— theater community still feels nostalgia for four NY 42nd Street theaters being torn down this week. – New York Times
Blog
AWASH IN MONEY
The world’s two auction giants may be having their difficulties, but the art market is the strongest it’s been in years. – The Telegraph (UK)
FRENCH FRIED
Seventy-eight percent of the world’s websites are in English – only 1.2 percent are in French. “More than any other medium of recent years, the Internet is challenging France’s attempts to control and protect its culture. Its pride in its culture is fierce. No other country—save Spain—has a body quite like the Académie Française, dedicating itself for the past 365 years to the defense of the national language.” – The Economist
REASON TO SAVE
To help arts institutions stop living paycheck to paycheck, the Missouri Cultural Trust has a proposition: for every dollar arts groups put aside for a rainy day, the Trust will add 50 cents. It’s working. By 2008, the Trust expects to have given away $100 million. – St. Louis Post-Dispatch
AFRICA FOR THE CULTURE
“For a long time, people saw Africa as only animals,” said Comfort Opoku Wave of the Ghana tourism board. “Now they’re realizing that there is culture, fabrics, lakes, rivers.” – Die Welt (Germany)
MASS RETIREMENT
As the wave of college professors hired in the ’60s and ’70s to teach baby boomers nears retirement age, universities are bracing for a major turnover in their faculties. – Chronicle of Higher Education
SWOONA in LAGUNA
In a lease dispute, the venerable 68-year-old Festival of Arts and Pageant of the Masters has told the California beach town of Laguna Beach it might leave. Uproar ensues. – Orange County Register 03/12/00
ANOTHER NAZI CLAIM
The heir of a German industrialist is seeking a 19th-century landscape by Courbet from the Art Institute of Chicago, that she says was stolen from her father by Nazis in WWII. Her successful bid last summer for a van Gogh drawing, L’Olivette, from a Berlin museum has been widely credited with accelerating Germany’s program to return looted art. – Jerusalem Post
HEIR OF WHITNEY MUSEUM FOUNDER —
— says she’ll cut off her support to the museum in protest. Marylou Whitney said that a work by Hans Haacke, planned for the Whitney’s 2000 Biennial, would belittle the Holocaust, politicize art and violate the principles on which the Whitney was founded by her late mother-in-law, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. – New York Times
- OTHER WHITNEYS DEFEND WORK: As Marylou Whitney withdrew her support of the Whitney Museum two other Whitney heirs lambasted her position. “It is regrettable that so many have chosen to lash out at an artist who has consistently been a voice of social conscience … This country should allow the free and unfettered expression of ideas through art.” – New York Post
- GIULIANI WON’T BE PUNITIVE, he says, about a work in the Whitney Biennial that compares the New York mayor to the Nazis. – New York Times
WHERE IS DR. GACHET?
Rumors that the famous Van Gogh painting, bought by Japanese industrialist Ryoei Saito at auction in 1990 for $82.5 million, would turn up in the new Van Gogh show opening today in Detroit, prove false. Since Saito died four years ago, museums and curators have been searching for the most expensive painting ever sold. – Philadelphia Inquirer