Robert Storr has been named dean of the Yale School of Art. “Storr will have a five-year appointment, Yale said in a statement yesterday. He is a former curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and a contributing editor at Art in America magazine. Next year he will be the first American commissioner of the Venice Biennale.”
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NY Library Buys Into Burroughs
The New York Public Library has purchased an extensive personal archive by the author William S. Burroughs. Burroughs is best known for the controversial novel, Naked Lunch, which was at the center of a landmark court case on censorship in the 1960s. The archive, which includes 11,000 pages of written material, will join Jack Kerouac’s papers in the library’s collection, making it “perhaps the premier institution for the study of the Beats.”
Writers Warn Of Totalitarianism
Salman Rushdie and a group of other writers have published a statement in a French paper warning of Islamic totalitarianism. “The writers say the violence sparked by the publication of cartoons satirising the Prophet Muhammad shows the need to fight for secular values and freedom.”
Librarians Vote Mockingbird The “Must Read” Book
A survey of librarians to mark World Book Day has voted “To Kill A Mockingbird” by Harper Lee as the “book adults should read before they die.” They “came out in favour of The Bible in second place and The Lord of the Rings trilogy in third place. But international best-seller The Da Vinci Code only gained one nomination.”
Authors Protest London Book Fair Producers
Authors including Will Self, Ian McEwan, Nick Hornby, JM Coetzee and Mike Leigh are protesting against the organizer of the London Book Fair. The authors are complaining that the producer also organised Europe’s biggest arms fair in London last year.
Is Scots A Language?
“There are any number of Scots words still in common use, but most public discourse [in Scotland] is conducted in the language England still calls its own. It is still possible, meanwhile, to find any number of otherwise distinguished English academics who dismiss all claims for Scots.” So the question remains: “Is the leid a real language, or merely ‘the bastard offspring of a superior tongue?'”
Are Louisville Orch’s Execs Out Of Their Depth?
ArtsJournal blogger Drew McManus says that there’s absolutely no reason that the Louisville Orchestra can’t find its way out of the fiscal hole it is in, but “ignorance, inexperience, and financial stress were conspiring to damn the negotiations [on a new musicians’ contract] before they began.” Neither the orchestra’s board chair nor its executive director have ever participated in a collective bargaining process before, and the lack of experience apparently led them to lash out in anger the moment the musicians declined to immediately accept their terms.
Value To Be Determined By Expert Blather
Art prices have been skyrocketing in recent years, and not only in the case of works by the old masters. “Boosted by an influx of Asian buyers keen to hoover up the classics of the modernist canon, the recent sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in London broke many records,” and the new high water marks likely won’t last long. But commerce aside, assigning value to art is a tricky business, especially in the long term, because “by far the most important factor in making art works valuable is what experts say and write about them.”
Those Shadowy Auction Winners
“One of the great contradictions of the art market is that it simultaneously has a thirst for publicity and an obsession with secrecy… Once a work of art has been sold, a veil begins to descend. Auction houses often trumpet big prices, yet they rarely reveal details about buyers. Meanwhile, dealers at fairs often refuse to confirm that a sale has taken place, let alone identify their clients. Artworks suddenly move out of sight into the discreet world of anonymous collectors, sometimes vanishing for generations.” So a new book devoted entirely to some of the world’s more reclusive collectors is bound to make a big splash.
You Mean They’re Singing Words?
Should operas performed in English still have surtitles projected above the stage? It sounds like a silly question, unless, of course, you’ve ever been to an opera ostensibly sung in English. Now, English National Opera, which translates all its operas into English and once had its director declare that he would “bomb the London Coliseum” if surtitles were introduced, has quietly begun using them. Not everyone is happy, but a few diehard surtitle haters have begun to admit that they could be won over.