San Francisco’s mayor says that to deal with the city’s deficit, he wants to combine the area’s two major art funders. “But in moving the Grants for Arts program under the Arts Commission umbrella, many say, the mandates of the two different agencies could clash and endanger a fragile arts ecology in San Francisco.”
Tag: 06.09.04
Police Hunt For Person Who Hung Stealth Pictures In Major Museums
A nationwide manhunt is underway for someone who hung paintings of presidents Bush and Clinton in the Metropolitan Museum, Guggenheim, National Gallery in Washington DC, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “The paintings — 15 inches by 9 inches — portray the commanders-in-chief on a background of ground-up dollar bills. The wacky spree has prompted a sweeping investigation by the U.S. Secret Service and the FBI, as well as local police in three cities.”
NZ Ballet On A Roll
The Royal New Zealand Ballet has had a great year. Attendance is up 38 percent over the previous year and “the Ballet has turned around its fortunes since the financial crises of the 1990s. Subscriptions have tripled in the three years since 2000.”
Berlin Drops Gestapo Museum
The Berlin government is dropping plans for a museum documenting the Gestapo. The federal German government will now take up the project and is announcing a new architectural competition to design the building.
Calls For Scottish Opera Boss To Step Down
A growing chorus of critics is demanding that Scottish Opera boss Duncan McGhie resign, after the company was told of a draconian plan to downsize. Critics “accuse the management of repeatedly failing to steer Scottish Opera out of financial trouble and running up a £4.5 million debt that forced first the Scottish Arts Council and then the Executive to step in.”
Levy Wins Orange Prize
“In one of the biggest literary upsets for some years, a previously low-rated novel last night scooped the £30,000 Orange prize for fiction. After a hard-fought final round, judges gave the women-only award to Andrea Levy’s Small Island, a comedy about the punctured illusions, tribulations and spry adaptability of the pioneer Windrush generation of immigrants to Britain in the early 1950s.”
Judging A Lit Prize – Exhausting
Judging a literary prize such as the Orange requires great feats of endurance from judges. “I left the meeting slightly hysterical, convinced that there was no way I would ever finish these novels – 46 in six weeks in the first batch, although I would read 71 in total – and certain that my swotty fellow judges would. So at 2am that night I realised I needed to make a schedule. Weekends were best – say, six novels – and then a couple in the week, in the odd spare evenings or on the bus. This was the exact opposite of the languorous pleasure I usually take from reading, and the intensity had consequences.”
German Orchestra Refuses To Play Anthem
“A German orchestra was threatened with dismissal after instrumentalists mutinied over having to play the communist anthem, the Internationale, for an audience of blue-collar car-assembly workers”
How An Ancient “Unreadable” Book Becomes A Bestseller
Two friends took “an unreadable book, written more than a half-millennium ago in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and Chaldean” and rewrote it, modernizing the plot. Voila – the thriller turns into an instant bestseller…
The 24-Hour Play
“Furthering its interest in new writing, the Old Vic theatre in London has just staged Britain’s first 24-hour plays. Six playwrights, six directors and 24 actors wrote, cast, rehearsed and performed six new 10-minute plays in one day and night.”