During the “fat” years, Tennessee’s arts funding didn’t grow much. But then when the eceonomy slowed, arts funding didn’t get cut back much, either. Heck – Tennessee spends more on the arts than California now. Could Memphis be the new San Francisco of the South?
Tag: 01.10.04
Options For The Barnes
Why Does the Barnes Collection need to move to Philadelphia? There are other options, writes Lee Rosenbaum. “The foundation could begin by selling unused or little-used assets. Chief among these: the foundation’s 137-acre property in Chester County, for which the Barnes was recently offered $12 million. Auctioning off some of the foundation’s ancillary collections — some 5,200 objects and documents — could also generate cash. The Barnes provenance would give these objects market cachet far in excess of their artistic or historic importance. While art museums are supposed to use sale proceeds solely for acquisitions, not operations, the Barnes considers itself an educational institution (and it doesn’t acquire new works). In addition, legal strictures against selling the Barnes Foundation’s holdings apply only to works on view in the galleries.”
Natural Law Party
Each year, John Broackman posts a big-idea question to important thinkers. This year he wonders what law of nature is waiting to be declared. “There is some bit of wisdom, some rule of nature, some lawlike pattern, either grand or small, that you’ve noticed in the universe that might as well be named after you.” What, he asks, is your law, one that’s ready to take a place near Kepler’s and Faraday’s and Murphy’s. More than 150 responses totaling more than 20,000 words have been posted so far…
Professor: Literary Theory Needs Reform
Literary theory, argues one scholar, has got it all wrong. “Literary study, he argues, has been a random, unsystematic affair. For any given period, scholars focus on a select group of a mere few hundred texts: the canon. As a result, they have allowed a narrow, distorting slice of literary history to pass for the total picture. A canon of 200 novels, for instance, sounds very large for 19th-century Britain (and is much larger than the current one), but is still less than 1 per cent of the novels that were actually published: 20,000, 30, more, no one really knows — and close reading won’t help here, a novel a day every day of the year would take a century or so.” So what should replace it?
Scientists To Dig Up Medicis
Scientists plan to dig up as many as 50 members of the Medici family to study the bodies for clues to how they lived and died. “Starting from June, corpses will be removed from the monumental tombs in the Medici Chapels at Michelangelo’s church of San Lorenzo in Florence, allowing scientists to reconstruct the dynasty’s genetic make-up and their real family tree.”
A Canadian City Courts Gehry
It’s been a mating dance of four years between the Art Gallery of Ontarion (which has a new $300 million collection it wants to display) and architect Frank Gehry. Finally plans for the museum’s expansion are about to be revealed. “What took so long? Well, it was a complicated courtship involving negotiating strategies on both sides. There was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing. There were endless brilliant ideas that were eventually discarded. There were plane trips, and there were bonding experiences, including hockey games. There were problems that sometimes seemed insurmountable, and for a while, a division of opinion within the AGO board. And always, there were money issues.”
A Showpiece Stadium
Architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron have broken ground on their biggest project yet. “On Christmas Eve, construction began on its biggest project yet: the Olympic Stadium, which will form the centrepiece of the Beijing Olympics in 2008. The 100,000 capacity arena promises to be the most remarkable stadium since Gunter Behnisch’s 1972 Olympic Stadium in Munich. It looks like a giant bird’s nest, with a mass of structural members intertwined to form its huge basket.”
Albee – Overcoming The Past And What A Past)
Edward Albee has “written 28 plays over 44 years, but as he wrote in the programme notes for the Almeida’s 1996 revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, that play, premiered on Broadway in 1962, has “hung about my neck like a shining medal of some sort – really nice but a trifle onerous”. Among American playwrights he ranks alongside Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, and like them he has suffered critical rejection.”
Do Titles Matter?
The title makes the book. Who even wants to crack the cover of a book with a dull title? So how do you come up with a winning title that will make the cash regsisters sing?
World’s Languages Are Becoming Extinct
“While estimates suggest that in the next 100 years perhaps five per cent of species will be wiped out, Mark Abley’s ‘Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages’ argues that it is languages that are really under threat. The consensus seems to be that on current trends, between 50 and 90 per cent of the world’s 6,000 or so languages will cease to exist over the next century. Should we care?”