For six weeks in 1530, Michelangelo hid in a little cell-like room while the Medicis wanted him dead. While there, he drew on the walls. “The collection of around 50 ‘doodles’, first discovered by Paolo dal Poggetto in 1975, include a self-portrait, a life-size risen Christ and some sketches experts believe are copies of figures the artist had painted earlier on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel.” The drawings are being restored after having badly deteriorated.
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What And How We Read
How do Britons read? And what? A survey asks the questions. “Those who study the bestseller lists with bewilderment each week can take comfort from the fact that the sales of new books don’t necessarily reflect what the nation is reading. Seventy-three per cent of people buy new books, but 41 per cent borrow library books, 42 per cent borrow books from friends and family, and 41 per cent buy from secondhand shops.”
Saatchi’s Big New Show
At the age of 60, Charles Saatchi is embarking on his most ambitious project yet. “Halfway between Tates Britain and Modern, he is opening a new gallery. At 40,000 sq ft, it is larger than any venue he has managed before. In it he will showcase his major trophies – Damien Hirst’s shark, Tracey Emin’s bed, Jake and Dinos Chapman’s vision of hell – and lots more. If he gets only a tenth of the 12 million people who walk along that stretch of river each year he will have increased his audience by 100 per cent. And, with an £8 a head entrance fee, the new gallery, which he has leased from a Japanese property company, could pay handsome dividends.”
Moshe Safdie And The “Anti-Bilbao”
Since the Bilbao Guggenheim opened, no museum can afford to be blase about getting bigger. “Today, no museum Web site worth its salt is without a section on its imminent, or just completed, ‘expansion,’ ‘renovation,’ ‘renaissance’ or ‘transformation.’ The rhetoric is eerie in its uniformity: The new building will display the museum collection in a ‘fundamentally new way.’ It will provide the public with a ‘richer and deeper experience.’ It will be an ‘exciting new public space.’ And, of course, the café and bookstore will be expanded.” Architect Moshe Safdie has come along with a kind of “anti-Bilbao” approach to museum-building.
Griffin Prize (Poetry’s Richest) Shortlist Announced
The three nominees for the Griffin Prize’s Canadian short list and the four nominees in its international competition were announced yesterday in Toronto by the prize’s founder, Scott Griffin. The $40,000 prize – the richest in poetry – attracted 320 entries…
Have Band, Will Hire
Want to hire the Rolling Stones for your party? It’ll cost you $13 million. The Eagles will play for $7.8 million. Indeed, many famous bands will sign on for a private performance if the money’s right. “Michael Jackson started the trend 10 years ago when he played for the Sultan of Brunei, who has also hired Diana Ross and Whitney Houston for family gatherings, and Bob Dylan has been known to do a gig or two.”
Why Approval For Polanski The Child Molester?
Beth Gillin wonders why Hollywood was applauding Roman Polanski last week when he won an Oscar. “Wait a minute. Did they just give the Academy Award to a child molester? And why are the beautiful people giving him a standing ovation? For many watching the Oscars Sunday, it was an icky moment, marked by obscenely excessive applause. Polanski could not be there to pick up his gold statuette for directing The Pianist, because if he sets foot in this country, he’ll be handcuffed and hauled off to prison for up to 50 years.”
Saving Afghan Books
“New York University has just begun an ambitious project to digitize all the books printed in Afghanistan from 1871 to 1930, the earliest period of publishing there, and to catalog them and make them available electronically. The effort to preserve and widely disseminate the rare Afghan books is a counterpoint to decades of destruction of the country’s art, books and monuments. In the early 1990’s alone, tens of thousands of books in both the Kabul Public Library and the Kabul University Library were destroyed under Taliban rule.”
Bay Area Museum “De-Merger” Hires Some Help
A year ago Berkeley’s Judah L. Magnes Museum and the Jewish Museum San Francisco decided to merge. But it didn’t work out, so the two are “de-merging.” And that requires somebody to help pull it off – so the Magnes has hired Joanne Backman as its acting executive director.
A Poetry Award With Narrow Scope
So the organizers of the new $10,000 Trillium Prize for a first book of poetry by an Ontario resident couldn’t find enough entrants to even mount a shortlist. Can we really be surprised? wonders Alex Good. How many good new debut poetry books by an Ontario resident are there in a given year. Who are the people running this award? A check of the group’s website reveals an intimidating corporate “mission statement”: “Our focus is to build capacity and competitiveness of Ontario’s cultural media industry, individually and across the sectors and to provide opportunities that encourage business alliances across the cultural industries.”