The plaintiffs’ suits against the company and its artistic director, Albert Schultz, seek a total of well over $6 million. At the board’s direction, Schultz has taken what’s being called a leave of absence, pending investigation; executive director Leslie Lester, Schultz’s wife, has voluntarily done the same.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Spotify Slapped With $1.6 Billion Lawsuit
“Wixen, a Californian company that collects royalties on behalf of artists including Tom Petty, Neil Young, Janis Joplin and the Doors, alleges that Spotify ‘took a shortcut’ when it cut deals with major labels to host their back catalogues. … The news comes at an awkward moment for the tech company, which is reportedly preparing for a stock market sale.”
Another Deaccession Uproar: La Salle University To Sell 46 Works From Its Museum
The Catholic university in Philadelphia, “which has struggled to plug a projected deficit in recent years, plans to sell 46 pieces of art from its prized museum collection to help fund teaching and learning initiatives in its new strategic plan, officials said Tuesday. The sale, which includes masterpieces by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Georges Rouault, and Albert Gleizes, could raise more than $7 million, officials estimate.”
Former NY City Ballet Dancers Wonder If Board’s Investigation Into Peter Martins Will Be Cover-Up
Kelly Cass Boal, who was one of the first to publicly accuse Martins of physical violence, describes her interview with the lawyer leading the inquiry as more like a cross-examination than a fact-finding effort: “I felt she was uninterested in the facts, and was just trying to mess up the timeline. She asked me, ‘Why weren’t you watching the performance when he grabbed you?’ … She was trying to spin it that I wasn’t being punished.” Another dancer says the same attorney refused to allow her to record her interview or bring a witness.
Royal New Zealand Ballet Chief Patricia Barker Answers Reports Of Turmoil
“The former Pacific Northwest Ballet star and concurrent director of Grand Rapids Ballet took over RNZB last June, and although the most troubling aspects of what has been reported, such as accusations of abusive behavior and other workplace grievances, pre-date her appointment, some complaints have been directed at her.” Steve Sucato gets her side of the story.
Paris’s Quai Branly Museum Is Ready To Return African Art
“French President Emmanuel Macron’s pledge to return African artefacts is an ‘awesome challenge’, according to Stéphane Martin, the president of the ethnographic Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac Museum in Paris. … The Quai Branly museum has a collection of more than 70,000 artefacts from sub-Saharan Africa, and displays 1,000 of them in its galleries on the Left Bank of the Seine.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 01.03.18
It’s complicated, or complex, or chaos, or…
The idea of “best practices” has always driven me a bit nuts. The world is full of complexity and context and interconnections, I figured. … read more
AJBlog: The Artful Manager Published 2018-01-03
A New Leonardo?
Has the unprecedented sale of Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi brought more paintings by the Renaissance master out of the closet? Over the courses of this fall and winter, some people were speculating that that would happen, … read more
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2018-01-03
More on La Salle’s Sales: My Revealing Q&A with the University’s Spokesperson
La Salle University’s website provides surprisingly scant information about its astonishing plan under a relatively new president to dispatch to Christie’s some 46 objects from its museum’s collection to raise funds for non-museum activities. … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2018-01-03
Across the Pacific
“To all Sailors, Soldiers, Marines, wherever ye may be and to all mermaids, flying dragons, spirits of the deep, devil chasers, and all other living creatures of the yellow seas, Greetings: Know ye that …” read more
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2018-01-03
If The FCC Won’t Enforce Net Neutrality, These States Will
“Along with pursuing lawsuits over irregularities in the FCC process (like millions of fake citizen comments being submitted), several states are crafting their own net neutrality laws, which they will start debating as new legislative sessions commence this month. They would prohibit internet service providers from blocking or hindering access to legal online content sources, or from offering premium-bandwidth ‘fast lane’ deals to others.”
How Facebook Plans To Start Competing With YouTube (But Not Netflix)
Facebook VP of product Fidji Simo: “When we look at the content that’s really building these engaged communities, it’s content from creators that are vlogging for 15 minutes. … We see incredibly engaged communities around knitting. That’s something that won’t build a massive community like a big TV show, but if you do that for everyone’s passion projects and you can connect everyone to the creator, it can be extremely powerful.”
How Did Mongolia Start Producing Crops Of Gifted Young Opera Singers?
Westerners don’t think of this huge, remote, sparsely populated country as an operatic hotbed, but singers from there have started taking big prizes at competitions like Moscow’s Tchaikovsky and Cardiff’s Singer of the World. Kate Molleson went there, and traveled 1,000 miles from the capital, Ulaanbaatar, to a lake in the Gobi Desert, to find out why.