Hasta La Ideas

If you recall back to the tail end of last year, when budget cuts were sweeping through the UK with an unmerciful vengeance, and sympathies were particularly heavy toward the Commission for Architecture and the Build Environment (Cabe) as they announced their government funding had been cut. Prince Charles even got a (now semi-routine) batch of flak for offering to help take over some of their architectural review duties with his Foundation for the Built Environment. However, according to a recent report by the Telegraph, perhaps the former employees, the ones who didn’t stick around when the organization merged with the UK’s more famous Design Council, did okay for themselves with some fairly generous severance packages. “Golden handshakes,” the paper calls the government-wide redundancy packages, which reportedly cost British taxpayers somewhere in the range of “almost £1 billion.” Cabe itself apparently did okay, with £2.7million spread across the 76 employees who were laid off. Building Design highlights that its former director of resources, Charlotte Cane, “received £224,000 when she left her post” and Matt Bell, director of campaigns and education, “was handed a £111,000 payout.” Whether you think it’s a good thing that the people in these creative professions weren’t thrown out on the street when the government decided to cut off their employers, or that they should have to pay back every Pound and live in shame, working in forced labor on a peat bog somewhere in the country for the rest of their lives is completely up to you. We just post about it.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Around this time of year, we start getting a bit exhausted by the annual architecture prizes. It’s only July, but we’ve already been through the Pritzker, the van der Rohe, who gets the Serpentine, and of course, the shortlist for the Architect Barbie Dream House Design Competition. We’re sure we missed some in that list and that there are more to come, but getting to Stirling Prize always seems like it’s the end of the season. So here we now are with the shortlist for the Royal Institute of British Architects‘ top honor. For the first time ever, all the nominees have been at least nominated for the prize in previous years, and, as to be expected anymore: former winners are on there again as well. Those two are David Chipperfield for his Folkwang Museum, and Zaha Hadid, returning again after winning the award last year, this time nominated for her Evelyn Grace Academy. However, neither starchitect seems to be the favorite, as it appears that Hopkins Architects’ velodrome for the 2012 Olympics is the betting person’s picks. However, as the Guardian puts it, the real story in the Stirling shortlist is that two of the finalists aren’t new construction at all, but rather rehabbed buildings that “save money and energy” and signal a “new austerity in architecture.” We will know for sure if this new austerity is really swept in or not on October 1st, when the winner is announced.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Being as its summer reading season and that’s when you break out the guilty pleasures, we were really hoping for a good true crime heist story to break. Sure, there was that theft at Beijing’s Forbidden City a few months back and more recently, that New Jersey chef who was just caught after having swiped a Picasso, but we were holding out for something more sensational. Fortunately, the fates have provided. The Baltimore Sun was the first to report on the arrest of Barry H. Landau and his young accomplice after the pair were caught trying to steal artifacts from the Maryland Historical Society. What makes the story juicy is that Landau is a longtime and well-known collector of presidential memorabilia. On his site, he even calls himself “America’s Presidential Historian.” He’s hobnobbed with presidents and celebrities for more than 40 years, starting his collection after a visit with President Eisenhower when he was just ten years old, has made countless media appearances, and wrote the best-selling book The President’s Table: Two Hundred Years of Dining and Diplomacy. But now, as the Sun writes, he “sits in Central Booking and is being held without bail.” According to their report, Landau and the “24-year-old Jason Savedoff” spent most of Saturday at the museum looking at documents, after which museum officials eventually spotted the young accomplice “taking a document and concealing it in a portfolio, then walking out of the library.” Police were quick to act and he was apprehended, with Landau following shortly thereafter. It’s sure to be an interesting case, as we’re already riveted by just the crime. Of course it begs the question: what other skeletons are in Landau’s closet (figuratively and perhaps literally as well). Quality summer reading indeed.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Even with having finally hooked up the user account thingie so we could download issues on our iPad after our wife recycles the print edition, this writer is still hopelessly behind in his reading of the New Yorker. However, we’ve recently learned that a) we’re not so far behind as to make it absurd and b) if there was a feature profile about us in an issue, we’d likely make the time to read it right away. This doesn’t seem to be the case with forensic art expert Peter Paul Biro, who has filed a $2 million suit against Conde Nast‘s owners and writer David Grann, claiming defamation after a profile appeared about him in the New Yorker in July of last year. Okay, okay, lawsuits must take a while to put together, so maybe that’s why it’s taken a full year to file, but let’s move on, shall we? Adweek reports that Biro’s suit claims that Grann’s piece “paints a portrait of a plaintiff which has no basis in reality, and which has been highly damaging to his reputation.” Fair enough, as we read the piece way back when and it certainly puts both Biro’s past and his methods into sharp question. However, ArtInfo chimes in that Biro “might be in for an uphill battle” considering that several of the sources used in Grann’s article to help paint him in such a fashion were anonymous, and worse for him still, no longer living. So getting proof that he was defamed will perhaps mean finding ways around journalistic privilege and the great beyond. To read up on the whole matter and make up your own mind, you can read some great highlights from the Courthouse News Service about the filing. Here’s but a slight portion of the claims:

Biro adds: “Defendant Grann obtained plaintiff’s consent to a series of interviews, by misleading him about defendant Grann’s true intentions in writing the article, and he distorted the substance of those interviews to serve a predetermind agenda.”

Biro claims that Grann’s article “ignores the many highly celebrated and iconic masterpieces of art which plaintiff has been privileged to work with, including Edvard Münch’s ‘Scream’, works by Leonardo da Vinci, Claude Monet’s ‘Impression, soleil levant‘, and many works by J.M.W. Turner.

And here’s the official word from the New Yorker‘s David Remnick:

“David Grann’s reporting on this story and everything else he does is painstaking in both its attention to the facts and tone. We stand with David Grann and behind the story and believe the suit has no merit.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Spring has come and gone and now that summer is here, we’ve long moved past the annual Buckminster Fuller Challenge shortlist and are ready to crown a winner. The prize, which hands out “a $100,000 prize to support the development and implementation of a strategy that has significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems,” has this year been awarded to Blue Ventures, “a conservation organization that simultaneously protects marine environments while improving the standard of living in some of the world’s poorest coastal communities.” We’d try to explain exactly what it is that Blue Ventures does, which involves things like designing and implementing plans for a Marine Protected Area in the Indian Ocean, which has benefited more than 10,000 people in traditional fishing villages, but it’s probably best if we let the video they submitted for the Challenge do the talking:

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.