Proms Time Again

They’re back. London’s Proms concerts are the summer music fest every critic seems to love to hate. Big, showy, popular and rippling with gaudy nationalism, they also seem to grow each year. “As though to reinforce its paramountcy, the BBC has announced a season, to open on Friday, with more concerts than ever, more special events and an expansion of the Proms in the Park to embrace all four UK nations for the first time.”

Ending Cal. Arts Funding Is Shortsighted (And Costly)

A proposal to zero out the California Arts Council will make recovering it difficult later. “Eliminating the Arts Council in a bad budget year is like taking your car to the junkyard because you can’t afford to buy gas this week. Times will get better, and when they do, re-creating a state arts council will be far more costly and complex than keeping the existing one in place.”

Saving Art For The Nation?

Next week the UK’s National Gallery will learn if it can get the money to buy a Raphael before it is sold to Americans. “Arguments have been raging over the fate of the painting with varying degrees of hysteria, sentimentality and anger since October. The Getty has been accused of ‘baby-snatching’; there has been talk of “raids on the British patrimony”. The language employed – including the nakedly over-emotional, quasi-evangelical notion of ‘saving’ – has not been helpful. Anyone would think that the National Gallery is protecting the picture from a gang of criminals, masterminded by evil geniuses in the guise of aristocrats, Sotheby’s experts and ruthless foreign curators, intent on grabbing the Raphael and hurling it into the Thames.”

Cleaning Michelangelo No Joke

“The row over how to clean David has been reported around the world as almost comic, but it is not funny at all. It is frightening because, ultimately, those involved will do what they want. And if they permanently damage the greatest sculpture in the world, that will just be tough. David is a global property, a defining achievement of humanity. Italy has no more right to damage its surface than the Taliban had to blow up Buddhist masterpieces. Anyway, this is not Italy-bashing; it is a Florentine who has sounded the alarm.”

Book Sales Down This Year

The balance sheet for publishing is not looking good so far this year. Book sales were down again in May, and while Harry Potter sales should give the industry a bump, overall things are gloomy. “For the first five months of 2003, bookstore sales were down 1.7%, to $6.12 billion, with sales falling in three of the first five months of the year.”

The Old Write Way

“Fountain pens are no longer remembrances, as they were a generation ago. Nor are they simply faddish symbols of resistance to technology. That counter-trend peaked a few years back. Today, this old and stylish implement has achieved an uneasy peace with the PDA and the keyboard. We deploy our pens less often these days, true. But we find that this makes them all the more important when we do. At least that’s the rationale behind the lively and mostly under-noticed global enterprise of quality 21st century fountain pens.”

Washington Concert Opera Close To Shutdown

Washington Concert Opera, an unusual company dedicated to presenting rarely heard gems of the operatic literature, is on the verge of financial collapse, and will “have to be restructured, hugely” if it is to survive, according to its board president. WCO ran a $200,000 deficit on an overall budget of $500,000 last season, and the board is unwilling to go into debt to keep the company singing.

Lawsuit Threatens L.A. Exhibit

“In a legal challenge that aims to block an upcoming show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the grandson of a Russian aristocrat is arguing that 25 of the artworks — including paintings by Cezanne, Degas, Matisse, Picasso and Van Gogh — are stolen goods, looted from his family by Lenin’s Bolshevik government in 1918 and later passed to Moscow’s State Pushkin Museum.” The lawsuit is a new tactic in a larger battle by the family of the Russian collector who owned the pieces to force legal recognition of the Bolshevik seizure. LACMA officials, presumably caught by surprise, aren’t commenting just yet.