An auction of paintings by Congo the chimpanzee have sold at auction in London for more than $25,000. “Congo, born in 1954, produced about 400 drawings and paintings between ages 2 and 4. He died in 1964 of tuberculosis. The three abstract, tempera paintings were auctioned at Bonhams in London alongside works by impressionist master Renoir and pop art provocateur Andy Warhol. But while Warhol’s and Renoir’s work didn’t sell, bidders lavished attention on Congo’s paintings.”
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Is HBO Losing Its Lustre?
“Through the end of May, HBO’s average prime-time viewership was down to 900,000 from 1.2 million for the same period in 2004. The weekly “Deadwood” audience has dropped by 2 million and “Carnivale” was canceled, while “Six Feet Under” and “Entourage” both started new seasons with smaller audiences than the year before…”
A New Leader For English National Ballet
The troubled English National Ballet is close to getting a new director. “Harold King, 56, is viewed as a possible saviour of a company that had to be bailed out last summer by the Arts Council with a £2.3 million rescue package and which is said to be still struggling financially.”
Town Considers Censoring Comedians
An English town considers censoring comedians who perform blue material. “Councillors in Newcastle upon Tyne are to be asked to consider banning performers whose acts are branded offensive, racist, sexist or homophobic. It followed calls from the public sector union Unison to ban the comedian Roy Chubby Brown from playing the City Hall, where he has appeared regularly for 20 years.”
Is Boston A Theatre Town?
It was a good year for theatre in Boston – two new theatres, a couple of Tony-nominated plays… But is Boston a great theatre town? Depends on how you mean it…
Will Ireland Make Artists Pay Taxes?
For the past 35 years, Ireland has exempted artists from paying taxes. “But Celtic Tiger Ireland is now being accused of reverting to its old philistine ways as the government consults in secret on whether to scrap the scheme. Detractors claim that tax-avoiding British writers are taking advantage, and that an elite of millionaire popstars is using it to get rich. The Arts Council is outraged, arguing that Ireland faces losing ‘one of the most enlightened pieces of legislation ever introduced for the arts in any country’.”
Killing A Memorial By Committee
Any chance of making something meaningful of the Ground Zero memorial in Lower Manhattan is all but faded. “As the wrangling over the nearby Freedom Tower has shown, nothing here goes smoothly. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation is quietly pushing to wrap up plans for the memorial by mid-July. But after two and a half years of tinkering, the city is likely to end up with a memorial geared to tourists with short attention spans rather than to the serious contemplation of human loss. Worse, the constant revisions continue to gobble up space for the living, threatening to transform the site into a theme park haunted by death.”
A New Way Of Training Musicians In Minn.
The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the University of Minnesota have teamed up to take a different approach to training musicians. “We’re trying to address the fact that orchestra jobs are changing dramatically in the 21st century. The demands that are being placed on members of orchestras, the breadth of musical skills, the scope of interpersonal skills they have to bring, the score of entrepreneurial skills they need, are vastly different from the expectations of 25 to 30 years ago.”
Thomas Krens: Back On Track
Thomas Krens’s career, which “seemed to have hit the buffers at the start of the year, when the supremely generous chairman of his trustees, Peter B Lewis, resigned in disgust at his director’s manic, expansionist policies, is back on track. He has come up with the one thing that cannot but command the attention of his severest critics: an unmistakable blockbuster work of art. Krens has been instrumental in the installation of Richard Serra’s The Matter of Time: several hundred tons of raw steel in a sequence of rippling twisted curves.”
Do Book Review Sections Still Matter?
“Scott Pack, whose day job as buying manager at Waterstone’s gives him considerable powers over the relationship between writers and readers, has recently been hired as a columnist for Bookseller magazine and in his first outing took a swipe at the broadsheets’ books pages, asking, essentially, what is the point? ‘They should inspire reading. They should excite, stimulate, agitate and empower readers to discover new books.’ But they’re not…