Category: today’s top story

“A Brandeis University committee examining the future of the Rose Art Museum will recommend today that the museum remain open to the public, eight months after the financially strapped college threatened to shutter the renowned facility…. It does not take a stand on the most controversial part of Brandeis’s plan, the potential sale of its $350 million collection.”

“Having already sunk residency roots in Miami and Vienna, the Clevelanders plan an every-other-year presence at the Lincoln Center Festival,” beginning in the summer of 2011. Future plans include fully-staged opera with the Cleveland Orchestra in the pit.

“Just two days after waking to news that the proposed Pennsylvania budget agreement, announced late Friday in Harrisburg, would extend sales taxes to arts and cultural performances and venues – but not to movies or sports events – arts officials said they would blitz lawmakers in a last-ditch effort to stop the tax.”

“The boards of New York’s highest-profile cultural institutions were once the domain of gray-haired men; wives or widows were relegated to the ladies’ auxiliaries. Now it is women who are stepping up and taking control of some of the biggest arts organizations, or making multimillion-dollar gifts behind the scenes.”

“Federal regulators next week are expected to seek to turn controversial ‘net neutrality’ principles into formal rules intended to give the nation’s computer users the right to use whatever services and devices they like without interference from their ISPs.”

“The Tate says it has secured just £4m of funding in the past 12 months towards building its flagship ‘Tate 2’ glass gallery on the south bank of the Thames – but insists that it will continue with the ambitious development despite a £140m funding shortfall.”

The departure next year of artistic director Joy Zinoman “augurs one of the most significant changes in years at the top of a Washington performing arts organization.” It “is at once a stunning development, and the first sign that turnover at other major companies is inevitable.”

She “brought a powerful voice and an unfeigned urgency to music that resonated with mainstream listeners. With her straight blond hair and willowy figure and two bearded guitar players by her side, she looked exactly like what she was, a Greenwich Villager directly from the clubs and the coffeehouses that nourished the folk-music revival.”

Last fall, the Cleveland Museum of Art found itself in the midst of both a major expansion/renovation and a financial jam. “To be able to proceed, the museum … has gone to court for permission to draw up to $75 million over 10 years from the interest paid out on two endowment funds and two outside, restricted trusts for acquisitions.” It’s a troubling move.

Jon Landman, considered by many the sole hero of the Jayson Blair fiasco and for the last four years the editor in charge of the paper’s Web site. While the appointment has surprised many observers, the man who made it, Times executive editor Bill Keller, calls it a “no-brainer.”