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A Museum Director Who Makes Way Over Scale (But Why?)

How do museums set salaries for their directors? That’s what Tacoma News-Tribune reporter Jen Graves wants to know after noting that the small Museum of Glass: International Center for Contemporary Art has paid its director $282,000 in salary and $34,000 in benefits. The median museum director salary in the Western United States is $188,000. “At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, an operation roughly 10 times the size of MoG and with $280 million in net assets, the director makes $267,245.” So what has the glass museum got for its money from its departing director?

Public Broadcasting Fights Back

Last week a US Congressional committee voted to cut money for public broadcasting by 25 percent. This week, public TV and radio is fighting back. “Faced with their biggest budget battle in a decade, public broadcasters are waging local campaigns through the Internet and on-air advertising to oppose legislation that, some claim, would weaken their ability to produce local programming and cripple their sister stations in rural areas of the country.”

Networks Look Outside The Building

US TV networks are increasingly turning to outside producers for their shows. “No one in Hollywood expects the networks to stop favoring their own. But at a time when some conglomerates like Viacom are reassessing the benefits of bigness – and when a hyper-competitive ratings race makes closing off any possible advantage foolhardy – most network and studio heads have come to realize that an overreliance on their own fare can lead to creative and financial trouble.”

Dismantling Iraq

A new book details the cultural history of Iraq and its pillaging. “Conceived as an educational tool and a plea for help, the book offers a history of the region and its art, as well as an account of the devastation that occurred in April 2003, when looters ran rampant through the museum in Baghdad.”

Opera 1, Moths 0

London’s Covent Garden has come up with a solution to a costly moth problem. “In a plot that could have come from an opera, males attempt to mate with the false females, but do not succeed. Until the new pheromone traps were pioneered by Exosect, a company with close links to Southampton University, moths were costing the Royal Opera House tens of thousands of pounds a year. The worst affected are ballet dancers’ costumes, which get engrained with sweat, clothes moths’ favourite taste.”

Master Builder

“The name of Arup rings through postwar architecture like a subsonic rumble. This extraordinary firm has had a largely invisible hand in many of the iconic structures of the past 50 years, from the Sydney Opera House through the Pompidou Centre, James Frazer Stirling’s Stuttgart Art Gallery, Norman Foster’s Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, right up to the Swiss Re Tower and the London Eye. If you’ve got a huge or difficult project to sort out, like a bridge or a skyscraper or an airport, Arup is one of the few companies to turn to.”

Why Are America’s School Textbooks So Bad?

“At least 21 states, including large and powerful California, Texas and Florida, have committees that decide which books can be used in public schools. The scrubbing and sanitizing that are imposed to satisfy the big states have affected all the commercially produced textbooks. That means that even states without adoption laws end up using the same books as the ones written to please California and Texas. Their decisions have been excoriated by spokespeople for both the right and the left. Their fear of offending any politically connected group means the textbooks they approve are often the dumbest and dullest of the bunch.”