“Reports this week of a conflict at the Royal Academy between the head of exhibitions, Norman Rosenthal, and the secretary, Lawton Fitt, may be the most serious crisis a British gallery has faced since 1988, when an inexperienced director at the V&A caused an international outcry by dismissing five of the museum’s senior keepers.” Richard Dorment observes that “the president and council of the Royal Academy would be mad even to contemplate sacking a man of Rosenthal’s stature. Is it possible that they have forgotten what he has done for the Academy – or, for that matter, done for this country?”
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How Is The Value Of Art Decided?
What makes a Van Gogh painting worth $82.5 million and another good painting worth millions and millions less? “The art world has capitalized on the fact that most people believe they can’t really understand why a work of art is worth what the market is asking. It helps to realize that the process of setting value is different for dead artists such as Van Gogh, whose works now trade more like commodities, and living artists, whose worth is still being determined, particularly if they are young.”
Getting In To Affordable Art
The Affordable Art Show movement is taking off. The shows are “now a regular event in London and New York and six months ago he tested the water in Sydney, attracting 13,000 visitors and selling more than $4 million worth of art. Now it’s Melbourne’s turn, with the Royal Exhibition Building playing host to works from 120 galleries, 500 artists – and nothing more than $5000.”
Scottish Opera On The Line
“Scottish Opera has, for reasons hard to discern, acquired pariah status. No one will speak up for it. Less than a year after the triumphant conclusion of its Ring Cycle, generally held to be one of the great post-war Wagner productions, it is cast in the role of profligate – elitist, unpopular, and irrelevant. Apparently unwilling to conform to the demands of contemporary cultural policy, it has retreated into the ranks of the untouchables, tarred with the great New Labour crime of being non-inclusive. The time has come, say its critics, to shrug it off, to clear it from the desk, to consign it to outer darkness. Except that no one can quite bring themselves to say so.”
University Buys Murdoch Library
The University of Surrey has bought the personal library of writer Iris Murdoch. “The collection of more than 1,000 books – many of them with her own remarks in the margins – surrounded and influenced her from 1952, when she began writing the first of her 26 novels, until a few years before she died of Alzheimer’s disease in 1999.”
Peabody’s New Face
Baltimore’s Peabody Institute “unveils nearly $27 million worth of campus renovations, the most extensive and expensive construction project since the institution opened in 1866.” The school campus has looked in for decades, and the renovations are designed to reconnect with the community.
Nielsen People Meters Under Attack
The Nielsen company’s new “people meters” to monitor TV viewership have come “under attack from television networks, minority groups and even lawmakers when a test of its electronic “people meters,” newly installed in select New York homes, began reporting a sharp decrease in viewership for television shows that feature minorities. Because the current system — a decades-old technique involving week-long diaries that are mailed to the homes — had never yielded such a drastic swing, the critics contended that the new technique must somehow be unreliable.”
Latin American Antiquities Endangered
The plundering of archaeological sites, tombs and churches for pre-Columbian and colonial objects in Latin America is now so widespread that officials are now saying that “these antiquities can be considered the art world’s endangered species. ‘Countries in Latin America are deprived of their history at an alarming rate’.”
On Pop Culture And The Art Of
John Rockwell: “Pop culture is not necessarily interesting in itself: it’s merely an index of the state of the broader social culture, or a way to sell newspapers or CD’s or commercials. The trouble with that mercantile mindset is that the popular arena is indeed the source of some of the best art out there, and artistic excellence calls forth smart criticism. Even elitist criticism — the kind produced by critics who love popular art but scorn the populace as a bunch of Menckenesque rubes easily manipulated by commercial interests.”
No TV For Kids?
Should parents not let their toddlers watch TV? That’s what the new study says. “It’s worth remembering that there are some significant flaws in the study, including that results were based solely on interviews with children’s parents, who may not have accurately recollected how much television their kids watch. Still, it’s hard to ignore the findings that, of 1,345 children ages 1 and 3, the risk of developing attention problems by age 7 increased by roughly 10 percent for every hour of television watched daily.”