“We have learned that the Louvre forecasts it will attract 12 million visitors a year by 2025, a 30% increase on the 9.3 million recorded for 2013, which made it the best attended art museum in The Art Newspaper’s annual attendance survey.”
International Study: Culture Is Big Travel Appeal For Young People
“Of the 15 countries with the largest economies in the world, the participants – plus 1,000 additional young people surveyed from the UK – said that France was the most attractive place as a source of arts and culture, followed by Italy, the US and then the UK.”
Tracey Emin’s Bed Will Spend Ten Years At The Tate
“Tracey Emin’s controversial artwork My Bed is to return to the Tate after selling for £2.2m earlier this month. Count Christian Duerckheim, the piece’s new owner, has agreed to loan the work ‘for a period of at least 10 years’, said Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota.”
Corcoran Lawyers Make Case For Breakup
“After painting a grim portrait of a museum on the edge — empty coffers, emergency climate chillers in the courtyard, a backup power generator in the street, “combustible” student art-making equipment one floor below priceless works — lawyers for the Corcoran Gallery of Art on Tuesday rested their case in favor of a dramatic reorganization.”
After Only Six Months On The Job, William Penn Foundation Head Resigns
“Peter J. Degnan, who came to William Penn as managing director at the beginning of March from his post as vice dean of finance and administration at the Wharton School, has tendered his resignation, foundation leaders said Monday.”
Andrea L Rich, Controversial Former LACMA Head, 71
“In her methodical process of updating LACMA’s technology, balancing the budget and reorganizing the curatorial departments into “centers,” she often seemed to impose an unwieldy university structure on a relatively eccentric art institution.”
NYT Art Reporter Carol Vogel Caught In Unattributed Wikipedia Quote
“As the comparison shows, Vogel appears to have substituted and deleted a few words, but otherwise left the structure—and several strings of words—mostly intact.”
Get Happy! Scientists Work On Finding Out What That Means
“To track happiness they had to figure out what signaled the feeling and then decide how best to measure that. That ability to track emotion, which is part of a broader field called sentiment analysis, is a nut that everyone from Facebook to the National Security Agency (NSA) is trying to crack, and Dodds and Danforth believe they have found a granular way to do it.”
Pussy Riot Pair Sues Russia Over Imprisonment
“Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova say their prosecutions amounted to torture. They have filed a case at the European Court of Human Rights against Russia, seeking compensation.”
Britain’s Top Draw For Young Visitors From Abroad? Culture
“The UK’s cultural offering is the country’s most appealing feature for young people visiting from abroad, according to a new survey. More than a third of 18 to 34 year olds from Brazil, China, Germany India and the US that were surveyed said that culture ‘particularly contributed’ to making the UK attractive.”
Amazon Makes Hachette A Public Offer: Price E-Books At $9.99 And We’ll Make Peace
“In a post on its website, Amazon made the argument for lower e-book prices and outlined that it would be willing to continue accepting 30 percent of e-book sales, its current take, if Hachette stopped pricing titles at $12.99 and $14.99. The company did not suggest that Hachette lower all e-books to $9.99, leaving room for exceptions for specialized titles that warrant higher prices.”
UK Reverses Ban On Guitars In Prisons
“A ban on steel-string guitars in prison cells in England and Wales has been reversed after a campaign by rock stars including Billy Bragg and Johnny Marr. Prisoners had been unable to play the instruments outside supervised sessions since rules were changed last November.”
Andrew Lloyd Webber Sues Over Cancellation Of “Superstar” Stadium Tour
“The show had been due visit 50 US cities, with a cast including Sex Pistol John Lydon and former Destiny’s Child singer Michelle Williams. But the promoter, Michael Cohl’s Options Clause Entertainment, pulled the plug at the end of May” without giving any reason.
Rochester Philharmonic Names New Music Director
Ward Stare, who played in the Rochester Youth Philharmonic as a youngster and spent four years as the St. Louis Symphony’s resident conductor, takes over this fall “after the turbulent tenure of … Arild Remmereit, who was terminated mid-season in 2012 after two years into his four-year contract.”
U.S. Authorities Drop Effort To Seize Ancient Mask From St. Louis Art Museum And Return It To Egypt
“‘The Department of Justice will take no further legal action with respect to the mask of Ka-Nefer-Nefer,’ U.S. Attorney Richard Callahan said [Monday].” Authorities are unable to produce any evidence that the item, which disappeared from Egypt sometime between 1966 and 1973 and was purchased by the museum from a U.S. dealer 25 years later, was stolen.
Subway Dancers Vs. The NYPD
“Cheered by tourists, tolerated by regulars, feared by those who frown upon kicks in the face, subway dancers have unwittingly found themselves a top priority for the New York Police Department – a curious collision of a Giuliani-era policing approach, a Bloomberg-age dance craze and a new administration that has cast the mostly school-age entertainers as fresh-face avatars of urban disorder.”
Met Museum President Emily Rafferty Retires
“The Met’s first female president managed some 1,500 workers. Working with Met director Thomas Campbell, she oversaw renovations of its Islamic galleries and American wing, new digital initiatives and an increase in attendance fueled by blockbuster shows.”
What Happens When Archives Aren’t On Paper Anymore?
When Salman Rushdie donated his archives to Emory Univeristy, he didn’t mean only his papers: the collection includes four of his old computers (and will include all his later digital effects). How do archivists go about making the material on these old pieces of technology available to the public?
Top Posts From AJBlogs 07.29.14
Retirement For Emily Rafferty?
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts | Published 2014-07-29
St. Louis: Ka Nefer-Nefer Case Ends With A Whimper
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts | Published 2014-07-30
John Luther Adams’s outdoor music needs to come indoors
AJBlog: Condemned to Music | Published 2014-07-29
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On The Sad Sad Mess That The Metropolitan Opera Has Gotten Itself In To
“Of course the lockout will be toxic, as we learned from the Minnesota Orchestra and from the last Met lockout, in 1980. Subscribers flee, musicians flee, and the art suffers too. Whatever happens, a lockout will mean bitterness between the workers and Gelb. It will mean a division among the subscribers and donors, and worse, it will mean that other institutions may follow the Met’s hardline example. In other words, something rotten will spread beyond Denmark.”
How Are Europe’s Great Museums Supposed To Handle All Those People?
“Seeing masterpieces may be a soul-nourishing cultural rite of passage, but soaring attendance has turned many museums into crowded, sauna-like spaces, forcing institutions to debate how to balance accessibility with art preservation.”
Is The Bolshoi Ballet A Soviet Throwback?
Alastair Macaulay: “It was hard not to think of politics when watching the Bolshoi’s repertory – which was entirely pre-glasnost. Seeing the tedious mix of Swan Lake (in Yuri Grigorovich’s dismal production), Don Quixote (in Alexei Fadeyechev’s version) and Spartacus (all Grigorovich and all hokum) was to feel the clock turned back 40 years.”
College Radio Fans Fight To Keep Their Stations For Students (And Their Quirky Programs)
“Cash-strapped universities are discovering that their student stations are lucrative assets. They are finding eager partners in public-radio stations and religious broadcasters. The public and religious radio channels are looking to own the equivalent of beach-front property on the FM dial,.”
One Big Problem With Met Opera Contract Talks: All The Different Unions
Management is negotiating with 15 unions, “representing the orchestra, chorus, stage crews, hair and makeup stylists, costumers, scenic artists, cleaners, ticket takers, ushers, security guards and others. Some unions are beginning to eye one another warily, because any agreement made with one of the bigger groups is likely to set a pattern for the others.”
Making Genuinely Anti-War Art Is Surprisingly Hard
“Art makes its subject interesting and arresting and meaningful. To make art about war, even anti-war art about war, is to risk rendering war interesting and arresting and meaningful.”