Author: Matthew Westphal

James Turrell Shuts Down Skyspace At MoMA PS1 Until Condo Construction Across Street Is Done

Scaffolding for the 5Pointz luxury apartment tower (built on the site of the now-destroyed street-art mecca) has moved into what Turrell intended as an unobstructed view of the sky in his Skyspace installation, titled Meeting, at the MoMA outpost in Queens. So the museum has agreed to his request to close the installation until the scaffolding is no longer visible. — Hyperallergic

€3.1 Million EU Project To Revamp And Modernize Egypt’s National Museum

“The renovation project, entitled Transforming the Egyptian Museum of Cairo, … focus[es] on areas such as collection management, communications and audience engagement.” The Louvre and the British Museum will participate, along with institutions in Turin, Berlin and the Dutch city of Leiden. (But they won’t be sending the Rosetta Stone back to Cairo.) — The Art Newspaper

Biography Of Jewish Girl Hidden By Author’s Family In WWII Wins Costa Prize For Book Of The Year

“[Bart van Es’s] The Cut Out Girl beat Sally Rooney’s widely praised novel Normal People, Stuart Turton’s debut novel The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, JO Morgan’s poetry collection Assurances and Hilary McKay’s children’s book The Skylarks’ War to the award for the year’s ‘most enjoyable’ book.” — The Guardian

Harry Christophers To Step Down As Artistic Director Of Boston’s Handel & Haydn Society

The British conductor — the second man to lead the oldest performing arts organization in the U.S. since it made the switch to period instruments and a small-ish professional chorus in 1989 — will have been with H&H for 12 seasons and recorded a dozen albums with the group when he steps down at the end of the 2020-21 season. — WBUR (Boston)

Marcel Marceau Was A World War II Resistance Hero Who Saved Dozens Of Jewish Children

Recruited by his cousin, resistance leader Georges Loinger (who recently passed away at age 108), Marceau used his mime and acting skills to convince German and Vichy authorities that he was a teacher or youth leader taking young kids (who happened to be Jewish and incognito) to an exercise camp (that happened to be on the Swiss border). — The History Channel

‘Unnerving Kitsch’: The Problem With The New KGB Museum In New York

The flyer says the place offers a “journey back to socialism.” You can get a picture taken in an old restraining chair, or at a commissar’s desk in his coat; you can dial-a-dictator on an old rotary phone and hear Stalin or Brezhnev give a speech. It’s all “blithely morally neutral,” writes Masha Gessen. “In the absence of any historical or political context, everything becomes an exhibit. And, with enough cheer and an address in Chelsea, anything can be kitsch.” — The New Yorker

Hemingway Hoped ‘The Old Man And The Sea’ Could Be Made Into A Play. Now, At Last, It Has

The novel was adapted for film three times, but none were considered successes. (Hemingway hated the first one, saying that Spencer Tracy looked more like Gertrude Stein than a Cuban fisherman.) A.E. Hotchner, who was both Papa H’s longtime friend and his biographer (and is now 101), has partnered with his son to make the novel’s first stage version, which opens in Pittsburgh on Feb. 1. — The Observer (UK)