Category: issues

“A French anti-racism group has filed a legal complaint against the Louvre museum, arguing that a policy [introduced by President Nicolas Sarkozy] to allow free admission to European young people is discriminatory.”

“New Jersey’s attorney general is suing three ticket resellers for offering marked-up tickets to Bruce Springsteen concerts that have not yet gone on sale to the public. Because tickets to the Giants Stadium shows will not be available for purchase officially until Monday, Attorney General Anne Milgram charged that the brokers could not have the items they offered on Tuesday.”

“The Gaillard Municipal Auditorium, Charleston’s largest performance venue and an essential stage for local arts groups and Spoleto Festival USA, will undergo extensive renovations beginning as early as 2011 if enough money can be raised to pay the hefty price tag. The project likely would cost more than $100 million,” and “a $20 million matching gift already has been committed.”

“People working in media, publishing and entertainment sectors are the heaviest drinkers, according to the Department of Health. They consume an average of 44 units a week, almost twice the recommended maximum amount of three-to-four units a day for men, and two-to-three for women.”

“Germany, the land of Goethe, Thomas Mann and Beethoven, has an unlikely pop culture hero: Donald Duck. Just as the French are obsessed with Jerry Lewis, the Germans see a richness and complexity to the Disney comic that isn’t always immediately evident to people in the cartoon duck’s homeland.”

Since the Summer Games ended in August, Beijing’s Bird’s Nest stadium has suffered a fate that is all too common among former Olympic venues around the world: neglect. A lack of bookings means the stadium (designed by Herzog & de Meuron) remains empty most of the time. Business is so meager that there are even plans to turn parts of the structure into a shopping center. So today’s news that Chinese auteur Zhang Yimou will restage his famous production of Puccini’s “Turandot” at the stadium in October comes as a noteworthy development.

“While some companies have implemented staff freezes and are entertaining reduced work hours, their worst-case scenarios include scheduling fewer performances, reducing touring, and postponing or abandoning riskier work. And while it’s the last resort, they cannot rule out the possibility of staff retrenchments.”

“Eminence is the one universal precondition to being a commencement speaker, and an implied (often explicit) theme of the speeches is, ‘Here lieth the path to success and happiness.’ There are two problems with this formula. The first is that any narrative of success is bound to be at least a little bit dull. The second is that successful people are almost never able to pinpoint what it was that made them so. […] Failure, on the other hand, is Harvard, Yale, and the University of Heidelberg rolled into one.”

The America-Israel Cultural Foundation used to give out about $2 million annually in study grants to promising musicians, dancers and visual artists. “But this year, disaster looms. The foundation’s endowment of about $14 million was in the hands of Bernard L. Madoff and evaporated in his Ponzi scheme. … [The AICF] expects to give around 350 scholarships next year, down from about 800.”

“The [downtown] opera house, completed in 1934, is a grand old building … [with] eclectic Classical Revival-cum-Art Deco architecture. Inside is a 3,500-seat hall and four side theaters, each capable of seating 700.” The building has been empty since 1991, but the city is now negotiating with a group “who wants to reopen the opera house as a performing arts center.”