Australia’s National Portrait Gallery has been short on exhibition space for a long time, but this year, “arguing that 90 per cent of its 1000-plus collection was acquired without government money, the gallery successfully lobbied the Howard Government for a campaign promise of $56.5 million to build a new place to show them. At its current home in the former parliamentary library in Old Parliament House, the NPG can display only about 100 works in its permanent hang.” The new building will likely be near Australia’s High Court building in Canberra.
Blog
Rothko, In His Own Words
A new collection of writings by Mark Rothko is casting new light on the professional life and personal tragedy of the artist. “It reflects the author’s intense intellectual curiosity and ambition, as well as a polemical streak. Though Rothko never directly refers to his own art, or even acknowledges that he is a painter, the book reveals something of his life at the time.”
What Really Made Mozart Tic
According to a new documentary, Mozart may have suffered from Tourette’s Syndrome. Researchers believe that the composer “self-medicated” his condition with his music, able to control his tics so long as he was absorbed in his art. The documentary highlights Mozart’s “inability to rein in impulses, the sudden boredom, his sense of mischief and his scatalogical obsession, which all point to Tourette’s.”
Bidding War Over The Next Big Children’s Author
For a high-school dropout, children’s author Stuart Hill was garnering an awful lot of attention from the intellectual set last week. “His book was at the centre of a bidding frenzy last week at the Frankfurt Book Fair, when 20 European publishing houses fought for its rights. It has already been bought by Scholastic, which publishes J K Rowling’s work in the US, and a film rights deal is in discussion.” Why all the fuss? Hill seems to be the consensus choice of publishers as the “next big thing” in kidlit, and everyone wants a piece.
Leaving The Nest
Magazines that attempt to explore the art world without confining themselves to a rigid format frequently fall prey to irrelevance or flippancy, but this autumn has seen the demise of what AJ Blogger Nancy Levinson calls “one of the strangest, smartest, most idiosyncratic and eccentric periodicals ever to maintain a quarterly publication schedule… Nest wasn’t everyone’s cup of oolong souchong, but it was the sort of periodical that’s become increasingly rare, not to say endangered: a magazine shaped by the passions and ideas of its leading editor.”
Gay Chic Comes To The Opera
The English National Opera will take the unusual step of launching its 2005-06 season with a potentially controversial new opera by Irish composer Gerald Barry. The work, entitled The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, concerns “lesbian love, passion and jealousy set against the backdrop of a fashion studio,” and will feature an all-female cast. The ENO’s new artistic director, Seán Doran, has made it clear that he intends to put his own stamp on the troubled company, and plans to mount at least two new works each season.
9/11 Report Nominated For Literary Award
The finalists have been announced for the National Book Awards, with a big surprise leading the non-fiction list: The report to the nation by the 9/11 Commission, which has been praised as being eminently readable by the standards of government documents, and which has been a bestseller since being released several months ago. On the fiction side, the big news is who didn’t make the cut, notably novelists Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick. Also, for the first time ever, all the fiction finalists are women.
Jazz Legend May Make A Posthumous Move
The board of Kansas City’s American Jazz Museum is considering moving the remains of the legendary Charlie “Bird” Parker to a new site in the city’s historic 18th and Vine District. At the moment, Parker’s remains are housed at a local cemetery where a recent trash-dumping scandal caused the museum to consider the move to a more prominent location.
Edinburgh’s Literary Rep Garners UN Honor
The Scottish city of Edinburgh will shortly be named “City of Literature” by the United Nations’ cultural group, UNESCO. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson and Robert Burns all spent time living and/or writing in the city. A host of current UK literary stars had backed Edinburgh’s push for the designation, which could have a significant financial impact for the city.
Changing The Culture Of The CIA (Not That One)
The Cleveland Institute of Art is a distinguished school, but over the decades, its leaders fear that it may have missed an artistic boat or two. “After World War II, [CIA] grew increasingly conservative and insular. It hired a lot of former graduates as faculty. It emphasized fundamental skills, such as painting and drawing, virtually to the exclusion of the theories and concepts that drive the art world today.” Now, a new “academic demolition crew” has taken over the school, and is making a concerted push for change in the way that art students are educated.