Hobbit treasure to become legal tender in New Zealand
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THURSDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2012
An Indian daily wage laborer walks past a mural of Bollywood actor Amitabh Bachchan from his classic film “Deewar” on the eve of Bachchan’s 70th birthday in Mumbai yesterday. India’s favorite film star and Bollywood legend Bachchan - who is known as the ‘The Big B’ having over 3.5 million Twitter followers is treated like royalty in the movie-mad country. Bachchan was the first Indian actor to feature at London’s Madame Tussauds waxworks museum and was voted ‘actor of the millennium’ in a BBC online poll in 1999. — AFP
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oy Lichtenstein, the American painter whose comic book-inspired canvases gave the Pop Art movement some of its most vivid images, is getting his first major retrospective since his death 15 years ago. Beginning Sunday, the National Gallery of Art in Washington will be exhibiting 130 of his paintings, drawings and sculptures, reflecting a long and prolific career that ended when he passed away at the age of 73. The show moves to the Tate Modern museum in London next February and, in a less expansive form, to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in July. Its curator Harry Cooper called Lichtenstein, a New York native, “one of the most popular” modern artists alongside his contemporary Andy Warhol. “I don’t think he would want to be considered, above all, an American painter,” Cooper told AFP. “He’s a great modern painter. He had a great visual culture, a great background, training in all the history of art.” The show begins with an early work, “Look Mickey,” gifted to the National Gallery of Art by the artist in 1990. The work depicts Donald Duck hooking his own tail while fishing on a pier with a guffawing Mickey Mouse. It was an early example of Lichtenstein’s appropriation of Ben-Day dots-the tiny colored pixels that made possible the high-volume printing of pulp comic books in the 1950s and 1960s. Lichtenstein’s intention, Cooper said, was to turn the language of comics into a work of art. Also in the retrospective is “Whaam,” from 1963, arguably Lichtenstein’s bestknown work, showing one fighter plane blowing up another in mid-air with a minimum of painterly detail and a maximum sense of impact.
“He doesn’t denounce, and he doesn’t celebrate, either,” Cooper said. “We sometimes don’t know what the tone is, what the point of view is. That’s part of the definition of Pop Art... a kind of removal of the artist. Lichtenstein remains highly sought after by collectors. Last November, Christie’s auction house sold his 1961 work
“I Can See the Whole Room... and There’s Nobody in It!” for a record $43.2 million dollars in New York. — AFP
A 1963 canvas, Whaam! — AFP photos
People tour a retrospective of US pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, including his 1964 canvas, ‘Ohh... Alright’.
People tour a retrospective of US pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, including his 1961 canvas, ‘Look Mickey,’ at the National Gallery of Art in Washington on October 9, 2012.
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aced with tumbling sales, publishers from crisis-battered eurozone countries gathered at the world’s biggest book fair yesterday determined to weather the storm for a brighter future. Greece, in the midst of painful reforms and cuts to stave off bankruptcy, is in fighting mode and has boosted the number of publishers at the Frankfurt Book Fair by a fifth, its official here said. But it has also halved the size of its national stand compared to last year with publishers opting to be part of that to save costs rather than exhibiting individually, Catherine Velissaris, director of Greece’s National Book Centre said. “They have a lot of meetings. They have no intention of throwing in the towel. They are there, they are going to fight,” she told AFP. “Oh for an end to the crisis! I won’t hide from you the fact that we are shattered,” she said adding that even wars did not generally last as long as the six years of recession that Greece has suffered. Greek publishers could survive a 20-25 percent fall in sales but are being suffocated by banks’ failure to lend while also not being paid by booksellers who have their own loans to pay back, she said. Spanish publishers, among the more than 7,000 exhibitors at the annual fiveday event for insiders from the book and multimedia industries, paint a similar picture of falling sales and shop closures. But Spain’s Federation of Editors is trying to shore up the future for publishers as the country faces a question mark over whether it will need bailing out and anti-austerity protestors take to the streets. Director Antonio Maria Avila told AFP by telephone from Madrid through an interpreter that they were talking to the government to urge it to reform intellectual property rights to help fight literary piracy. Other steps include calling for VAT on Internet-bought books to be cut from 21 percent, as well as changes in the regional states to enable better distribution and greater variety of books, he said. Ofelia Grande, of Madrid-based Siruela publishers, said they had taken the initiative to publish story-driven “upmarket commercial fiction” in a departure from its usual more prestigious literary writers. Sales are down about 10 percent for the first half of 2012 compared to the same period a year earlier, she said adding that the possibility of selling to Latin American countries helped but was not enough. “Many bookstores have closed in Spain, mainly the independent
ones, and those independent ones are the most important for the literary independent publishing houses like us,” she said. “We have to work more and more and more to have not even the same results, just to be alive, to maintain (ourselves),” she added. Paulo Oliveira, chief executive of Portuguese publishing house Grupo Betrand Circulo, said they were probably publishing a third fewer new titles a year but were trying to hone their selection to pick the best ones. And he said having weighed up whether to come to the Frankfurt show, his company had decided it was worth the investment. “The Portuguese companies who are trying to prepare the future are here. We are facing the crisis, it’s a problem, but we are looking into the future, preparing the future,” he said. Katja Boehne, the fair’s press officer, said they had been pleasantly surprised that attendance figures had remained steady and saw it as a “symptom of the crisis” that exhibitors felt the need to keep in touch with business partners. — AFP
Visitors look at books on display at the 64th Frankfurt Book Fair in Frankfurt, central Germany, yesterday. — AFP