The Motion Picture Association of America has rejected a suggestion to give movies an adult rating if they feature people smoking. “The industry is facing political pressure, following research last year which suggested teenagers who watched smoking on screen were more likely to take up the habit. A further report in March, issued by the University of California, suggested smoking should be treated in the same way as swearing.”
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MoMA’s Art Sale
The Museum of Modern Art has sold more than $100 million of artwork from its collection “during the past five years, more than eight times the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s proceeds of $9.23 million in the past five years. Unlike the Met, which typically sells second-tier works, MoMA, throughout its history, has unloaded important objects that would have been treasured icons at almost any other museum, and that collectors have eagerly acquired. Alfred Barr Jr., the founding director, believed that the collection should “metabolically” shed older works as it acquired new ones.”
NYT Gets New Culture Editor
Steve Erlanger leaves his job as cultural editor of the New York Times. And to replace him? Jon Landsman, about whom editor Bill Keller writer: “Jon will be the first to tell you that he does not bring to the job a thick portfolio of cultural expertise, but he more than compensates for that with a deep and wide-ranging curiosity, a gift for managing big undertakings.”
A Smart Building For Geniuses
Frank Gehry’s new Stata Center at MIT “occupies historic, even mystical ground. It sits on the site of the former Building 20, a boxy wooden structure that was thrown up in 1943 and became known as the Magical Incubator for the breakthroughs that took place inside, including the invention of radar and Mr. Chomsky’s pioneering work in linguistics. This building is on the precise site of one of the major flourishings of innovation in the 20th century.”
Hockey Opera Sells Out Prague
“With subjects such as television reality shows providing fodder for contemporary opera, why not sports? Martin Smolka’s Nagano, an opera in three periods plus overtime, relates the Czechs’ victory at the Nagano Winter Olympics in 1998, having come near but never achieving the gold four times in 50 years.”
I, Márquez – Diplomat
“Mexican opposition politicians are appealing to Latin America’s best-known writer, Gabriel García Márquez, to mediate in the diplomatic crisis that has taken their country’s traditionally good relations with Cuba to the brink of collapse.”
Hughes: Reconsidering deKooning
Robert Hughes is unimpressed by Wilem deKooning’s reputation. “De Kooning has been written about, mainly by Americans, in terms that might seem over-the-top for Rubens. More tempests than Lear and Moby-Dick put together. Hysterical weather reports from some outer galactic fringe, accessible only to Hubble telescopes and art historians – such as John Mekert, who wrote the catalogue for the 1984 retrospective: ‘The creative force of eros has merged with the flux of a shapeless magma of light and unbound matter drifting towards congealment into form.’ Yikes!”
Cut-Rate Opera Doesn’t Fly
Why did Raymond Gubbay’s Savoy Opera fail so quickly? “Gubbay was selling the Savoy Opera as unexceptional everyday West End fare, without the ‘snobbery’ and ‘elitism’ that supposedly put “ordinary” folk off. But what came across, I think, was an unfortunate impression of mediocrity. And Joe Public never wants to pay good money for that. Precisely the opposite, in fact.”
A Bad Night At The ENO
Richard Dorment vows never again to set foot in the English National Opera. “When the curtain finally fell, I did something I’ve never done in a lifetime of opera going – joined in booing the director Phyllida Lloyd when she came on stage to take her bow. The sound came out involuntarily, an expression of pure hatred directed at a person who had so wantonly done violence to a beloved work of art. Had I a rotten tomato to hand, it would have given me great pleasure to throw it.”
The Examined Literary Life
Is it true that the literary life is “swamped by its epiphenomena, that books’ blurbs and author photographs have become more important than their content, that the industry is overrun by middlemen and women whom writers had to pay for, that bookstores resemble supermarkets whose fruit and vegetables had mutated and lost their flavour in favour of external appearance?”