Two execs from the auction house talked to reporter Anny Shaw about the now-world-famous self-shredding painting. They insist that Sotheby’s was not warned in advance — and Banksy himself issued a statement that said “no collusion” [sic]. But there were some suspicious stipulations for the sale.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Banksy Really Meant To Shred The Entire Painting, But The Shredder Jammed
“In [a] video posted on Tuesday entitled Shred the Love (the director’s cut), Banksy shows himself constructing the shredding mechanism inside a frame. It then cuts to the auction room and the moment of partial destruction. At the end, the video notes: ‘In rehearsals it worked every time …’ as it shows the piece going the whole way through the shredding machine.”
Funding The Arts Through National Lotteries Is A Terrible Idea
“Since its introduction in the mid-1990s, the UK National Lottery has made a lot of poor people slightly poorer while equipping Arts Councils to enrich an arts sector that disproportionately serves the better-off. It is not hard to picture an old woman applying coin edge to scratch card, with no more chance of winning the jackpot than of stepping inside the gallery she has helped to build. Can we still claim that the arts are a ‘good cause’ when ill-spent money is increasingly used like this?”
Toronto Symphony Posts Surplus Of $2.3 Million (!)
“Although the TSO has been in the black for many years, the surplus for 2017-18 is significant. After many years of small, slow declines in ticket revenue, the organization posted a 17 per cent rise in ticket sales over the 2016-17 season. Subscription revenue has been steady, but revenue from single-ticket sales last season was up 26 per cent. This is a remarkable accomplishment, largely due to interim CEO Gary Hanson, a veteran orchestra manager.”
With String Quartets In A Brewery, NC Classical Radio Station Courts New Listeners
“Organized by WDAV in Davidson, and held at a brewery in Charlotte, the quarterly Small Batch Concert Series has attracted standing-room-only crowds of more than 200 people for its four concerts to date” — a turnout “much bigger” than previous station events, says the general manager, who adds that at every concert he encounters people who didn’t know that metro Charlotte even had a full-time classical radio station.
New NHS Program Uses Dance To Help The Elderly Avoid Falls
“Dance to Health started with a hunch: that the arts have the potential to deliver health improvement more effectively and more cost-effectively than the NHS. We needed a major health challenge that the arts might solve. We lighted upon older people falling over.”
Pokémon Issues Trading Cards Based On Munch’s ‘The Scream’
“Featured in the lineup are Eevee, Mimikyu, Rowlett, Psyduck (my personal favorite here) and Pikachu. Grabbing all of them requires making separate purchases, including buying an expansion pack from the Pokémon Center. (How to get a Pikachu card remains a mystery for now, though.)” The line of cards is being launched on the same day that a major Munch restrospective opens at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum.
Iceberg, Melting
Hungry beyond myself, I come to a cartoon field of wet, glossy globes. Leaping into mud, I get on my knees and lean over, biting and choking to swallow one down. The way nightmares work, I see the lettuces, run, bend and chew — again and again. Then I wake up, blinking and faint.
Propwatch: the curtain in ‘Wise Children’
Is a curtain – that fabric lodged in the fabric of the building – a prop? Usually, no; but Vicki Mortimer’s design for Wise Children – adapted from Angela Carter’s deliciously rorty final novel – includes mobile pictures of stage curtains of various sizes, from toy-theatre miniature to human-height-plus. Identical in all but scale, they present the very quintessence of curtain.
Recent Listening: Quartette Oblique
Michael Stephans, David Liebman, Marc Copland, Drew Gress: Quartette Oblique (Sunnyside)