert Lynch says that his organization’s Arts + Social Impact Explorer “consolidates and highlights concrete ways in which the arts intersect with and have an impact on other sectors of society … [how, for example, the arts] help people with cancer cope with stress through painting, assist people with Parkinson’s increase their vocal strength through singing, and support patients undergoing treatment or unable to leave their beds with live, in-room performances.” – Inside Philanthropy