Greg Dyke, the director general of the British Broadcasting Corporation, has stepped down in the wake of a damning report by a UK judge involving the death of a BBC source who had accused the Blair government of “sexing up” a dossier on the threat posed by Iraq. The suicide of Dr. David Kelly, who anonymously provided information to a BBC reporter before being revealed by another media outlet, led to six weeks of hearings before Lord Hutton, who also cleared the Blair government of all wrongdoing in his report.
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Bush Proposes NEA Boost
“President Bush will seek a big increase in the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts, the largest single source of support for the arts in the United States, administration officials said on Wednesday. The proposal is part of a turnaround for the agency, which was once fighting for its life, attacked by some Republicans as a threat to the nation’s moral standards.” The president’s proposal is for a hike of $15 million to $20 million in the fiscal year beginning in October 2004.
Down But Not Out
Greg Dyke was “a fantastically popular director general,” and that may have been part of his undoing at the BBC. But despite the humiliation of being accused of shoddy journalism by Lord Hutton, the BBC is circling the wagons, and firing back at Prime Minister Tony Blair and his supporters. One former BBC staffer has publically accused the government of “trying to grind an independent broadcaster into the ground. The staff are determined that it won’t happen.”
The Least Likely Bestseller
How can an obscure Victorian-era comic novel about three snobby Britishers on a boating trip possibly become a bestseller in Africa? Well, it helps if there’s only one bookstore in the whole southern region of your country, and if that bookstore only stocks three titles, one of which is Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men In A Boat. Welcome to southern Sudan, where civil war still rages, but one plucky bookseller soldiers on.
Location, Location, Loca… Wait, Weren’t We Just Here?
New York being the trendy city that it is, it can be all a gallery owner can do to stay on the cutting edge of such important matters as what neighborhood your business needs to be in in order to attract your better customers. Of late, the hot gallery location has been the West Chelsea neighborhood, but now, there appears to be a retro movement afoot, with several prominent art dealers moving their galleries back to the old “traditional” art neighborhoods of Midtown and the Upper East Side.
As Opposed To All Those Unimportant Representations Of Griffins
“An antiquities dealer with offices in New York and Geneva has been arrested for illegally importing an Iranian object, described as ‘the most important representation of a griffin in antiquity,’ and facilitating its sale to a private collector. The dealer, Hicham Aboutaam, a principal in Phoenix Ancient Art, S.A., was arrested on 13 December, following an investigation by the US Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The antiquity is alleged to have been part of the plundered Iranian Western Cave Treasure, much of which, the government says, is said to have been looted and dispersed since 1992 around the world.”
Former ABT Star To Head Washington School
“Former American Ballet Theatre soloist Rebecca Wright will be the new director of the Washington School of Ballet, the organization is expected to announce today. Wright succeeds the school’s founder, Mary Day, who retires this summer.” The school says that it very much wanted its new director to be someone with an impressive performance history, rather than merely an administrator.
“Fake Critic” Trial Will Proceed
Sony will have to answer to charges that it invented a movie critic and attached quotes from non-existent reviews to several of its films. The studio admitted to having concocted the critic known as David Manning, but had argued that free speech laws shielded it from prosecution for the deception. The California Court of Appeals disagreed, declaring Manning’s quotes to be commercial speech, which the Supreme Court has said does not enjoy full First Amendment protection.
Gehry Comes Home
Frank Gehry grew up in the same Toronto neighborhood which houses the Art Gallery of Ontario, and this week, he returned home to present the AGO with his plans for the museum’s latest expansion. “Mr. Gehry’s design includes a frontal promenade covered by a tilted 60-foot-high glass window the length of two football fields. There will be multistory light blue titanium walls intended to fade into the sky and turn gold on cloudy days. A grand glass roof will cover the museum’s central Walker Court. And a giant winged spiral staircase made of Douglas fir will double as a piece of interior sculpture that soars into the court’s glass ceiling.”
Biting The Hand That Writes The Notes
Mauricio Kagel is not your ordinary composer. To begin with, he’s never been all that enamored of classical music’s grand traditions and more-than-occasional pomposities. And yet, as a dedicated modernist, he belongs to a school of composition which tends to be populated with the genre’s most humorless specimens. So how does Kagel deal with being a part of an industry he frequently finds to be far too enamored of its own genius? By using his much-respected musical talents to poke fun, of course. Kagel invented the concept of “instrumental theater” back in the 1960s, and has used it to great effect: in one of his works, the conductor of a small chamber ensemble is instructed to fake a heart attack and “die” on stage.