“For two centuries, the Amber Room – a chamber entirely panelled in amber – adorned the summer palace of the tsars near St Petersburg until in 1941, when the Germans invaded, it was stolen. Since the war, thousands of treasure hunters have pursued ever wilder theories in search of ‘the eighth wonder of the world’. Yet it is still missing.” Now, an exhaustive three-year investigation into the fate of the Amber Room has revealed the truth: the room was indeed taken by the Nazis and stored in Germany for a time. But a fire at the castle being used for the storage destroyed the room completely in 1945.
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Cubism’s Enduring Legacy
“Many of the assumptions of the world a century ago have been so overturned that you would think the paintings Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, produced between 1907 and the first world war, would make perfect sense today, and even appear a little naive. Yet their difficulty is not of a type that recedes with familiarity. Cubism is like a maths exam at the gateway to modern art. The paintings are uniquely unyielding… Art today is made from the building blocks of ordinary life. Cubism took these building blocks, or working premises, apart. Most art confirms our sense of who we are and how we live. Cubism suggests that our real existence eludes the images and stories we constantly make of it.”
The BBC’s New Head Man
The BBC hopes to heal the rifts caused by the scandal surrounding the Hutton report and the suicide of Dr. David Kelley with the appointment of Mark Thompson as the corporation’s new director general. Thompson, who worked at the BBC for 23 years before leaving to head up the UK’s Channel 4 two years ago, succeeds the popular Greg Dyke, who was forced out of the top BBC post following the scandal over journalist Andrew Gilligan’s report claiming that the government had “sexed up” a dossier concerning intelligence information on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
Concern For The Future Down Under
The Australian government is undertaking a national study of the country’s orchestras and opera companies, to determine whether the current funding formula is capable of supporting struggling arts scenes in cities and states across the continent. Of particular concern is the Melbourne music scene, where Opera Australia has steadily reduced the number of annual productions from 11 to 6 in the last decade. The last time such a review was conducted, the review team recommended that Melbourne’s two orchestras be merged, and only an outcry from the local arts community prevented the merger.
Fahrenheit 9/11 Wins Palme d’Or
Michael Moore’s incendiary documentary trashing the politics and policy of the Bush administration has captured the top prize at Cannes. It was the first documentary to be awarded the Palme d’Or since Jacques Cousteau’s The Silent World took the prize nearly 50 years ago. Moore was the darling of Cannes this year, though some observers noted that, if his film won, it would be more an expression of European outrage with current American foreign policy than a true reflection of the quality of the picture. Still, in a year when no one film blew away the competition, Fahrenheit 9/11 stood out from the pack.
Who Is This Guy, Anyway?
Michael Moore has crafted a well-constructed image as a man of the people, a spokesman for the downtrodden, and a lone voice howling against the American corporate, political, and economic elite. But those who have worked with Moore tell a different story, of a money-obsessed power broker who exaggerates his supposedly working-class roots and hides his own excesses behind his populist bluster.
Michael Moore’s America
It seems almost absurd now to recall that, only a few years back, documentary films were considered box office poison, and were treated like the bastard stepchild of the industry. Then came Michael Moore, whose Bowling for Columbine “turned the tables on the conventional wisdom that America was full of Bible-thumping, gun-toting conservatives: in fact, it was full of people who wanted to see their private stirrings of dissent put out there by someone who had a few facts at his disposal and dared to poke fun at the powerful.” Moore’s humorous but stinging criticism of conservative America, and of its current president in particular, is defining a new generation of documentary film, and helping to throw the polarization of the U.S. into stark relief.
Are NZers Ready To Support Museum?
Are New Zealanders ready to pony up serious money for its museum? “Make no mistake, Aucklanders admire their art gallery. They may not go inside too often, but they like the idea that the grand old building survives, up the hill from Queen St, nestled against Albert Park. But $75 million, largely from the public purse, to restore this storehouse of (mainly) old paintings? In a city fixated on solving its traffic problems, it could be viewed as the art scam of the century.”
Losing Art In Words
Blake Gopnik argues that the addition of words almost never helps a piece of art or architecture. “In my work as an art critic, I often come across this imbalance between word and image. It’s almost never put there by the artists themselves, when they’re any good; it almost always comes when someone doesn’t believe that art can work without the help of text. When museums don’t really believe in the communicative power of a piece of art, however great and famous, they throw up words that are supposed to make it speak. The strange thing about the World War II memorial, I’d say, is that even the designers of this work of art don’t trust it to communicate alone.”
A Radical Rethink For The Royal Academy?
“What is London’s Royal Academy of Arts for, exactly? The question needs to be asked, because the Royal Academy is clearly not doing quite what it was set up to do…”