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WHAT FALLS TO EARTH…

The American Museum of Natural History in New York goes to court to refuse to give back a 10,000-year-old, 15-ton meteorite to Oregon Indian tribes who say their ancestors once treated the rock as a sacred object. The rock is not the kind of sacred object intended to be covered by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, a law covering the “repatriation” or important Native-American cultural objects, claims the museum. – New York Post

A MATTER OF HONESTY

For all Al Taubman’s fabulous success running Sotheby’s these last 17 years, he forgot one thing, writes Thomas Hoving: “the basic point about what Sotheby’s had to be. Honest. The opposite of caveat emptor. Clean. Never-a-scandal. Caesar’s wife. Or, to quote from a renowned 1928 court of appeals ruling, ‘Not honesty alone but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive.'” – Artnet

I REMEMBER SYDNEY

In 1964 Harold and LuEsther Mertz, a couple of rich American tourists, visited Australia. They decided to buy four or five Australian paintings but became so captivated by them they bought 148, assembling possibly the finest private collection of Australian paintings anywhere and shipped them off to America. Now they’re for sale, and Australian auction houses are lining up for the privilege. – Sydney Morning Herald

  • Australian auction company competes with Sotheby’s and Christie’s for Mertz collection. – Sydney Morning Herald

PAYING FOR PAST SINS

The Smithsonian has begun renting itself out – its experts, its expertise, its artifacts – in an attempt to earn money to make up for budget cuts. Why? “The federal contribution to our budget has declined to the point that, while it will pay for some (not all) maintenance of our buildings and for about 75 percent or so of our staff, it will not cover any of the costs associated with mounting new exhibitions or educational programs. We no longer have the staff to do work in-house; contracting it out is very costly. And yet the public expects us to continue as we have in the past, and the belief that taxpayers’ money supports everything we do is widespread. It supports the infrastructure, barely, but nothing else. And from this deficit stems a great deal that is troubling, to those of us inside the institution as well as to outsiders like yourself.” – Washington Post

HECKLE THIS

Frederic Stocken once briefly formed a group of anti-modern malcontents called The Hecklers, who made headlines when they disrupted the first revival of Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s opera “Gawain” at Covent Garden in 1994. Now Stocken’s considered one of Britain’s brightest young composers. “He composes modern music according to pre-modern principles. He hates the idea that artists should, by definition, be provocative and sees no reason why the fundamental laws of harmony had to be broken by 20th century composers.” – Sequenza/21

i-FILMS AND THE FUTURE

“If you love Hollywood movie-making you are in heaven right now,” says filmmaker David Cronenberg. “If you are making so-called alternative films that is what you are fighting, not Hollywood per se, because they don’t care about you, but people’s expectation of what a movie is. Expectations have to change and I think something like the Internet might be the only way for that to happen.” – National Post (Canada) 02/28/00