Word: year
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sure-thing vote. At some point it simply became her time. Bullock had been the favorite for various Best Actress awards in the weeks - even months - leading up to the Oscars, and it's almost hard to remember a time when it was unthinkable to see the 45-year-old actress at a podium...
...late 1990s, the DIA hired Graham Beal, who formerly headed the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, to serve as its CEO. He arrived just as the DIA was set to launch a six-year, $158 million renovation and expansion. Beal's mandate: "to rethink how we present art to the general public." That meant tripling the amount of space devoted to the DIA's Native American art collection and opening a department to curate a collection of African-American art. Beal ordered that exhibit labels be more accessible to the masses. In one gallery, he added a virtual dining...
Because of Detroit's disastrous past decade, the renovation took longer than expected, and the museum struggled: attendance, which is highly dependent on special exhibits, fell sharply. Last year Beal reduced the DIA's budget, from $32 million to $26 million, partly by laying off 20% of the museum's staff. Cultural sites nationwide are struggling to weather the economic crisis, but the challenge facing Detroit's institutions is especially severe; they can no longer rely on support from the region's ailing auto industry. Raising money, Beal says, "has been unbelievably challenging." (See TIME's special report "The Committee...
Still, Beal continued to push for an Islamic-art gallery. In the summer of 2005, he hired Heather Ecker, a well-regarded curator whose background includes a year at Qatar's Museum of Islamic Art. Ecker carefully combed the 900-plus pieces of Islamic art in the DIA's collection, most of which was stored in the basement. Some pieces, like shards of pots, weren't worthy of being publicly shown. Others were striking finds, like the massive gilded copper candlestick the DIA acquired from a Belgian art dealer in 1922. It had been classified as an 18th century candlestick...
Kaliningrad's transport tax, for instance, has been called off for this year, and Russia can afford it: the state is still reaping massive profits from its sales of oil and gas. The broader economy is also recovering, and even though Putin's initial reaction to the protests showed some signs of dismay, Mitrokhin is far from certain that the government is afraid. "It amazes me," he says. "People are screaming for him to get out, but there is no sense that he is trying to reform or justify himself. He feels his own strength. If needed, he knows...