Art News from Around the World

Visual Arts Thu, 06 Mar 2014 18:06 11th Century Indian Sculpture In Toledo Museum May Have Been Stolen “The Toledo Museum of Art said it saw no signs of trouble when it bought the small bronze statue of a Hindu deity in 2006 from a New York dealer now charged in India. The statue resembles an idol now listed as stolen in India.”Source: Yahoo! (AP) Visual Arts Thu, 06 Mar 2014 18:01 Big Concerns About The Scale Of Massive Picasso Restorations In Paris “What comes as a truly horrible surprise is that all of Picasso’s 5,000 works have been “cleaned, restored and reframed” for the opening. It beggars belief that some urgent “conservation” necessity should have struck all of these modern works at the same time.”Source: The Guardian (UK) Visual Arts Thu, 06 Mar 2014 14:46 Stunning Move: Getty Images Makes 35 Million Images Free On The Web “Getty’s not doing this out of the good of its heart. It recognizes that images on the Internet are treated as de facto public domain by many people on social networks, blogs, and the scummier parts of the content web. It knows it’s highly unlikely to ever get significant money out of any of those […]Source: NiemanLab Visual Arts Thu, 06 Mar 2014 14:20 Here We Go Again: This Year’s Whitney Biennial – A Lot Of Dead Art Jerry Saltz: “I kept hearing myself think, I see dead art: Work that looks and behaves like it is supposed to look and behave but that doesn’t make us see differently, that doesn’t rethink form, reimage structure, or explore material, color, or new orders.”Source: New York Magazine Words Fri, 07 Mar 2014 09:09 Loss, Betrayal, and Inaccuracy: A Translator’s Handbook “If this much loss comes with the translation of a single word, it’s hard to imagine the worlds that are lost with the rendering of an entire novel. But the crucial thing to remember – I often tell myself – is that it doesn’t matter. Loss is invisible; it is what makes it through the […]Source: Virginia Quarterly Review Ideas Fri, 07 Mar 2014 09:07 Why Do We Find Some Languages More Beautiful Than Others? Bernd Brunner (aggrieved): “People often describe German, my native language, as hard and aggressive. They relish criticizing its guttural sounds, long compound words, and the sentence structure … According to popular accounts, it was five hundred years ago when the apparently polyglot Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, declared ‘I speak Spanish to God, Italian to […]Source: The Smart Set People Fri, 07 Mar 2014 09:06 When James Met Jean-Jacques: How Rousseau Cured Boswell of Calvinism “Boswell had been raised in the dour Church of Scotland, where the worst of Scottish weather and Scottish Calvinism met to form a perfect storm of fear and trembling.” And so, while on the Grand Tour, the young man turned to the author of Emile and The Social Contract, who had “succeeded in the redoubtable […]Source: Virginia Quarterly Review Music Fri, 07 Mar 2014 09:03 Why Robert Ashley Was a Great Opera Composer (And Why So Few Americans Knew of Him) For a start, it’s because his approach to writing opera was, as he wrote, “Put aside intelligibility, put aside urgency of plot. Put in embellishment. Put in Maria Callas and Patsy Cline and Billie Holiday.” Mark Swed explains.Source: Los Angeles Times Music Fri, 07 Mar 2014 09:01 Reports of Kiri Te Kanawa’s Retirement Are Greatly Exaggerated While she did just make her last opera appearance, she says, “One door closes and another door opens but as to retiring, I’ve never ever had that word in my vocabulary. Only thing is that other people have got it in their vocabulary because they can’t think of anything else to say.”Source: Radio New Zealand Media Fri, 07 Mar 2014 08:59 Whatever Happened To Qatar’s Once-Budding Film Industry? “In Doha, there was once a buzzing festival and schemes to nurture local talent, but now much of the the money in the Qatari film business goes to projects elsewhere.”Source: The Guardian (UK) Theatre Fri, 07 Mar 2014 08:58 ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ Coming to Broadway For Sixth Time Bartlett Sher will direct the musical’s latest incarnation in the fall of 2015. No casting has been announced, though the director has reportedly talked informally with Broadway stalwart Danny Burstein about playing Tevye.Source: The New York Times Music Fri, 07 Mar 2014 08:57 Ex-Orchestra CEO in Silicon Valley Indicted for Embezzlement “Stephen Jay Carlton, the former executive director of the Los Altos-based Peninsula Symphony, is facing felony charges for embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from the nonprofit organization, prosecutors said Wednesday.”Source: San Jose Mercury News Dance Fri, 07 Mar 2014 08:56 See the Dance Films From the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle “Thanks to a collaboration between Gaumont Pathé archives, La Cinémathèque Française, and sound-recording expert Henri Chamoux, 34 of the original films [shown at the Exposition's newfangled Phono-Cinéma] have been beautifully restored.” (includes clips)Source: The Guardian (UK) Dance Fri, 07 Mar 2014 08:55 A Century of Dance in America, On Walls in Washington Alastair Macaulay visits the “exuberantly diverse” exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, “Dancing the Dream”, which features everyone from Vernon and Irene Castle to Rudolf Nureyev to Shirley Maclaine to Isadora Duncan to Mark Morris to Twyla Tharp to John Travolta to Gypsy Rose Lee.Source: The New York Times Music Fri, 07 Mar 2014 08:54 Wilmington, NC to Get Its First Opera Company “Opera Wilmington is now formally incorporated and is applying for federal non-profit status … Plans now call for the company to mount a production of Franz Lehar’s The Merry Widow, in English, July 25-27 … with a cast of student and local singers.”Source: Star-News (Wilmington, NC) Media Fri, 07 Mar 2014 08:50 An African-American ‘Annie’ (Why Didn’t Anyone Think of This Before?) Columbia Pictures is producing the remake for release this coming holiday season, with stars Quvenzhané Wallis (Beasts of the Southern Wild) and Jamie Foxx. (includes trailer)Source: The Guardian (UK) Blogs Fri, 07 Mar 2014 05:45 Top Posts From AJBlogs 03.06.14 MASS MoCA Expands, With State Funds AJBlog: Real Clear Arts | Published 2014-03-07 The Case for Cultural Fluency AJBlog: Field Notes | Published 2014-03-06 Photography on the Web: Getty Images Goes Free AJBlog: CultureCrash | Published 2014-03-06 Serge Dorny sues Dresden for unfair dismissal AJBlog: Slipped Disc | Published 2014-03-06    Source: AJ Blogs Ideas Fri, 07 Mar 2014 01:33 Today’s Universities Are Broken. So How Do We Fix Them? “It’s clear that universities will have to figure out the balance between commercial relevance and basic research, as well as how to prove their value beyond being vehicles for delivering content. But lost in the shuffle of commentary here is something arguably more important than and yet containing all of these factors: culture.”Source: Wired Theatre Thu, 06 Mar 2014 18:41 Broadway Joke: Adele Dazeem Now Substituting For Idina Menzel “In a social media joke circulating on Twitter, a fake playbill notice for the Broadway musical “If/Then” states that its star, Idina Menzel, will be replaced by her alter-ego, Adele Dazeem.”Source: Los Angeles Times People Thu, 06 Mar 2014 18:30 Venezuela’s Artists Increasingly Speaking Out Against Government “From pop culture to high culture, Venezuela’s conflict is leading actors, artists, athletes and fashion designers to voice their support for the antigovernment protesters, with a minority backing President Nicolás Maduro.”Source: The Wall Street Journal