Author: Matthew Westphal

Brooklyn Museum To Sell 12 Works To Pay For Maintaining The Rest Of Its Art

“It is the kind of sale that once would have engendered criticism, perhaps even sanctions: The Brooklyn Museum is putting 12 works up for auction at Christie’s next month — including paintings by Cranach, Courbet and Corot — to raise funds for the care of its collection. But it is now completely within the parameters of loosened regulations, which are themselves a measure of just how financially damaging the coronavirus pandemic has been for cultural institutions.” – The New York Times

Arts Groups Could Finally Get Insurance Companies To Pay COVID Claims Following UK High Court Ruling

“Many companies whose revenues have been severely hit by the COVID-19 pandemic have been disappointed when told by their insurers that the very add-on policies that they thought would protect them in such instances do not apply in the case of havoc wreaked by a previously unknown virus. So the [Financial Conduct Authority] stepped in on their behalf to clarify the situation, examining 21 sample wordings from policies. The High Court ruling largely found in favour of the FCA.” – The Art Newspaper

Young Japanese Musicians Rally To Save The Art Of The Shamisen

The centuries-old three-stringed lute, a mainstay of traditional Japanese art music, remained popular up at least to the turn of the millennium, but most of the remaining players today are well over 60. With the pandemic paralyzing an already shrinking market, the country’s largest shamisen maker was about to close when it was rescued (for now) by an online fundraising campaign. There’s some hope that a newer style called tsugaru shamisen, livelier and less austere than the genteel music of Kyoto geishas, can keep interest in the instrument alive. – The Observer (UK)

Randall Kenan, Magical Realist Writer Of The American South. Dead At 57

“[He was] an award-winning gay Black writer whose fiction, set largely in a North Carolina hamlet similar to the one where he grew up, artfully blended myth, magic, mysticism and realism.” That village, a sort of Macondo, N.C., was called Tims Creek and, in Kenan’s fictional world, had been founded by a runaway slave named Pharaoh. – The New York Times

New Edition Of ‘Pride And Prejudice’ Prints Characters’ Letters In Period Handwriting

Naturally, each character’s script is different, modeled by a calligrapher on surviving correspondence from England ca. 1800 and matched to each individual letter-writer in the novel by project curator Barbara Heller. (Elizabeth Bennet’s handwriting is copied from that of Austen herself.)
Here’s how Heller went about it. – Smithsonian Magazine

Planned Museum Near Taj Mahal Will Now Ignore Muslim Dynasty That Built It

“The museum was meant to showcase the arms, art and fashion of the Mughals, Muslim rulers who reigned over [much of] the Indian subcontinent from the 16th to the 18th centuries. But officials this week in Agra, home to the Taj Mahal — the world’s most famous example of Mughal-era architecture and India’s best-known building — had another idea: a complete overhaul of the museum so that it would instead celebrate India’s Hindu majority, leaders and history.” – The New York Times

‘Tenet’ Was Hollywood’s Great Hope To Revive American Moviegoing. It Didn’t.

It worked overseas: the Warner Bros. blockbuster has grossed $207 million altogether, but less than $30 million of that has been in the U.S. Worse, the much-touted $20 million first-weekend domestic gross turns out to have been heavily padded. These figures are scaring studios off their major release schedules. “Now the question isn’t whether theaters can return to normalcy,” writes David Sims, “but whether they can survive this pandemic at all.” – The Atlantic