Violence erupted in the Middle East over the weekend as crowds of Muslims protested Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad. “Those attacks earned widespread condemnation from European nations and the U.S., which accused the Syrian government of backing the protests. The Danish foreign minister said: ‘enough is enough. Now it has become more than a case about the drawings: Now there are forces that wants a confrontation between our cultures. It is in no one’s interest, neither them or us.’ Syria blamed Denmark for the protests, criticizing the Scandinavian nation for refusing to apologize for the caricatures of Islam’s holiest figure.”
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The China Factor – Getting In To Western Art
“China’s spectacular economic rise over the past quarter-century has started to create enormous wealth, and prices for Chinese art have risen steeply, especially in the last three years. But Chinese art collectors have barely begun to show interest in Western masterpieces. Few doubt that in the years to come, wealthy Chinese on the mainland and in Hong Kong will become important buyers of Western art.”
Important Art – Return To Sender? (A List)
Numerous important artifacts in major museums have disputed ownership. Roger Atwood makes a list…
Negotiating The Met’s Return Policy
The Metropolitan Museum has agreed to send disputed artifacts back to Italy. So now the negotiating for how and when intensifies. “The Met has requested that it be allowed to keep the krater and a disputed set of Hellenistic silver at least through the end of next year so that the objects can be on display for the opening of the museum’s expanded Roman galleries in spring 2007. The two sides are also still discussing the possibility that the vase, which the museum bought for $1 million in 1972, might be allowed to return to the Met at some point as a loan from the Italian government and remain in the United States for as long as four years.”
Our Eroding Cultural Lingua Franca
“Not so long ago it seemed as if we all spoke the same pop-culture language. But in an era of 500 TV channels, billions of Web pages, unlimited Netflix rentals, and iPods with music libraries of Smithsonian proportions, popular entertainment has suddenly become mind-bogglingly vast. As the overlap between what we all watch, read, and listen to steadily erodes, the water cooler has become a modern-day tower of Babel, where conversations sound like the jumbled voices emanating from the jungle in “Lost.” (If that reference is lost on you then, well, Q.E.D.)”
The Arts Race
Colleges are escalating their arts offerings. “According to College Board data, there was a 44 percent increase from 1996 to 2005 in the number of high school seniors who say that they plan to major in visual and performing arts. For business and commerce majors, the gain was much less modest, at 12 percent, while the percentage who plan to major in social sciences and history has decreased by 15 percent.”
Fears That Go Bump In The Night (Live! Onstage!)
Chicago theatres are opening their stages to anxiety this season. “Audiences seeking to exorcise the demons that plague us in the midnight hours can face down their fears a little earlier, in the collective warmth of a theater, and emerge cleansed of anxiety when the lights come up and the world rearranges itself around us, still intact for the time being.”
So It Matters How You Play Carnegie Hall…
“The distinction between renting the hall and being invited by Carnegie’s programmers may not strike many concertgoers, who see the same black concert dress onstage and hear the same canon of orchestral works. But the difference is sharp, both in prestige and in fees.”
Cartoon Culture = Clash Of Civilizations?
It’s easy to leap to the extremes of the uproar over the Danish cartoons of Muhammad. “Perhaps these cartoons really do crystallize why Islam and the West are incompatible and must hunker down for a ‘long war.’ The only other option, it seems, is to remember that if vastly different worldviews can find no accommodation on a subject, then perhaps it’s too early, in human history, to have the conversation.”
Twain As Literary Lincoln
A new biography of Mark Twain attempts to measure the author’s importance to American literature: “His way of seeing and hearing things changed America’s way of seeing and hearing things … he was the Lincoln of American literature.’ In his prime, a century after the Declaration of Independence, Twain was a Yankee original who rendered the vocabulary and tone of the American vernacular, previously despised, in a way that was neither parody, nor caricature, but literature.”