ART IN PUBS?

The chairman of Britain’s Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries says British museums need to loosen up. “Pointing out that museums across the country have an average of 75 per cent of objects in store, he advised them to be ‘less precious’ about deaccessioning. Lord Evans congratulated the Museum of London, which has given boxes of Roman artifacts to primary schools. In answer to a query about his earlier suggestion that museums should lend to pubs, he argued that this might sometimes be appropriate for sturdy objects, such as agricultural equipment (“but not Canalettos”, he quickly added).” – The Art Newspaper

HERE FOR THE TINTORETTO

A Tintoretto painting is discovered in small town Pennsylvania. “From an art-historical standpoint, the discovery of the Tintoretto in Wernersville is not quite as significant as the discovery of Caravaggio’s “Taking of Christ” in a Jesuit residence in Dublin in 1990. Yet the story of the Tintoretto painting is intriguing and involves several figures of ecclesiastical and historical prominence.” – New York Times

ENSHRINING A CONDUCTOR

Is the larger world ready to appreciate the late great Sergiu Celibidache? “Little did anybody at that time know to what extent Celibidache lacked a cordial relationship with the real world. At one point, he wanted to fire the entire Berlin Philharmonic. He demanded extravagant amounts of rehearsal time, declined to perform with American orchestras until a 1984 engagement with the Curtis Symphony Orchestra, and, most curious of all, refused to record.” – Philadelphia Inquirer

PATRONAGE AMERICAN STYLE

American internet investor and opera lover Alberto Vilar has donated $2 million to Milan’s La Scala – the largest private non-European donation in the opera house’s history. “He is now waging a sort of one-man campaign to bring U.S.-style arts patronage to Europe at a time when governments are scaling back their arts spending.” – Yahoo! News (Reuters)

FAILURE TO INCITE

Director Graham Vick was disappointed last week when his “Don Giovanni” at Glyndebourne failed to provoke demonstrations of disapproval. He is, after all, in the business of trying to shock. “No, this time the overall reaction was one of provocation fatigue: the seen-that, used-the-T-shirt, thrown-away-the-mug sense of déjà vu that marked the fag end of Peter Jonas’s PowerHouse regime at English National Opera in the late 1980s.” – The Sunday Times (UK)