The stolen Strad resurfaced in 2015, several years after the death of the apparent thief, a violinist with a checkered career, when his ex-wife turned it over to the F.B.I. The bureau returned it to Mr. Totenberg’s three daughters, Amy, Jill and Nina Totenberg, who decided to have it restored and sold — but who wanted to make sure it wound up with a musician, not locked away in a collection.
Blog
Will Vinton, Who Invented Modern Claymation, Dead At 70
He made a number of well-regarded animated shorts (including one Oscar winner) and one feature film (The Adventures of Mark Twain), but the project that really made his career was the California Raisins, four Motown-singin’ dried grapes whose television commercials for the California Raisin Advisory Board in the 1980s’ and ’90s became huge pop-culture hits. (Michael Jackson even called Vinton to ask if he could be a raisin.)
Where’s Cher? Is Mackie Too Tacky? Metropolitan Museum Goes “Camp” for Costume Institute Show
The Metropolitan Museum has just announced that its next Costume Institute extravaganza will be Camp: Notes on Fashion, May 9-Sept. 8, 2019. (Rest in Peace, Susan Sontag.) But Cher, with a show about to open on Broadway, doesn’t seem to be involved, and how can the Costume Institute have a show like this with none of the gowns Bob Mackie designed for her?
Has The Man Booker Prize Lost Its Shine?
With only one exception, everyone I speak to feels the same: that something has been lost. “A big, big mistake,” says Carmen Callil, co-founder of Virago books and former managing director of Chatto & Windus. “Its USP has gone,” says a leading agent (this despite the fact that he represents some US authors). “This whole fucking thing about us having such a cultural cringe towards America,” says one publisher.
The Big Story On Broadway This Season Is That Plays Are Outshining Musicals
“It was just last season when theater lovers were wringing their collective hands as big brand musicals descended on Times Square … No more. In a turnabout no one on Broadway expected, this season is rich with drama — ambitious, challenging, risky work, most of it new and most of it American.” Says one producer, “It’s no accident that all these plays are happening now. It’s how artists react to what’s happening in the culture.”
How To Establish Value In Art? Connoisseurship Or The Market?
In the past few decades, academia has largely abandoned traditional connoisseurship because it was too often tied to “great man” narratives. Over the same period professional art criticism has been eclipsed by a journalistic preoccupation with glamour, scandal and money. While the art world was never entirely free from market forces, these are now essentially the sole determinant of value. People need narratives to make sense of culture and collectors require a mechanism to assess quality. By default, today’s dominant narratives are being written by dealers and auctioneers.
At The First Chopin Competition To Use 19th-Century Pianos
Reporter Julien Hanck visits Warsaw and talks with two jury members and all six finalists about the challenges and joys of using instruments from Chopin’s own lifetime and about their own experience with those pianos. (One prizewinner had been playing them since he was 12, another started as a harpsichordist, and one finalist had never played anything older than an early-20th-century Erard.)
Want To Get People To Work Harder? Gamify! But…
Gamification’s trapping of total fun masks that we have very little control over the games we are made to play – and hides the fact that these games are not games at all. Gamified systems are tools, not toys. They can teach complex topics, engage us with otherwise difficult problems. Or they can function as subtle systems of social control.
How Columbus Day Made Anti-Columbus Day Protests Possible
Yoni Appelbaum: “Columbus Day, a solemn occasion marked by parades, pageantry, and buckets of fake blood splashed on statues of its namesake. Activists have turned the commemoration of Columbus’ landfall in the New World into an annual protest against ‘the celebration of genocide.’ What the protesters may not know, however, is that the holiday they are protesting once played a crucial role in forging a society capable of listening to their concerns. This is the curious tale of how Columbus Day fell victim to its own remarkable success.”
Boston Globe: Our Business Is Looking Up, And We’ve Hired A New Art Critic
The Globe is announcing today that it has finally replaced Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Sebastian Smee, who left for the Post nearly a year ago. The Globe’s new critic is Murray Whyte, currently at The Star of Toronto, whose arrival in Boston, I’m told, was delayed because of immigration issues.