The last-minute interventions were revealed as part of a (none-too-favorable) independent review of Creative Scotland’s operations and processes that followed a major controversy over funding decisions last year. – Arts Professional
Blog
The Best-Selling Romance Novelist’s Baroque Tale Of Her Husband Trying To Poison Her (Is It True?)
About five years ago, the lawsuit claims, her hair and teeth started falling out and she developed intense nausea, tremors, disorientation, bone loss, facial swelling, and a peculiar metallic taste in her mouth. Tests of her hair, blood, and nails appear to reveal that she’d had high levels of toxic heavy metals in her system, including lithium, barium, arsenic, and mercury. Her suit notes that her husband had taken out a hefty life-insurance policy on her and “stood to gain millions of dollars upon her demise.” – New York Magazine
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Coming Back To Broadway
The show combines singing, rapping, comedy, beat-boxing and human percussion, with the performers taking suggestions from the audience to create “humorous bits, instantaneous songs and riffs, and fully realized musical numbers.” – Deadline
Arizona State University’s Project With James Turrell’s Roden Crater Says A Lot About Museums
As an artwork that encompasses a sprawling landmass as well as decades’ worth of crafting to customize it as a man-made offering to the cosmos, Roden Crater may be “an order of magnitude too great” for conventional means of art-world funding, said Michael Govan—whereas, “when a university comes in, they have particle accelerators. They see what Roden Crater is as an element of the university, and it makes sense, even by scale.” – ARTnews
The Radical Notion Of Harriet Tubman On The Twenty-Dollar Bill
Her expression is a stealthy contrast to the blank-eyed stare of Jackson, who would remain on the new twenty’s back side, demoted but not fully displaced. Should the bill one day materialize, the composition of Tubman and Jackson, two faces of the same vexed coin, would serve as an apt emblem of Americans’ habit of historical equivocation. White supremacists and abolitionists have no doubt that each contributed to the character of our country; there are “very fine people” on both sides of the bill. – The New Yorker
Why Paris Wants To Plant Forests Around Its Famous Landmarks
“Under a plan announced last week by Mayor Anne Hidalgo, thickets of trees will soon appear in what today are pockets of concrete next to landmark locations, including the Hôtel de Ville, Paris’s city hall; the Opera Garnier, Paris’s main opera house; the Gare de Lyon; and along the Seine quayside.” – CityLab
How The Baltimore Symphony Got Into Dire Straits
The Baltimore Sun obtained financial documents showing the orchestra’s fiscal health is in calamitous condition. Even factoring in additional state funding, the orchestra is projected to barely make payroll in July and August, according to cash forecasts for a 52-week season. The orchestra would likely end its fiscal year with an approximately $1.5 million deficit. – Baltimore Sun
Publishers Are Changing The Deals They Give To Libraries For Ebooks
“These days, the question driving the debate is whether publishers should sell ebooks to libraries at a higher price for a perpetual license, or at a lower price for a license that needs to be renewed,” with several major publishers moving from the former to the latter model. – Melville House
How to Attract Visitors to an “Esoteric” Exhibit
We’ve all seen museums do a lot of odd things in recent years in attempts to draw people into their galleries – cat video contests, crowdsourcing curatorial decisions, and so on. Some may have “worked,” in the sense that they did attract visitors – but generally only for the one exhibit or particular gesture of outreach. Instead, the Getty, with Book of Beasts, generally took the high road. No dumbing down, no “unicorn days,” no silly contests. – Judith H. Dobrzynski
Bravo De Salvo! Unpacking Donna’s Sudden Exit from the Whitney Museum’s Deputy Directorship
With less than two weeks’ notice, the Whitney Museum has announced that Donna De Salvo “has decided to leave” the museum where she served with great distinction for the past 15 years, in order to “pursue other interests.” Adding to the mystery of why this news was sprung on us so precipitously, Adam Weinberg, the Whitney’s director, enigmatically commented: “We wish her the best as she embarks on the next phase of her career.” – Lee Rosenbaum