The Ogden Museum of Southern Art opens in New Orleans. But just what counts as “southern” art? “I’m not aware that there is such a thing as Southern art, at least not if you’re defining it by technique. If there’s something distinct about it, it’s subject matter and also inner heritage. All Southerners who try to express themselves in art — whether it’s writing or painting or anything else — are very much aware that they are party to a defeat, which is something most other Americans didn’t feel until Vietnam.”
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Digging Up “Little Rome”
“After 10 years of digging, ‘Little Rome,’ as the great Roman orator Cicero called it, is coming to light near Naples, in what could be the most important discovery of an ancient Roman town since the excavation of lava-entombed Pompeii and Herculaneum in the 18th century.”
Culshaw: The Real Problem With Jazz?
Peter Culshaw thinks he knows: “The real problem seems to me the disappearance of spontaneity and fun from the world of jazz. Marsalis’s attempt to turn jazz into America’s classical music often produces work that is respectable and bourgeois to the point of dullness. Yet take a look at the greats of jazz history, from Fats Waller to Billie Holliday and Miles himself, and you will nearly always find a sleazy undercurrent of sex and drugs.”
Cleveland Picks Up A Krasner
“The Cleveland Museum of Art closed a major gap in its collection last night by bidding $1.9 million at auction at Christie’s in New York for a mural-sized painting by American Abstract Expressionist Lee Krasner. The price is a record for the artist, who died in 1984 at age 76.”
Insult And Injury At ABT
A major sponsor of the American Ballet Theater has pulled its financial support, and transferred its fiscal loyalties to New York City Ballet, saying that mismanagement at ABT forced the move. The Movado Watch Company has sponsored ABT productions for nearly two decades, to the tune of more than $400,000 per year, but the company’s chairman said in a letter that he was taken aback by the ABT management’s unwillingness to listen to criticism from its board. The sponsorship loss is being seen as a potentially crippling blow to ABT, which has struggled mightily in recent years.
Whitbread Shortlist Announced
“Booker Prize winner DBC Pierre and three other Booker nominees are on the UK’s Whitbread book prize shortlist. Pierre’s Vernon God Little is chosen in the first novel category, while Mark Haddon, Shena Mackay and Barbara Trapido compete in the novel category.”
Judge Halts Riopelle Auction
A Quebec judge has issued a temporary injunction blocking a planned auction of several dozen works by the late artist Jean-Paul Riopelle, which was to be held tonight. In making the ruling, the judge granted a major victory to Riopelle’s three children, who claim that the hastily organized auction of so many works at once will diminish the artist’s legacy unnecessarily. “Left in the lurch are art collectors who were said to be flying in from around the world for the sale at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel – and Riopelle’s estate, which says it urgently needs to hold the auction to pay off mounting debts.”
You Mean, American TV Isn’t Always Original?
No one can copyright a concept, which is why so many American TV shows can legally be nothing but mock-ups of already successful foreign programs. But a Canadian television network appears to think that CBS crossed the line this fall when it released Cold Case, a new cop show which bears several striking resemblances to a 6-year-old CTV program called Cold Squad. Both shows center around similar-looking female detectives who fight criminals and their own sexist co-workers in roughly equal measures as they attempt to uncover new leads in stalled cases. Oh, and the writer who came up with Cold Case did so right after attending a writing seminar in Canada.
All For One, One For All In Winnipeg
“Winnipeg artists are collectively playing the numbers game. In the past, the city established a reputation for producing individual artists of singular talent — Ivan Eyre, Don Reichert, Wanda Koop, William Eakin and Eleanor Bond are all painters and photographers whose careers have been solo affairs. But recently, with the meteoric success of the seven-member Royal Art Lodge as an example, Winnipeg artists have been banding together to form associations in which their collective identity is as important as their individual one.”
Yeah, Those Bong Close-Ups Are Always A Bad Sign
Film festival organizers may be as enthusiastic about film as a person can be, but they still have only 24 hours in their day, and that’s just not enough time to watch every minute of every movie that comes across their desks. So how do the honchos decide which films make the cut? It’s all about those first few minutes, says one festival organizer, and “if any video from the teetering stack in her living room begins with images of a gun, a bong, a pimp or a whore, she hits the eject button.”