Above the Fold

A round-up of the latest news in the arts world.

A $27 million creation museum will open in Kentucky on May 28. Scenes include humans and dinosaurs cohabiting and Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Many of the exhibits were designed by Patrick Marsh, who also designed the “Jaws” and “King Kong” attractions at Universal Studios in Florida.

For those who don’t have the time to read “War and Peace”, a new website, dailylit.com, sends daily sections of classic literature to inboxes and hand-held devices for free (you can read Tolstoy’s classic in 675 parts). The website will soon expand to include recent works as well, and will likely then start charging. I wonder if comedian Sasha Baron Cohen’s new travel guides “Borat: Touristic Guidings To Minor Nation of U.S. and A.” and “Borat: Touristic Guidings To Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.” will be included in the collection.

At the Lawson-Menzies Aboriginal Art Auction in Sydney, Australia, last night, the Aboriginal painting “Earth’s Creation” by Emily Kame Kngwarreye, sold for just over $1 million, the highest amount ever for a piece of indigenous Australian artwork.

A high price

SO, WHAT is to be made by the $72.8m sale of an abstract painting by Mark Rothko last week? The record-breaking bid made it the costliest work of contemporary art ever bought, confirming Sotheby’s confidence “that a Rockefeller Rothko is now the ultimate luxury object,” Christopher Benfey sighs.

I’m reminded of a lecture given by David Hickey, an art critic, years ago (delivered in his compelling Southern Baptist drawl). He was defining the difference between beauty and value: the visceral, mouth-gaping wallop of good art, and its inevitable commodification. Only the first consumer of a work of art truly sees its beauty, he suggested; subsequent buyers merely purchase an icon, a status symbol, at a reassuringly inflated cost. The visual cues morph, and the retail value of a painting inevitably influences how we see it–perhaps to a point where we fail to see the artwork at all.

Naturally, anyone who spends tens of millions of dollars on a painting is not really thinking about the effect of the oils on canvas.

A chat with the author of “Blackbird”

“BLACKBIRD“, David Harrower’s play about a man and a woman who meet to talk about an affair that took place 15 years earlier (when he was 40 and she was 12), has recently premiered on both American coasts, to critical acclaim. Mr Harrower, a Scottish author of five original plays and several edgy adaptations (including Pirandello’s “Six Characters Looking for an Author” and Chekhov’s ”Ivanov”), took the time to speak with Moreover on the phone from his home in Glasgow.

Listen here to the interview with David Harrower.

Above the Fold

A round-up of the latest news in the arts world.

Russian customs has barred the export of six works of art, including two depicting Vladimir Putin, Russian president, on their way to the exhibition “Learning from Moscow” at the Städtische Galerie in Dresden, Germany. The pieces, meant to be part of a 40-work exhibition by contemporary Russian artists (now 34?), were apparently held because they could provoke “international discord”. Meanwhile, a documentary about the murder of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko entitled “Rebellion: The Litvinenko Case” will be shown as a late entry at the Cannes film festival.

JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, has already made plans for an all-night autograph session at the Natural History Museum in London in July to celebrate the release of her final Harry Potter book “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” 1,700 children will be chosen by raffle to attend the event.

According to Americans for the Arts, a non-profit organization focused on advancing the arts in America, non-profit arts groups contributed $166.2 billion and 5.7 million jobs to the American economy in 2005.

The trilogy madness continues. Pirates of the Caribbean 3 “At World’s End” will be released in America tomorrow night, and has already received mediocre reviews, most of them complaining that the plot is too complicated. Honestly though, does that really matter? Rumors abound that it will join the likes of Shrek and Austin Powers in adding a fourth installment to the series.

Writer’s block?

GARRISON KEILLOR, an author and host of ”A Prairie Home Companion“, a radio programme, has some humble and awkwardly soothing words for the hair-tearing writers of the world:

Writers get obsessed with a project and lock the doors and sit and work at it, like animals in a leg trap trying to chew through the leg, which is not good strategy. My advice is to get out of the house and take a walk, a good first cure for the depression that hits after you’ve been working for a year and it dawns on you that your book is not “Huckleberry Finn” but you must finish it anyway because the publisher’s generous advance has been spent on a new pair of shoes for the baby and she has worn a hole in them already, so you press on — on — on — though it strikes you that the world has a great many books already and does it need yours? And the readers you most want (youth) are fixated on screens, not on paper. This is so depressing you want to tie a rock to your ankle and jump in the Mississippi, and if you remembered how to tie the knots that could hold a rock you might, but a long walk can bring you around.

Maybe a little simplistic, and perhaps a touch condescending. But not bad advice. It is spring, after all.

Pittsburgh poetry

“AUGUST WILSON is America’s best playwright,” says my colleague here at Moreover. “I just love listening to his characters talk.” Arthur Miller? Too didactic. Tennessee Williams? Eugene O’Neill? Their plays haven’t aged well enough. But Wilson, a high-school dropout from Pittsburgh, left a legacy of ten plays (his “Pittsburgh Cycle”) before he died in 2005. Each play, set in a different decade of the 20th century, has a raw and honest poetry. My colleague reviewed “Radio Golf”, Wilson’s last play, in this week’s paper:

To describe the plays as telling the story of the American black experience is true, but it sounds too high-minded. Wilson had a golden ear for the cadence and humour of everyday speech, and the way his characters reveal themselves through language provides a pleasure unmatched on the American stage.

“Radio Golf”, which has been nominated for a Tony award for “Best Play”, may not be Wilson’s finest, but the chance to catch it on Broadway should be seized.

Then We Came to the…sales conundrum

IN LIGHT of all our whinging about the declining space dedicated to books coverage in American newspapers, it is amusing to read this article about the publishing market. David Blum poses some interesting questions about what motivates readers to buy a book. Often (*gulp*) the whims of critics don’t factor in.

“Then We Came to the End,” first-time author Joshua Ferris’s satirical narrative of office life in a Chicago advertising agency, got the sort of universal acclaim from book critics that novelists dream of, and almost never happens….So why did “Then We Came to the End” not become a New York Times bestseller?…   

I’ll concede the point that book review sections don’t deserve to be whacked. But why doesn’t discourse result in sales? …shouldn’t smart, alert readers have been lining up to buy the Ferris novel? Something doesn’t compute.

It is odd when an expensive marketing strategy (Mr Ferris’s book even has its own website) and critical acclaim don’t generate impressive sales figures. And if a book fails to win momentum early on, things only get worse. Authors are left writing long lists of all the people they can send signed copies of remaindered books to.

Above the fold

A round-up of some of the latest news in the arts world.

John Studzinski of Blackstone LLP has donated £5 million ($9.87 million) to the Tate Modern for the museum’s expansion plans, estimated to cost £215 million ($425 million), which will include the construction of an 11-story glass building on the south side of the gallery.

Joost, a peer-to-peer online application (from the creators of Skype) that allows users to watch streaming TV on their desktops, has just signed a deal with Creative Artists Agency to increase content and distribution. As of now, Joost has 150 content channels and distribution deals with Viacom, CBS and Turner Networks.

Khaled Hosseini, author of the “The Kite Runner”, which has sold almost 5 million copies in the US alone, has released his second novel “A Thousand Splendid Sons”.  Mr Hosseini’s new book tells the story of two very different Afghan women married to the same man, who begin as rivals but soon form a bond as they struggle to live an increasingly perilous Afghanistan.

Employees at the Hilligoss Galleries in Chicago believe that a middle-aged couple is responsible for the theft on Sunday of the 370-year-old Rembrandt etching “Adam and Eve”, worth about $60,000.

Something for the Antique Roadshow

FEAST YOUR eyes on two remarkable photographs by Edward Steichen, taken about a century ago, which have only recently come to light. Relics of the earliest days of colour photography, they are lushly tinted portraits of a raven-haired woman, thought to be Charlotte Spaulding, a friend and student. They are at once inviting and forbidding, staged yet intimate. In their gauzy splendour, one can’t help but think of Gustav Klimt’s jewel-like portraits of Adele Bloch-Bauer (one of which sold for a king’s ransom last summer). After decades in the cupboard of Spaulding’s daughter (which helped preserve these rare, colour autochromes), they will be on view this autumn at the George Eastman House in Rochester, a top photography museum.

Adorable America

AT A time when American patriotism seems to be suffering some blows–a bumbling president, a questionable war–the art market is seeing a rise in the value of a more wistful, more romantic view of the country. Norman Rockwell, a painter whose work is often sneered at as greeting-card illustrations, has become a top seller. As the New York Sun reports:

There’s a sea change going on in the market for American painting. The field has traditionally been dominated by austere portraits of Founding Fathers, impressionist style landscapes, and expansive seascapes. Now, pictures by Norman Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth, once sniffed at as mere illustrators, may spike the American paintings sales, which take place tomorrow at Bonhams and Doyle New York, at Sotheby’s Wednesday, and at Christie’s Thursday.

A decade ago, works by Rockwell and Mr. Wyeth barely fetched $1 million. However, “now there is an understanding that their availability is diminishing,” the head of American paintings at Christie’s, Eric Wilding, said. That dwindling supply means higher prices.

Sotheby’s is betting that Rockwell’s original cover painting for the September 15, 1945, issue of the Saturday Evening Post, “Home on Leave (Sailor in Hammock),” will sell for between $2 million and $3 million.  

Rockwell’s work, full of apple-cheeked children and smiling postmen, has often seemed nostalgic for an America that never was.  (Few are surprised that Steven Spielberg is a fan.) Though Rockwell may have been more complicated than many assume, there is something grimly fitting about the rising stock of pictures of smiling soldiers, just as newspapers fill up with ever more photos of bloodied ones.