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MoMA’s Modern Museum (For The Art)

While museums the world over have gone on a binge of commissioning trophy buildings by famous architects, the Museum of Modern Art is going with basic modernism (at $425 million). “A museum is not architecture, and it is not a collection. It is both. A museum, in other words, should not compete with its art. The midtown Modern, scheduled to open in late November after being closed for two and a half years, is 630,000 square feet of straight walls, floors and ceilings with no obtrusive columns or dead-end hallways. It is a building with a harmonic precision.”

Brooklyn Museum’s New Face

The Brooklyn Museum is projecting a new face to the world. “Arnold L. Lehman, the museum’s waggish, enterprising director, is emphatic about wanting to ‘open the museum up.’ He’s trying to make it more like a town square than a temple. This sounds beneficent. But remember, nowadays everywhere you go is like a town square; a museum has the singular, sometimes transporting virtue of being a place where you can leave the group and immerse yourself in the richness and mystery of the group mind. Nevertheless, to those who might think his ideas are faulty, Lehman bluntly replies, ‘I don’t care.’ Under his leadership, the museum has increased attendance and reinstalled the collection in showily painted spaces. Sometimes the results are illuminating, other times infuriating.”

The Iraq Musem – One Year Later

“One year after looters stole some of its most prized antiquities, the Iraq (news – web sites) Museum in Baghdad is undergoing a top-to-bottom restoration that its leaders hope will make it one of the premier museums and research centers in the world. The project is being funded by donations from around the world and is not likely to be completed for at least two years.”

Rebuilding Iraq Museums

“The Iraq National Museum could be ready to open in a few months. Physically the building could be opened. The construction work is done. But we wouldn’t want to do that until the security contract for physical improvements and upgrades is done. It’s up to the Iraq Museum staff to decide when the security situation permits reopening, and how much time they want to put into installing the gallery. Saddam would say, ‘Have the galleries installed in one month for my birthday.’ Now they have time to think about the arrangement.”

Recording Companies To Pay $50 Million Royalty Settlement To Musicians

Recording companies have made a settlement with thousands of musicians to pay outstanding royalties. “The settlement, which amounted to nearly $50 million, was the result of a two-year investigation that found the world’s largest recording companies had failed to maintain contact with many artists and writers and had stopped making required payments to them.” The companies offered “an array of explanations like `we didn’t really pay close attention,’ and none were persuasive legally.”

Monster Mashup (Taking The Mashup Challenge)

“For some time, DJs – at first in England and later in the United States and other countries – have been developing a new style of remix, known as mashups, in which two songs are melded together. Often, the resulting track features the melody of one song and the vocals of another. Until recently, mashups had been the province of underground DJs, in part because those doing the remixing hardly ever had permission from the original artists to do so.” But now, David Bowie has issued a mashup challenge…

Why Suing Music Fans Is Pointless

Recording companies are trying to sue their fans into not downloading music for free off the internet. But while the move seems to have dissuaded some, there’s no indication that such disaffected fans have actually turned to using legal online services. It comes down to this: do musicians want people to listen to their music or not?

Senator Has Questions For Smithsonian About Strads

A US Senator wants to question the Smithsonian on the gift of four Stradivarius violins it received from Herbert Axelrod, a New Jersey businessman who is on the lam in Cuba after being indicted for tax evasion. “It is troubling that the Smithsonian may be turning a blind eye to tax mischief. Government agencies should be working in concert, not against each other. . . . Donors shouldn’t be able to get away with playing the taxpayers like a fiddle.”

The Unexpected Grammar Book

Lynne Truss on her best-selling grammar book “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: A Zero Tolerance Approach To Punctuation”: “I’m not a grammarian or a linguist or a professional editor and I don’t want to pretend that I am. Punctuation was a topic that felt knowable, containable. If you get into the larger subject matter of grammar you do need to study it and I’ve always been a little intimidated by academe, although now my old college, University College London, has invited me to be a Fellow, which is nice.”