More than 600 paintings and assorted trinkets from the home of President John F. Kennedy & Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis will be auctioned off by Sotheby’s this week, with the full sale expected to bring $1 million or more. “Among the most prominent items, Kennedy will offer the paintings done in 1968 by Aaron Shickler in the living room of her mother’s Manhattan apartment, Portrait Of Jacqueline Kennedy With Caroline And John Jr. and John And Caroline Reading, A Study, that likely will sell for $3,000 to $12,000.”
Tag: 12.01.04
Major Film Protest Planned For Toronto
“An estimated 100 trucks and trailers are expected to circle Queen’s Park in Toronto today as more than 5,000 workers in the Ontario film industry descend on the provincial legislature to demand increased tax credits to help revive the industry’s flagging fortunes… The demonstration — involving a united front of studios, unions, equipment suppliers and service companies called the Keep Ontario Cameras Rolling Coalition — is the latest step to pressure the Ontario government to raise the tax credit for domestic film and TV shoots to 33 per cent from 20 per cent and, most crucially, the credit for non-Canadian producers using Ontario labour, to 16 per cent from 11.”
Taking On The Big Guys Where They Live
A plucky young Canadian editor is mounting what might be considered the ultimate Quixotic challenge of the book world: building, opening, and running a major new independent bookstore in the heart of New York City. “She knows that the city’s independent booksellers have been dying off, squeezed out by skyrocketing rents and stiff price competition from large chains, such as Barnes and Noble, which gives no quarter in the town where it began.” But Sarah McNally comes from a family of experienced indie booksellers, and her family is throwing its considerable financial weight behind her new two-level, 7000-square-foot store in downtown Manhattan. The store opens this week with a staff of two dozen, and will stock 40,000 titles.
American Government Moves To Seize Picasso From Collector
The American government is trying to seize a Picasso from a Chicago collector. “The attempt is a rare instance in which federal prosecutors, apparently for the first time in California, are invoking the US National Stolen Property Act (NSPA) against an individual collector in an attempt to seize art in a Nazi-loot claim, on the theory that the work is stolen goods which crossed state lines.”
Canada’s Most Canadian Canadian Dies
“Journalist, author, pundit, personality — for more than 50 years Pierre Berton dominated print and broadcast media in Canada.” The author of 50 books and countless newspaper and magazine columns died yesterday at age 84, and his legacy as author, commentator, and benefactor to other writers is being celebrated across the country. How important was Berton to Canadians? The CBC’s flagship evening newscast devoted the first ten minutes of its program to him last night, relegating a major visit by the American president to page 2 status.
Requiem For A Bookstore
Boston’s independent WordsWorth bookstore closed this fall, offering yet one more reminder of how much is lost to a community with the failure of an institution that everyone had assumed would always be there. “Sitting among the litter, among posters of authors such as Hillary Rodham Clinton and Jack Germond and not far from a dracaena that looked dried out and defeated, [the store’s owners] pondered what they’d lost to bankruptcy — the bookstore at 30 Brattle Street that had led to their meeting and, eventually, their marriage, their two children, and all the exhilaration derived from nearly three decades of doing what they loved, which is living among, or… just touching books.”
Bigger May Not Be Better For The Arts
The city of Richmond, Virginia, is contructing a beautiful new performing arts center as part of an effort to revitalize its downtown. But not everyone is happy about the project – two local writers have created a weblog called SaveRichmond.com, which takes aim at the PAC as an expensive plaything for the elite, and asserts that the city “should work with its artists, musicians and entrepreneurs to build a vibrant and diverse ‘street-level’ arts scene.” The critics also claim that the planners of the PAC don’t know anything about arts administration, and accuses the center’s board of using “dodgy finances” to hide its inability to raise money.
Fund All You Want, We’ll Make More
Canada has a long history of government support for the arts. But “over the past 20 years, as activity in the arts has grown, federal funding has remained fairly stable. The result has been that the proportion of federal funding in the revenues of Canadian arts organizations has dropped by half.” It’s an uncomfortable situation – can you ever really have too much art, and even if you can, how do you decide who is worthy of support and who isn’t? Governments don’t generally like to be in the business of making value judgments, but without a serious increase in arts funding, many fear that Canada will soon have no other choice.
Tut’ll Cost Ya In LA
Hoping to get a glimpse of King Tut when he comes to Los Angeles? It’ll cost you. Tickets will be as much as $30. “A portion of the exhibition’s proceeds will fund construction of a new museum in Cairo, as well as preservation and conservation of archeological sites in Egypt.”
Chicago Sued For Intentional Mutilation of Flowers
A 72-year-old Chicago man who designed, planted, and maintained a massive wildflower garden on the city’s North Side, is suing the city for destroying his creation to make way for the increased foot traffic to the new Millenium Park. The lawsuit contends that the wildflowers were not merely a garden, but a work of art, and as such, they should have been protected under the Visual Artists Rights Act, a federal law prohibiting “‘intentional distortion, mutilation, or other modification’ of public artwork without permission of the creator.”