“Perhaps only someone from Britain could genuinely believe that a personal ad beginning, ‘Baste me in butter and call me Slappy,’ might lead to romance with an actual, nonincarcerated person. But in the strange alternate universe that is the personals column in the London Review of Books, a fetish for even the naughtiest dairy product is considered a perfectly reasonable basis for a relationship. Rejecting the earnest self-promotion of most personal ads, the correspondents in the London Review column tend instead to present themselves as idiosyncratic, even actively repellent.”
Tag: 11.21.06
The End Of (Getting Away With) Plagiarism
“Given the popularity of plagiarism-seeking software services for academics, it may be only a matter of time before some enterprising scholar yokes Google Book Search and plagiarism-detection software together into a massive literary dragnet, scooping out hundreds of years’ worth of plagiarists—giants and forgotten hacks alike—who have all escaped detection until now.”
Goya Thieves Trolling For Video Games?
Law enforcement officers say the thieves who stole Goya’s now-recovered “Children With a Cart” from a Howard Johnson motel parking lot likely weren’t looking for it. ” ‘This time of year, close to Christmas, they probably thought they’d found a truck filled with PlayStations and broke in and started looking for the biggest-looking box,’ said Steve Siegel, an F.B.I. agent who serves as the spokesman for the bureau’s Newark office.”
Artistic Voyeurism, With A Key
“Several years ago the artist Nina Katchadourian found herself staring up at the sky full of office windows in Times Square and thinking about the faceless occupants behind them. ‘You think, “My God, all those anonymous people up there, living and working,” ‘ she said. ‘There’s this sense of so much detachment between interior and exterior.’ With the cooperation of one of those anonymous people and the help of the Public Art Fund, Ms. Katchadourian is now trying to build a bridge — or at least, as she says, stretch a tenuous thread — between those two worlds.”
Toni Morrison Sets Conversation In Motion At The Louvre
“Different cultural disciplines may share audiences, yet art, theater, movies, music, dance and literature rarely commune directly with one another. More often, it seems, they are self-referential, defining their own vocabularies, speaking their own languages. The Louvre has now set out to prove that this need not be so.” How best to do that? Invite Nobel laureate Toni Morrison to choose a theme and program around it.
A Call For Higher Standards For Arts Boards
The state of arts institutions in Australia is generally good. But “there are still a number of prominent arts boards plagued by management weaknesses, staff discontent and external criticism, particularly from funding bodies such as federal and state governments. Ultimately, those boards must take responsibility and yet some continue to whitewash or ignore scrutiny.”