“Last week, the final guests checked out of the daunting Moskva hotel, for 70 years the gateway to Soviet Moscow, looming over one corner of Red Square. The better rooms of this heroic Stalinist pile may well have been bugged, but they did offer magnificent views over Red Square and St Basil’s cathedral. From the 15th floor the views were the stuff of epic Russian films, while from the corridor windows you could just peep across the walls of the reclusive Kremlin. For some years a debate has raged in Moscow over the future of the 1,000-room Stalinist hotel featured on every bottle of Stolichnaya vodka and built in the early 30s.”
Blog
The Mining Town That Reinvented As A Center Of Books
It’s a grand experiment – last month a small derelict mining town tried to reinvent itself as a town of books – opening nine bookstores. “Can books rejuvenate the depressed town and revitalise the local economy? July in booktown saw hostile locals and tarot card wars.
Suing The Opera Company You Love…
What does the lawsuit against the Metropolitan Opera on behalf of one of the company’s biggest donors mean to arts philanthropy? “Anybody who ever bought tickets for a production that turned out disappointing may be inclined to toast the plaintiffs. More seriously, individual donors will sniff an opportunity to increase their already dominant positions, if only after death.”
French Arts Strikers Shut Down Casals Concert
Striking arts workers forced cancellation of a concert at the Pablo Casals Festival in the French Pyranees. The “announcement of the cancellation infuriated the audience. As they left the venue, attendees shouted insults at the intermittents, who reportedly had to wait in backstage areas for over half an hour before being able to leave the area in safety.”
Big Sellers In A Depressed Book Market
There have been some very big-selling books this summer, and you’d think the publishing industry would be happy about it. Not exactly. They’re cutting staff and complaining of a slump. Big “sales don’t necessarily mean big profits, especially if everyone is expecting a hit. With Hillary Clinton receiving an $8 million advance, Simon & Schuster needed hundreds of thousands of sales to make money on the book. And Amazon.com, anticipating tremendous competition for the Potter book, offered a 40 percent discount on the $29.99 suggested price. The result: Despite more than 1 million sales worldwide, the online retailer announced it essentially broke even with Order of the Phoenix.”
How Do You Preserve Digital Info For The Future?
“Increasingly, academic journals are published online; many are not even available in print. As a result, libraries are losing the option of maintaining local collections—but are leery of discontinuing paper subscriptions. That makes them sound like Luddites stuck in a world of paper. After all, they could make digital back-ups. What is more, publishers often grant perpetual access to their journals and provide subscribers with CD-ROM versions. As a last resort, there is always the Library of Congress in America and other national libraries around the world where copies of most publications are kept. In the very long run, however, such solutions are not all that viable…”
Egypt Asks Museums To Loan Stolen Artworks
Egypt is seeking the loan of artworks that were stolen from Egypt and are now in other museums, for an exhibition next year marking the 100th anniversary of Cairo’s Egypt Museum. “Top of the museum’s list is the ancient Rosetta Stone, which is housed in the British Museum, and a bust of Nefertiti from Germany.”
Reinventing Dance In NY
“New York is once again in a cycle of producing the most distinctive and enthralling contemporary dance in the world. Making a dance a conceptual event by creating a specific atmosphere that overcomes a conventional space, or by making the site itself the starting point, is the overriding theme.”
The US Military And Art
“Each of the five branches – Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Marine Corps and Navy – has a collection, consisting mostly of paintings and sketches. The Navy’s is the largest, with about 17,000 works, followed by the Army’s 15,000, the Air Force’s 8,800, the Marines with about 8,000 and the Coast Guard with 5,000. They arrange exhibitions at bases and museums.”
Art Is Where You Find It
More than 1000 artists around the world are participating in the Found Art Project. “They make small artworks — sculpted figures, booklets of drawings, decorated mailing labels, collaged postcards and CDs, sidewalk chalk drawings, even ‘fairy houses’ made by kids and tied to trees — and ‘release them into the wild.’ They leave them at public places such as park benches, library shelves, hospital waiting rooms, grocery bulletin boards and malls. Those who find the artworks can keep them, throw them away or leave them someplace else.”