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NEA: Writing In A Time Of War

The National Endowment for the Arts’ new writing program for soldiers “seeks to address a seeming cultural paradox. War stories, after all, occupy one of literature’s longest, weightiest shelves, and American fighting men, from Ulysses S. Grant to Anthony Swofford, have set down their battle-forged memoirs, but these days the military and literary worlds barely overlap. The program, called ‘Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience,’ is aimed at preserving stories from the battlegrounds of Iraq and Afghanistan. The endowment expects to hold 20 or so workshops at American military installations between now and next spring.”

Deciphering The Da Vinci Code Success

The Da Vinci Code is a worldwide publishing phenomenon. “Around the world it has sold in excess of 10m, nearly 8m of those in hard covers, making it the best-selling hardback novel ever. Why is this book such a smash? I suspect the triumph of the Code tells a larger story. First, it confirms that people are prepared to believe the worst of the church – even in America, the most “churched” society in the world…”

Libeskind: Architecture Is About The Long Haul

Architect Daniel Libeskind would seem to be having a bad year. He’s battling with the developer of the WTC site. And his “Spiral” addition to the Victoria & Albert Museum is likely not going to happen. But he’s philosophical: “When you’re a kid with artistic yearnings brought up in the Bronx, you don’t get fed up too easily. It took 10 years to build the Jewish Museum in Berlin [his first building; overall, a critical success]. Nearly everybody said it would never happen. It was too crazy, too unrealistic. But it did happen.”

Turning Paintings To The Wall (Psssst – It’s Conceptual)

The Michaelis Collection at Cape Town’s Old Town House is renowned for its collection of Dutch and Flemish masters such as Frans Hals, Jan Steen and Anthony van Dyck, and “is seen as one of the best of its kind outside the Netherlands.” Next month the museum is opening a show that will flip these paintings with the faces to the wall. The exhibition “Flip” is “a conceptual art intervention” on one of the country’s premier art collections.

In Germany – Little Progress In Tracking Art Stolen By Nazis

Five years after German politicians directed the country’s museums to search their collections for artwork that might have been stolen from Jews by the Nazis, only a handful of artworks have been turned up. There has been little cooperation from the museums – “only about 165 of Germanys 6,000 museums have reported” that they have any suspicions of artwork that might have been stolen.

Russian Artists Protest Housing Plan

A plan to take away subsidized housing for artists in St. Petersburg, Russia has brought out the artists to protest. “A number of them arrived at the Legislative Assembly with banners bearing the slogans: “[Governor Valentina] Matviyenko, don’t be grudging, buy paintings!”; “St Petersburg is for the rich, the bandits and the thieves”; “Culture’s grave-diggers are Russia’s grave-diggers”; “The artists’ canvasses bind the feet of the city administration”; and also a quotation from Nekrasov – “There have been worse times, but none as mean!” “If the studios are going to be sold, then the artists will either have to leave for the West, or change their profession”.

Edinburgh’s Smart New Festival Art Space

Edinburghers are proud of the new visual arts exhibition space for the annual Edinburgh Festival. “For more than 50 years, it has not been possible to complement the drama and music programme of the Edinburgh International Festival with a large-scale exhibition of visual art, because of the limited gallery space in the city. With the completion of the Playfair Project, that barrier no longer exists. Scotland now has a world-class exhibition space of the size to take the largest international shows, and mount them in perfect conditions.”