Category: today’s top story

Early reviews are positive for the new e-reader, which will allow users to lend e-books to each other and to browse in B&N stores via wi-fi.

“At Carnegie Hall, which has featured on its three stages such varied musicians as Duke Ellington, Bob Dylan and the Berlin Philharmonic, only Artistic and Executive Director Clive Gillinson makes more than the stagehands.”

Several recent studies have “found that serious musicians are better than other people at perceiving and remembering sounds. But it’s not because they have better ears.” It’s because of their training and how that training changes their brains.

“In a report to be released on Monday the nonprofit Center for Arts Education found that New York City high schools with the highest graduation rates also offered students the most access to arts education.”

“[T]he artist whose ‘Hope’ poster of Barack Obama became an iconic emblem of the presidential campaign, has admitted that he lied about which photograph from The Associated Press he used as his source, and that he then covered up evidence to substantiate his lie.”

“Contemporary art often demands much of its viewers with imagery or performance pieces so avant-garde they can be difficult to understand,” but “it is often museums and art galleries that face the biggest hurdles to stay on the cutting edge of the art world.” New York’s New Museum is lowering a ceiling by 2 feet for an Urs Fischer show.

A church in western North Carolina has announced plans to celebrate Halloween with a bonfire fueled by the works of such “heretics” as Billy Graham and Mother Teresa – along with all translation of the Bible other than the King James Version. (Barbecued chicken will be served at the event. Seriously.)

“[C]redit analysts at Standard & Poor’s say they believe that the nearly three dozen nonprofit cultural institutions the company rates will ‘manage their businesses reasonably well during this recession,’ just as they have weathered past economic downturns.”

“A source with knowledge of the discussions … [said] that a group of former City Opera board members tried to form a coalition to oust key members of the current City Opera board, and had recruited Joe Volpe, former head of the Metropolitan Opera, as their standard-bearer” to replace new general director George Steel.

The orchestra has terminated maestro Oleg Caetani’s five-year contract one year early – and just 3 weeks after releasing a 2010 season brochure with Caetani’s name on it. His relations with management “are reported to have soured. … Audiences had tired of Caetani’s championing of the 20th-century Russian conductor [sic] Dmitri Shostakovich.”