Unsuccessful at convincing the British Museum to return the Parthenon Marbles, the Greek government is staging an exhibition at the Parthenon to run while the Olympics are in Athens in August. “The intention of the exhibit will be to show the world our case, that we would like to unite the pieces of the frieze and the statues. Now we think the Olympics will be a chance to get the world interested, to put the pressure on the British to finally return these important pieces of our heritage.”
Blog
Actors Contract Talks Break Down
Negotiations between Broadway producers and the actors union Equity broke down over the weekend. “No new negotiations are scheduled but Broadway and touring shows were not disrupted because the guild has kept its members working throughout the past few weeks of tense negotiations.”
Rushing To Complete La Scala
La Scala opera house is scheduled to reopen December 7. But the construction is still a long way from being finished. “La Scala’s $67 million renovation added precious storage space for sets which will allow the opera house to mount more productions and performances to meet growing demand for seats.”
Checking Out The Monets-To-Vegas Deal
A Association of American Museum Directors is examining the deal that sent 21 of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts’ Monets to a Las Vegas casino last winter. “The AAMD is concerned that commercial initiatives such as this could jeopardise the not-for-profit status of museums in the US and the directors’ organisation is now moving towards self-reform before tax-hungry legislators target museums and end their tax-exempt status. The AAMD guidelines stipulate that ‘In any decision about a proposed loan from the collection, the intellectual merit and educational benefits, as well as the protection of the work of art, must be the primary considerations, rather than possible financial gain’.”
US Music Dominates UK
For the first time, last year American music has outsold UK music in the UK.”American artists sold 45.4% of albums compared with the UK’s 42.3%, the British Phonographic Industry said. The BPI said the figures could be explained by huge-selling albums by US singers Justin Timberlake and Norah Jones – against scant UK competition.”
Dump The MP3
Is it time to dump the MP3 format for music? “In order to keep file sizes down MP3 encoding loses a lot of data, a lot more than modern formats, and this shows in the quality of the listening experience. The way it compresses files and plays them back means that the music too often sounds awful on anything but tinny laptop speakers or cheap earphones. We cannot let some sort of techno-nostalgia get in the way here. There is no reason to defend MP3, no reason why everyone who currently listens to MP3s stored on their hard drive should not move to something significantly better.”
Painting Revises Account Of Captain Cook’s Death
“When the explorer Captain James Cook was killed on the island of Hawaii, the tragedy was immortalised as the murder of a peaceable man. But more than two centuries later, a painting has been discovered that shows a rather different version of Cook’s demise, with the captain engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the islanders.”
Met Museum Vs. The Neighbors
“The Metrpolitan Museum has long been the jewel in the crown of the Upper East Side, a sprawling wedding cake of a building celebrating the marriage of art and money. In the past few years, however, some of the museum’s neighbors have begun to see the Metropolitan less as a refined repository of priceless cultural artifacts than as a tacky tourist attraction of idling school- and sightseeing buses, souvenir sellers, and street performers—far more democratic than Fifth Avenue has ever considered desirable. Then, in 2000, the Met threw down the gauntlet, pushing a plan through the Parks Department that called for a 200,000-square-foot expansion” and the neighbors revolted…
Bucky Gets A Stamp
Fifty years after his patent on the geodesic dome was granted, Buckminster Fuller has been honored by the US Post Office with a commemorative stamp. “The stamp reproduces Boris Artzybasheff’s painting for Time magazine’s June 10, 1964, cover of Fuller — who preferred to be called “Bucky” — and his best-known discoveries and inventions.”
The Text-Message Novel
A Chinese author has written a novel for text-messaging phone. “Qian Fuchang has reduced his novel Outside the Fortress Besieged into 60 chapters of 70 characters each, Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported. Described as a steamy tale of illicit love among already married people, the novel will be available exclusively to mobile phone users.”