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Rockwell Kent & The Red Menace

Artist Rockwell Kent was once the darling of the schoolboy set, renowned for his illustrated versions of Shakespeare and Moby Dick. But Kent was also an avowed Communist and staunch defender of the Soviet Union whose political leanings led to a high-profile tiff with a small museum in Maine, which Kent accused of having refused an exhibition of his work. Now, nearly half a century after the flap, the Farnsworth Museum has mounted an exhibition focusing on the controversy, and attempting to refute Kent’s claims of anti-Communist hysteria.

Phil Orch Musicians’ Novel Strategy: Dialogue With Board

Seeking to avoid a strike, the players of the Philadelphia Orchestra tried an unusual but seemingly effective tactic. “Convinced that management’s negotiating committee had no real authority to change the parameters of the deal, orchestra musicians wisely cut out the middlemen and -women and went directly for those who hold the orchestra’s pocketbook: the board.”

Painting The Gulag From The Inside Out

The name Nikolai Getman probably doesn’t ring a lot of bells in the Western art world, and in fact, when the octogenarian survivor of Stalin’s infamous Siberian Gulag died quietly in Russia last month, his passing didn’t make the obituary page of a single American newspaper. But Getman’s body of work represents the most complete and vivid visual record of life in the Gulag that the world has ever seen, and the horrors he recorded on canvas are a reminder of one of the great man-made tragedies of the last century.

At Least They’re Not Throwing The Cell Phones

Hollywood actor Kevin Spacey, who is spending part of his time these days as the artistic director of London’s Old Vic, is instituting a series of recorded messages before performances instructing audiences to turn off their phones, stop crinkling candy wrappers, and just generally sit still and keep quiet. Such admonitions have become common in the U.S., but some in London’s theatre world have a longer memory: “The behaviour of modern audiences is dramatically better than in previous centuries, when armed guards were frequently posted to stop the mob in the pit from storming the stage, and performers were sometimes knocked out by objects thrown from the gallery.”

But They Can’t Give Us A Browser Immune To Ads?

A new internet streaming service offered by Microsoft has traditional radio stations fuming, and many are accusing the software behemoth of copyright hypocrisy. The service consists of multiple live CD-quality streams of commercial-free music which duplicate exactly the publicly available playlists of nearly 1000 North American radio stations. Listeners can even select their favorite station by location and call letters, and hear the same music mix that traditional radio listeners hear, minus the commercials. Microsoft insists that it is doing nothing wrong, and legally, it probably isn’t.

MoMA To Receive 2,500 Drawings

A major New York art collector is poised to donate his trove of some 2,500 pieces of contemporary drawing to the city’s Museum of Modern Art. Harvey S. Shipley Miller, who until recently collected mainly Russian avant-garde books, has served on the MoMA board since 2001, and spent only a year amassing his impressive collection of drawings, which is insured for $75 million. “The collection’s focus is on artists who have emerged in the last two decades, but there are also contemporary works by artists who became prominent in the 1960’s and 70’s.”

A More Focused Biennale

This year’s edition of France’s Biennale des Antiquaires has a noticably streamlined feel to it, and the upgrade is no accident. Christian Deydier, president of the Syndicat National des Antiquaires which puts on the Biennale, has spent the last two years correcting what he saw as the fair’s descent into the ordinary. This year, the high-end jewellers who had previously been able to exhibit alongside more serious art and antiquities dealers have been effectively banished to a dank corner, and dealers who were perceived to be offering less than excellent works for sale were disinvited. The result is a decidedly more upscale art fair.

And Musicians Get What Percentage, Again?

So much for the recording industry’s claims that the culture of digital music would be the end of its profit margins. “Apple Computer, the dominant legal download business in Europe and the US, retains just 4 cents from each 99-cent track sale while ‘mechanical copyright’ holders – generally the record labels, who own copyright in the song’s recording – take 62 cents or more. Music publishers take the rest – about 8 cents. With the sites, the copyright owners have doubled their share of royalties, even though the marginal cost of manufacturing has fallen to almost zero.”