“As the dean of libraries at a state school, I contend that the economic model for academic journal publications is broken. As scholars are handicapped by limited access to the corpus of research in their fields, scientific progress is restricted and slows, and society ultimately loses.” Patrick Burns of Colorado State University explains how things have gone wrong.
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Pearl Paint The Rise And Fall Of An Iconic Paint Store
“Over the decades the business went from a struggling housepaint store to one of the most prominent brands in art supplies, with 24 stores nationwide and James Rosenquist and Red Grooms as regular customers. The Canal Street location was one of the last bastions against the flood tide of IRS investigations, bankruptcy, unsellable inventory and empty shelves. It was also there, in a no-man’s land between SoHo, TriBeCa and Chinatown—and with a steady stream of traffic feeding the Lincoln Tunnel—that the store got its foothold in the arts community in the 1970s and 1980s.”
A New Virtual-Reality Museum For Dutch Old Masters
“The results are startling. You may feel as though you’ll bump your head into the paintings, whose surfaces seem palpably close as you lean in to get a closer look – closer than you might in real life. Even the frames are stunningly 3-D.”
The TV Show That Ate Times Square
A brief history of Total Request Live, which saved MTV, midwifed the boom in boy bands, and filled the busiest crossroads in New York with screaming teenage girls.
Dead Grasshopper Found Embedded In Van Gogh Painting
“For over a century, it went unnoticed in the finished work, Olive Trees (1889), now owned by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, but a recent study by the museum’s curators, conservators, and outside scientists has revealed its old, brown carcass.”
Taking Ballet Class With Misty Copeland In Harlem
“What started as a technique class – focused on turnout of the legs, placement of the arms, straightness of the back – became a larger kind of learning experience, when Ms. Copeland, 35, was joined for an after-class discussion by a trailblazing African-American dancer of another generation, the 86-year-old Carmen de Lavallade. The two spoke about breaking down barriers for black ballet dancers and honoring those who had done so before them.”
How Much Time Do People Really Spend Looking At The Art In Museums?
Isaac Kaplan looks at the research that’s been done on the question over the past 16 years – and finds that the answer has hardly changed over that time span.
Kevin Spacey Is Being Edited Out Of His Newest Movie
In light of Spacey’s ongoing abuse scandal, Sony decided that it couldn’t promote Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World – a biopic about the kidnapping of J. Paul Getty III and the refusal of his billionaire grandfather to pay ransom for him – with Spacey in the role of the senior Getty. (Still less could they promote the film for Oscars, and it had been expected to be a contender.) So they’re re-shooting all of Spacey’s scenes with the actor Scott originally wanted for the role anyway – Christopher Plummer.
Unknown Kurt Weill Song Surfaces In Berlin
“The piece, ‘Lied vom weissen Käse‘ (‘Song of the White Cheese’) – which was written for a Weimar-era musical revue and sung by the actress Lotte Lenya, Weill’s wife – was recently found in an archive unrelated to Weill at the Free University of Berlin and is the most significant discovery of the composer’s music since the early 1980s. The song previously existed only in Lenya’s memory and was written off as chimerical.” (includes video)
Smuckers Give $15 Million To Cleveland Orchestra
Just a couple weeks after the jam company gave $1.1 million to the Akron (Ohio) Art Museum, the company’s executive chairman and his wife have pledged the second largest donation in the Cleveland Orchestra’s history. That executive, Richard Smucker, is the new chairman of the ensemble’s board of directors.