Category: today’s top story

“On Saturday, [the players and management] announced a mediated bargaining session beginning noon Monday. But while a resolution could come from that meeting, a spokesman for the musicians said the artists are still operating under their previously-stated plan to strike if a new accord is not reached before midnight Sunday.”

“Film and television producers won’t read anything not certified by an agent because producers are afraid of being accused of stealing ideas and material. Most book publishers have stopped accepting book proposals that are not submitted by agents. … It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”

In “a 1976 letter … one of J. Paul Getty’s closest advisors refers to the museum’s ‘exploits over the bronze statue’ as a ‘crime.’ The letter and other documents uncovered by a Times reporter show that the billionaire oilman and another potential buyer were troubled by the questionable legal status of the statue.”

In September 2009, authorities at the National Museum in Poznan, Poland discovered that a thief had removed the original of Beach at Pourville (the nation’s only Monet) from its frame and replaced it with a copy painted on cardboard. Now Polish police have announced that they have recovered the painting and arrested a suspect.

Human beings spend much of their time at work, “and yet this ‘work’ is unseen; it is literally invisible, and it is so in part because it is rarely represented in art. If it does appear in consciousness, it does so via the business pages of newspapers, it does so as an economic phenomenon, rather than as a broader human phenomenon.”

An unhealthy social contract has developed on the Web, says Jaron Lanier, one in which “authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the [online] hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.”

The selection of Jeffrey Deitch as MOCA’s new director “is inevitably framed as daring and audacious, but the appointment of a businessman to run a nonprofit in fact feels reactionary — a profoundly conservative response to the fiscal mismanagement of the museum’s prior administration, which nearly toppled MOCA in 2008.”

“Deitch, 57, founded his gallery, Deitch Projects LLC, in 1996 and operates from three spaces, two in SoHo and another in Long Island City. He plays a P.T. Barnum role, providing funds, vision and support to young artists including Tauba Auerbach, Kehinde Wiley and Kristin Baker.”

“In 2001, America produced a third of the world’s science and engineering articles in refereed journals, and in three of the past four years its academics received two-thirds of the Nobel prizes for science and economics. No wonder America’s great universities lure the world’s cleverest students and the finest academics, many of whom stay to enrich their new country. Now these great factories of talent, ideas and technologies are threatened from without and within.”

“Michael Brand, who has served four years as the director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, will step down from his role at the end of the month. … Current and former Getty officials pointed to a ‘personality clash’ between [Getty Trust president James] Wood and Brand, as well as differences of opinion over the Getty’s strategic vision.”