Culture Canvas

A roundup of the week’s arts and culture headlines.

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ARTINFO|+ARTINFO%29 appraises the legacy of influential painter Helen Frankenthaler, above, who died last week. Photo by Ernst Haas/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

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The city of Boston is calling for $250,000 from the Museum of Fine Art and other not-for-profit institutions under a new rule, via The Art Newspaper.

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China is declaring the success of an October crack down on Western television programming, via Reuters. A new essay by President Hu Jintao warns against the Westernization of Chinese culture, writing: “The fields of thought and culture are important sectors they are using for this long-term infiltration. We must clearly recognize the seriousness and difficulty of this struggle, sound the alarm bell … and take effective measures to deal with it.”

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A radical art collective in Russia is claiming that it incinerated a police vehicle in St. Petersburg, via The New York Times.

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A Polish art student secretly hung his own work in the country’s National Gallery, via BBC.

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Nicholas Carr considers one way in which e-publishing differs from traditional books: revision vs. permanence.

Meanwhile, Salon wrote about a shift in old-fashioned print as more independent booksellers begin publishing books themselves.

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Howard Reich of The Chicago Tribune discusses the future of Chicago blues music, writing: “A once visceral, urgent, profoundly complex music that told the story of a people — and, in so doing, ricocheted around the world — is slipping from public embrace in its primary home, Chicago, and beyond. Nearly banished from radio and TV, practically absent from the popular press and rarely heard in schools, real Chicago blues must be sought out, and only the most intrepid listeners find it.”

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Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times reflects on Occupy Wall Street and the arts, discussing criticisms over funding, inaccessibility and insularity.

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A new novel by Ayad Akhtar features a young protagonist who is growing up the Muslim son of Pakistani immigrants in Milwaukee, via NPR.

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Students from the Art Institute of Chicago are documenting modern architecture in suburban Cook County, via WBEZ. Their findings are documented online at Landmarks Illinois.

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Cabaret singer Barbara Lea died this week at the age of 82.