John Ruskin famously said he had made a bonfire of a pile of JMW Turner’s paintings. But a researchers now says it never happened. “It looks as if the notoriously prudish Ruskin, who worshipped Turner to the point of idolatry, could not bring himself to destroy his work. Instead he buried them in paper, interring them in a tortuous numbering system he devised himself, or in the case of some detailed anatomical details of women’s genitals, folding over the page to conceal them, undoubtedly with a shudder of revulsion.”
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UK Museums’ Popularity Due To Free Admissions, Lottery
Visits to UK museums were up again last year, and the government attributes increases to its policy of making museums free to the public. “Curiously, visits to museums that used to charge went up by only 1.7% while visits to those that had never charged shot up by 11.4%. Among the successes of the “always free” museums is the National Gallery in London, which increased visitors (after a couple of poor years) by 14% last year to 4.96m. It has moved ahead of the British Museum (4.8m) to become Britain’s most popular museum.”
Scream: Arrest In Munch Theft
Norwegian police have made an arrest in the theft of two Munch paintings last summer from Oslo’s Munch Museum. “An unnamed 37-year-old man has been charged with the robbery, after being taken in for questioning last week. He denies any involvement and claims to have an alibi.”
In Praise Of The Parking Garage
“Like all buildings, a parking garage can either bring vitality to a city or suck the energy right out of it. There is, of course, the eyesore garage we all know and despise, the three-dimensional cash station for the garage owner that assaults passersby with crumbling concrete and stark fluorescent lights. Yet there also are parking garages with ground-floor shops that enliven sidewalks, and facades that acknowledge that people look at garages as well as drive into them.”
Reviving Salieri
La Scala’s decision to reopen after its renovations with a long-ignored Salieri opera is a high-profile indication that the long-maligned composer’s reputation is being rehabilitated. Why now?
Internet Royalties Add Up
Royalties for music streamed over the internet is beginning to add up to serious money. And, unlike conventional broadcast radio, royalties are paid not to composers, but to performers and copyright holders.
Sontag – An Intellectual With Style
Susan Sontag was an intellectual original. Her work “made a radical break with traditional postwar criticism in America, gleefully blurring the boundaries between high and popular culture. She advocated an aesthetic approach to the study of culture, championing style over content. She was concerned, in short, with sensation, in both meanings of the term.”
Berlin Operas Get First Director
Michael Schindhelm, currently director of Switzerland’s Basel Theater, has been apointed the first general director of “a foundation set up this year to oversee Berlin’s three opera houses. In 2003, the city threatened to merge two of the opera houses until the federal government stepped in with extra arts funding. This year, the three houses were placed under the new foundation in a move meant to enhance coordination and cut costs.”
Susan Sontag, 71
“The writer, who had suffered from leukaemia, died at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Calling herself an “obsessed moralist”, Sontag was the author of 17 books and a lifelong human rights activist.”
Philanthropic Nature – Britain Lags Behind
Breitain’s level of charitable giving is quite low, especially compared with America. “Victorian Britain invented modern philanthropy, but in the 20th century an important strand of British opinion, mainly on the left, came to see charity as a poor alternative to state-funded provision, Americans have had no such qualms. Since the time of de Tocqueville’s early 19th-century celebration of voluntary associations as a cornerstone of US democracy, philanthropy has enjoyed an honoured place in the American story.”