Category: today’s top story

“The theatre at Fatah Square in Karrada is protected by blast walls while police are deployed in large numbers in surrounding streets during and after performances. … [T]heatre-goers are not exempt from the vehicle searches and security checks that pervade daily life in Baghdad, [but] the fact that the city is hosting evening shows at all is progress….”

“L.A.’s cultural elite shouldn’t mistake the Dudamel phenomenon for a solid strategy to reverse its historic negligence toward the city’s Latinos. … Historically, foreign-born elites generally escape the social prejudice that burdens even their relatively well-to-do native-born co-ethnics.”

“Critics seem to view the idea of branding the Louvre as both crass and unnecessary, and are particularly dismissive of Henri Loyrette’s outreach abroad. Supporters believe that he is merely doing what any museum director has to do these days to make the institution a financially stable place.”

“The joy of history lies in the stories, the pageantry, the interplay of great men and greater themes, the horrible deaths and bloody lives of our ancestors. … Here’s where historical fiction comes in.”

“Romanian-born German novelist, essayist and poet Herta Müller has been named winner of the 2009 Nobel prize for literature, praised by the judges for depicting the ‘landscape of the dispossessed’ with ‘the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose’. Müller becomes only the 12th woman to have won the Nobel….”

“[His] ‘less is more’ aesthetic, combined with a startling sensuality, defined a visual style that he applied to such varied subjects as designer dresses, cigarette butts and cosmetics jars, many of them now-famous photographs owned by leading art museums.”

“The architectural design [of the Barnes Foundation’s new home] can’t be evaluated in the usual terms because it is so much more than the latest contender for the title of the world’s most glamorous art palace. The architecture also must succeed as an exoneration of the foundation’s alleged crimes against the memory of its founder, the mercurial, vengeful Albert C. Barnes.”

The British novelist received the £50,000 award for Wolf Hall, “a fictionalization of the life of Thomas Cromwell, adviser to Henry VIII, during the king’s attempts to produce a male heir to his throne. Mantel’s win was not a complete surprise; bookmakers considered Wolf Hall the heaviest favorite in years.”

“In a letter to opponents of the move obtained by The Times, [Pritzker Prize-winning Philadelphia architect Robert] Venturi decries the $200-million project as ‘an indiscrete and ridiculous waste of money.’ The celebrated architect is the most prominent cultural figure in the city to publicly oppose the plan….”

“Over the past six months, Hockney has fashioned literally hundreds, probably over a thousand,” images with the Brushes iPhone app, “often sending out four or five a day to a group of about a dozen friends, and not really caring what happens to them after that. (He assumes the friends pass them along through the digital ether.)”