OOPS

  • “For decades, guides have directed countless tourists to a red-roofed, beamed cottage near Shakespeare’s birthplace at Stratford-on-Avon to pay homage at the place where his mother, Mary Arden, was thought to have been born in the early 16th century. Now it has emerged from new research that she was not born there at all, but in a house some 30 yards down the road in the same village.” – New York Times

OF IMAGES MOVING AND STILL

Painting and cinema are still handcuffed together on a one-way ticket to the morgue. When artists appropriate images from film they always seem to be drawn to the melancholy underside of the tinsel factory. Painting and cinema both create fictional spaces, but the space of painting is static. So when a moment in a film is snatched and turned into a painting, it becomes deathly: you might call it painting noir.” – The Guardian

BRITISH MUSEUM GREAT COURT OPENS

The Queen opens the British Museum’s new Great Court. “She hailed the £100m development, with its sweeping roof designed by Lord Foster, as a landmark of the millennium.” – BBC

  • BIG SPACE: “The £100 million development has transformed the world-famous museum’s two-acre inner courtyard – hidden for 150 years – into Europe’s largest covered square, the size of Wembley football pitch.” – London Evening Standard

LESS REJECTION

Performance artists are moving out of the museums and performing arts centers and into nightclubs. These nightspots are far from the galleries, museums and other art spaces that historically hosted performance art, and they attract a different crowd. The clubs, in need of performers, are embracing the artists. – Los Angeles Times

RECORD ST. LOUIS GIFT

“The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra will receive a record-breaking $40 million gift, it was announced Wednesday morning. The money, from the Jack Taylor family, owners of Enterprise Rent-a-Car, is in the form of a four-year challenge grant, and is the largest single personal contribution ever made to an American orchestra for its operations and endowment.” – St. Louis Post-Dispatch