Only days after nine Faberge Imperial eggs and some of the approximately 180 other Fabergé pieces belonging to Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg went on display in the Kremlin, the clients of a failed Russian bank filed a lawsuit asking that the “newly acquired Fabergé imperial eggs be confiscated by the authorities and auctioned to recoup the money they say they lost through their business with the bank.”
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Moveable Feast – US History Through Lenses Of Self-Interest
History belongs to those who choose to write it, right? “Extracts in ”History Lessons: How Textbooks From Around the World Portray U.S. History” tell us two things: historical narratives are biased and untrustworthy; and America’s impact on the world cannot be underestimated. Interesting history is interested history, so the secondary school texts excerpted here generally relate international events as they reflect local concerns.”
The Hip Near-Past For Sale
When it opened in 1998, the Damien Hirst-designed Pharmacy restaurant was the hippest thing in London. Maybe it was so hip it failed to outlive its opening moments, and last September it closed. Now the restaurant’s contents are being auctioned – relics of a singular moment. “There will be paintings with estimates of over $550,000 as well as objects expected to sell for under $100. A group of 10 of the artist’s much-loved butterfly paintings, each with a bright color background and each with love in the title, are estimated to fetch over $110,000. The auction will also have 11 of his well-known medicine cabinets and a molecular model sculpture with estimates each from $183,360 to $275,000.”
Minimalism (Finally) Gets Its Due
“For years, minimalism shows were rare events. In just the last year or two, however, they’ve hit the big time, big-time… The current flood of minimalism exhibitions indicates a new desire to come to grips with the movement as a whole and to rethink some of the narrow polemics that have built up around it. Instead of being part of the live, ferocious debates of contemporary art, with people choosing sides for and against, minimalism is now the subject of measured, art-historical contemplation. Which means it has truly arrived — next stop, official, unquestioned Old Master status.”
Political Art, Or Mindless Activism Disguised As Culture?
George W. Bush may be a divisive leader to many, but there is no question that he has managed to unite one group like few U.S. politicians in history: artists, from painters to actors to musicians, are coming together in record numbers, all with the common goal of ridding the world of this American president. But when does political art become so strident that it ceases to be good art? “Many inside and outside the arts question whether such overt political expression — created expressly to effect change — crosses the line of art and simply becomes a colorful op-ed piece. It’s important for the art to stand on its own merits… regardless of the message within it.”
Shakespeare on the Mississippi
The sleepy little river town of Winona, Minnesota is not a place where you would expect to find a major theater festival, but the founders of the new Great River Shakespeare Festival are banking on the allure of small-town America and its own no-frills approach to the Bard to draw a crowd ad build a lasting theatrical tradition. “It will take years of artistic nurturing, civic investment and theatrical brilliance to accomplish such goals. This first season is filled with education panels, discussions, music concerts — a regular Chatauqua — to energize the local population and lure the curious from around the region.”
Russian Film Riding High
The fall of Communism was a near-death sentence for the Russian film industry, as the federal funding that had always been a cornerstone of the USSR dried up in the capitalist world of post-Soviet reality. “By 1997, a miserable 12 home-grown films were released per year in Russia. By last year, however, that had shot up to 75, state sponsorship has risen by 14 per cent in 2004 to $70 million, and an average of 30 per cent of any film’s budget is now provided by the government. Add to this the fact that most urban Russians under 35 cite filmgoing as their favourite pastime, and the predicted rise this year in the number of screens in Russia from 550 to 700, and it seems that Stollywood has arrived.”
Finally Embracing Reality, Yet Again
The music industry appears to have finally embraced downloading as the wave of the future, and many are asking what took so damn long. But John Naughton says that we shouldn’t be surprised by the industry’s slow embrace of the obvious: “The fact that the music moguls resisted music downloading for so long is par for the course. They opposed audio, cassette and video taping and, later, DVD. Yet each turned out to be extraordinarily profitable. Movie studios now earn far more from videos and DVDs than they do from cinema audiences, but they had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the DVD world.”
The Disappearing Stadium
“Imagine a sports stadium that accommodates thousands of fans for an event, then folds up and disappears. Impossible? Perhaps. But it’s one of the visions that will appear in the upcoming Venice Architecture Biennale… It improbably envisions a baseball field inserted within the urban thicket of Chicago’s Loop. The field would be surrounded by a series of movable seating tiers. The tiers, some of which would be constructed into surrounding buildings, would fold and unfold as needed. As outlandish as the idea seems, [the Chicago architectural firm] Studio Gang already has proved it is possible to design and construct a performance venue whose architectural identity changes to suit changing needs.”
Rock’s Birthday? It’s A Black & White Debate
On July 5, 1954, Elvis Presley recorded his first single. That’s reason enough for BMG Records, which distributes the Presley catalog, to declare the date as the birthday of rock ‘n roll. “But the marketing blitz, by BMG as well as other companies, reopens a nagging debate: Just when did rock really begin? It’s an issue that has long been tinged with racism, specifically the notion that it took a white man to make it rock ‘n roll, whereas before it was only R&B and what was then described as ‘race music.'”