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.

Survival of the…

THANKS GOES to Carter for bringing out attention to the Darwin Correspondence Project.  This is a new online database with the complete, searchable texts of around 5,000 letters written by and to Charles Darwin up to 1865 (including surviving letters from the Beagle voyage).

Darwin was an eager correspondent, exchanging letters with nearly 2,000 people. Even a swift glance at these readable missives yields ample evidence of his keen mind and enthusiastic curiosity.

Eats shoots and leaves

A TEXT-BOOK quality illustration from Prospect magazine of the difference that the absence of a comma can make. Here is Mike Prest, writing about Paul Wolfowitz:

By circumventing the normal personnel procedures to secure sweetheart deals for his girlfriend and cronies, he has exposed the institution to charges of hypocrisy, demoralised its staff and may even have diminished the bank’s effectiveness in reducing global poverty.

Presumably all would have been well if he had followed the “normal personnel procedures to secure sweetheart deals for his girlfriend and cronies”.

Alice doesn’t live here

THE Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Centre closed for an 18-month renovation on Monday night. The last-night concert was, by the New York Times’s account, a happy affair:

Drinks were allowed into the auditorium—since there was no worry about a cleanup—and the proceedings were punctuated by the clink of glasses.

Among the glasses, Philip Glass gave a piano solo—”slightly lethargic”, according to the Times’s Anne Midgette. Laurie Anderson contributed a “rapid-fire sing-song screed” about global warming. The evening was “half festive, half somnolent”. See for yourself: the concert, “Good Night Alice” is being broadcast tomorrow on PBS.

Plug ugly

FILM critics are accustomed to having their nuanced prose sliced, diced and affixed with exclamation points in advertisements. The alchemy of marketing often transforms more reserved praise into something like “bone-chilling!” But this is trickier for books, particularly for the vaguely lofty kind that need grander recommendations than “thrilling!” to appeal to readers.

But still, it’s possible to tweak an unenthusiastic review into an endorsement, as Scott McLemee has learned.

At this point I’m left trying to figure out just how negative a review of “Freakonomics” would have to be before the authors couldn’t dub it “largely positive.”

He is right to be perplexed.