1. Today Vs. Yesterday - Are Symphony Orchestras Better? Are today's symphony orchestras better or worse than the orchestras of yesterday? The technical level of the players is better, but is the way they play together superior? The Boston Globe asked five prominent conductors to make comparisons. Boston Globe 02/02/03
   
   
2. Into Every "Painter Of Light" A Little Darkness Must Fall Thomas Kinkade, the self-styled "Painter of Light" was a phenomenon, selling millions of dollars worth of sentimental paintings out of mall-front stores. But lately business has been bad, and Kinkade dealers are furious. "The dealers have their own ideas about why sales have slowed: Media Arts has been flooding the market with cheap reproductions of the same art for which they're forced to charge top dollar. Although dealers are prohibited by contract from discounting the paintings by even a dime, Kinkades have been showing up at national discount chains, puncturing the carefully wrought myth that they are collectibles with a generous scarcity premium." Los Angeles Times 02/03/03
   
   
3. Feminist Art - Three Decades Later "How does feminist art of the 1970s hold up? Does it seem historically significant or merely transiently faddish?" Feminist artists' "demands for parity, for an end to being patronized, and for acknowledgment that art should accommodate a distinctly female consciousness made headlines at the time." Philadelphia Inquirer 02/02/03
   
   
4. The "Third Rail" Of Art History? After Lawrence Weschler wrote about David Hockney's theory about how Old Master painters might have used optical devices as aids in their work, he got an avalanche of protests. "I write about all sorts of things–hell, I write about relations between Jews and Poles, for God’s sake – so I’m used to getting letters. But I’d never found myself on the receiving end of anything like this. It turns out that the question of technical assistance may be the Third Rail of popular art history. Most people, it seems, prefer to envision their artistic heroes as superhuman draftsmen, capable of rendering ravishingly accurate anatomies or landscapes or townscapes through sheer inborn or God-given talent." ArtKrush 12/02
   
   
5. Getty Passes On Masterpiece For years the J Paul Getty Museum in LA has been able to buy whatever art it wanted - and has. But at the recent Old Master auctions in December the Getty failed to even bid on an important work that would have been a natural for its collection. "The decision of the world’s richest museum not to even bid on one of the last great narrative pictures of the Renaissance (one arguably of even greater rarity and importance than the $50 million Northumberland Raphael) is incomprehensible." The Art Newspaper 02/1/03