“An ancient Indian sculpture quietly consigned for sale in a New York gallery by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will be returned to the museum, LACMA Director Michael Govan said, as the museum reconsiders policies on the perpetually controversial issue of such ‘de-accessions.'”
Author: sbergman
Venezuelan Distributor Wins Children’s Book Award
“Banco del Libro, a nonprofit Venezuelan network that has distributed books to children for nearly half a century, is the 2007 winner of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for Literature. The award, which includes a cash prize of $710,000, was established by the Swedish government in 2002 and is the largest children’s book award in the world.”
Hamlet On Trial
Hamlet may have been a protagonist to Shakespeare, but to any conventional legal mind at the time, he would have to have been judged a murderer. Of course, he spent no small amount of time claiming to be insane, as well, a condition which is occasionally used to mitigate murder charges. This week, as part of Washington, D.C.’s ongoing Shakespeare festival, Hamlet’s case came before “no less a jurist than Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, [as] a jury of Washingtonians deliberated over whether Hamlet was in his right mind when he stabbed Polonius to death.”
Humans On The Edge Of Humanity
The question of extreme human behavior, both good and bad, is an intriguing one, especially when trying to measure one life against all others. Was Hitler evil on the extreme end of a normal human scale, or were his acts out of all proportion to the rest of humanity, placing him on his own continuum? Was Shakespeare brilliant out of all proportion to normal humanity, or was he merely one of the best on a more Earthbound scale? Journalist Ron Rosenbaum has made a career out of attempting to answer such questions.
Growing London, Gracefully
As London’s skyline continues to grow upward and outward, can the city prevent the kind of runaway development that leaves some cities looking cluttered and without focus? Those in charge believe that progress doesn’t have to mean letting the inmates run the asylum.
What Fresh Horror Hath Bridget Jones Wrought?
“The women who so identified with Bridget Jones a decade ago have now settled down and had children. The book industry noticed – and the current glut of ‘yummy-mummy lit’ is the result.” What is ‘yummy-mummy,’ you may well ask? (You may well regret asking.) Suffice to say, attaching the “literature” tag to the unbelievably formulaic genre at all is probably stretching credulity.
Passe Muraille Looks Across Town For New Chief
Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille has named Andy McKim, longtime associate director of the city’s Tarragon Theatre, as its new artistic director. “He won the job in a competition that began last June; there were 25 applicants from across the country and a short list of six were interviewed and asked to submit vision statements. Forty years old next year, Passe Muraille has been a seminal force in the development of Canadian theatre.”
Austen, Asked and Answered
The Jane Austen fan club is real, it is global, and if you question its power, just step into any bookstore and utter the word “overrated” in the general direction of a copy of “Emma.” (Then duck.) But what drives the mania? “Why can’t folks get enough of Austen’s Regency-era escapism that typically features a boy, a girl, a great love story, only a hint of sex, the great divides of class and money, plus an abundance of heaving bosoms and tight breeches?”
Too Many Batons, Too Few Candidates?
With Daniel Barenboim gone and no new music director in sight, the Chicago Symphony has been entertaining a slew of guest conductors. But does such ever-changing podium leadership hurt the orchestra in the long run? More importantly, does the parade of guests make it difficult to judge who would truly make a good long-term partner for one of America’s great orchestras?
Indie Theatre, Enhanced
“An enhancement deal, conventionally, is when a commercial producer pays money to a nonprofit theater to help subsidize a production. If a theater decides to stage a big musical, for example, a commercial producer may throw in a few hundred thousand dollars — or a couple million in some cases — to raise the show’s production values and get a sense of how it would look in a bigger theater… Some theaters still fear that widespread knowledge of enhancement could jeopardize their reputations, their donations or even their nonprofit status. But as money has become increasingly scarce, the enhancement system has become accepted. In fact it is all but essential, even in Off Broadway’s small and midsize theaters.”