Playwright Harold Pinter gets a special Evening Standard theatre award as outstanding dramatist of the past 50 years. “Amid cheers, Pinter accepted the award, a statuette, happily – and with a barbed memory. ‘Forty six years ago my [first] play The Birthday Party was performed in London and slaughtered by the critics – particularly by the Evening Standard, by the way. But in the early new year I’m happy to say that rehearsals will start for the fourth revival in London’.”
Blog
Being Smart – Is It OverRated?
In academia, the top complement these days is to be called smart. “But why this preponderance of smart? What exactly does it mean? Why not, instead, competent? Or knowledgeable? Or conscientious? We might value those qualities as well, but they seem pedestrian, lacking the particular distinction of being smart. Historically, smart has taken on its approbative sense relatively recently.”
What Constitutes A Successful Museum?
From the outside, today’s American museums look prosperous and happy. “Yet all is not well in the art museum profession,” writes Maxwell Anderson. “Within the confines of their boardrooms, American art museums today are beset as never before by disagreement about their priorities. The difficulty in measuring success in art museums today stems in part from the fact that, over the last generation, art museums have shifted their focus away from collection-building and toward various kinds of attention to the public—without balancing these two imperatives and without a consensus on what constitutes best practices in the latter.” So how do you measure success at the modern American museum?
FCC’s Powell Has First Amendment Duties Backward
FCC chairman Michael Powell’s recent illogical and contradictory pronouncements on the “indecency” battles he’s overseeing are indefensible. “Powell has got his responsibilities under the First Amendment backwards. Over tremendous public protest, he foisted upon the American public an excessively-concentrated media that restricts free expression. Then, when that excessively-concentrated media inevitably produces indecent material, he censors it. The public loses both ways.”
New Barnes Key To Philly Arts Boulevard?
With the addition of the Barnes and the possibility of a new Calder Museum, Philadelphia’s Franklin Parkway might indeed become a long-envisioned grand arts boulevard. “The Parkway, of course, already has a lot going for it. The area is home to the Art Museum, the Rodin Museum, the Free Library, the Franklin Institute, the Academy of Natural Sciences, and Moore College. But there are huge gaps along the broad, tree-lined boulevard that make it hard for visitors and natives alike to think of the 1.1 miles from LOVE Park to the Art Museum as an entity.”
Washington State Tax Agents Go After Art Collectors
Inspired by stories of New York art collectors avoiding sales tax on their purchases, Washington State revenue agents subpoenaed records of an art shipper and went after state residents who hadn’t paid a “use” tax (essentially a sales tax) on their out-of-state art purchases. Thousands of collectors may have been dinged for the taxes – plus penalties, which can run as high as 50 percent…
Phoenix Symphony’s New Music Director
The Phoenix Symphony has chosen Michael Christie, a 30-year-old American, as its new music director. Christie has been artistic director of the Queensland Orchestra in Brisbane, Australia for three years. He succeeds German-born maestro Hermann Michael, who retired last year at age 66 after seven years with the symphony.
Documenta Director Gets SF Gig
The director of Documenta 11 has a new gig – dean of academic affairs at the San Francisco Art Institute. “Most people in the art world know Enwezor, 41, as the director of Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany, the 2002 edition of one of world’s most prestigious survey exhibitions of contemporary art. He made it an even more international event than usual by staging, in advance of the exhibition, topical conferences in Vienna, New Delhi, St. Lucia and Lagos, Nigeria.”
Deal To Digitize The Repositories Of Human Knowledge
Google and some of the world’s biggest libraries announce a deal to digitize their collections. “The goal is to expand the Web beyond its current valuable, if eclectic, body of material and create a digital card catalog and searchable library for the world’s books, scholarly papers and special collections. Within two decades, most of the world’s knowledge will be digitized and available, one hopes for free reading on the Internet, just as there is free reading in libraries today.”
From Blog To Book
Where are our new writers coming from? Some publishers think it’s blogs. “Sometimes publishers are interested in publishing elements of the blogs in book form; mostly they simply enjoy the blogger’s writing and want to publish a novel or nonfiction book by the blogger, usually on a topic unrelated to the blog.”