Comic and podcast host Chelsea Shorte is onstage on a cold Wednesday night in a small restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia. She is telling her mostly female audience about her transition from improv comedy to standup.

 

“I got tired of being cast as people’s moms even though I was 23,” she says. “If you’ve ever done improv with men, you’ll understand.”

The women gathered at the restaurant did understand. Most of them were aspiring comics who attended to network with one another, in an effort to skirt the roadblocks set up by a male-dominated entertainment industry.

Long before last week’s allegations of sexual harassment by comedian Louis C.K. emerged, journalist Nell Scovell wrote a 2009 Vanity Fair piece in response to a sex scandal centered around her former boss, late-night talk show host David Letterman.

 

“At this moment,” the article began, “there are more females serving on the United States Supreme Court than there are writing for ‘Late Show with David Letterman’ [and competitors],’The Jay Leno Show’, and ‘The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien’ combined. Out of the 50 or so comedy writers working on these programs, exactly zero are women. It would be funny if it weren’t true.”

Space for women

Comedian and entrepreneur Victoria Elena Nones founded the Women in Comedy network, which was behind Wednesday night’s networking event.

“I thought it was really important to provide a space for women to come together,” Nones says. “We see a lot of improv troupes and smaller groups of women who band together or do all-female open mics, but there was no national and international network of support.”

Nones founded her network in Chicago in 2015 and it now has chapters in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Washington. She says she hopes the group will help women find and support each other as they make their own places in a field notorious for sexism and sometimes outright hostility toward women.

Actress and comic Diane Chernansky of Los Angeles says she was recently startled to realize one of her own jokes reflected the way women are often treated in the standup industry, where she often found herself the only woman, or one of a couple of women, in a comedy lineup full of men.

“It’s very difficult to sit there and listen to lots of men talk about women in general and how horrible we are,” Chernansky says.

One night while she waited to follow another woman comic at the mic, the emcee asked her how she would like to be described.

Chernansky quipped, “I’ll be the next pair of breasts to come to the stage.”

Later, at a roundtable of female comics, Chernansky realized, “Holy crap, I said that about myself” — and, she acknowledges, about the other woman performing. “If anyone else had said that about me, I’d be offended.”

The unhealthy dynamic manifests in the numbers, as collected by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University.

The number of female writers on the top 250 films of any year from 1998 to the present has stayed about the same, at 13 percent. Of directors on 2016’s top 250 films, only 7 percent were women. Only 2 percent of those top 250 films employed 10 or more women in the cast.

Minorities don’t fare any better. And the heavily male culture of the entertainment industry has a strong effect on what is expected of women — and minorities — in the industry.

Sexual harassment & labor abuse

Hollywood thrives on promises, notes E.C. McCarthy, who recently wrote a Washington Post piece that said predatory behavior in the entertainment industry is not limited to sexual harassment, or to performers. The promise of support in a difficult industry often paves the way for all kinds of abuse of power, she says.

“Harassment is one of the many ways to keep people feeling insecure, desperate, and willing to work for free,” McCarthy writes, after detailing one of numerous incidents in which a producer tried to take credit for a script she wrote. “Sexual harassment and labor abuse coexist as ugly forces in this business, and women overwhelmingly bear the brunt.”

McCarthy wrote that when she first became a writer in Hollywood, she assumed the imbalance of sexism would die out with the older generation of men in power. Instead, she says, now she gets it from men her own age. “The culture is thriving,” she writes.

“I get extremely frustrated when I walk into a room and feel like a piece of meat,” said Minka Wiltz, a black actress and activist in Atlanta, Georgia. She struggles not only with the stereotype of being a woman, but also being an African-American woman who is often asked to portray a stereotype.

“I’ve been asked to be ‘sassier,'” she says. Conversely, “I’ve been asked to ‘tone it down’ when I’ve [only] said five words.”

Wiltz says today’s entertainment culture suffers from “a sickness of manipulation.” She says the way to improve the situation, is for marginalized people to help each other tell their stories — the stories about women, people of color, LGBT and even disabled people — that are overlooked by the mainstream entertainment industry.

Pervasive problem

The problem is so pervasive that even Atlanta, a majority-black city, had no black theater collective until Wiltz and some colleagues starting working on one a few years ago.

Specialized groups, though, are nothing new in the entertainment industry.

Deaf West Theater, based in North Hollywood, in 2013 and 2015 sent productions of the musicals “Big River” and “Spring Awakening,” respectively, to Broadway theaters, winning wide acclaim.

The small Ivy Theatre Company  in New York makes diversity its mission, casting women and minorities in shows that explore issues relevant to those communities. Most recently, the Ivy mounted the show “A Real Boy,” about two puppets who adopt a human son. The show is written by Stephen Kaplan, a gay man who is raising an adopted son with his husband.

In Chicago, a thriving improv comedy scene lends itself to scores of improv troupes in various combinations, including an Asian-American group called “Stir-Friday Night,”  which has kick-started the careers of Korean-American actor Steven Yeun  and Indian-American Danny Pudi.

One of their recent shows skewered mainstream Hollywood for casting of white actress Scarlett Johannsen in The Ghost in the Shell, playing a Japanese cyborg. The name of the show: 8 Angry Asians, Starring Scarlett Johansson.

In conservative Spartanburg, South Carolina, the state’s first gay theater company, Proud Mary, just finished a major production, “I Am My Own Wife,” about a real-life transgender German woman who survived both the Nazi and the East German regimes.

Wiltz, the Atlanta-based actress, says these groups and many others are supporting the work that the mainstream entertainment industry overlooks.

“I really hope that people realize you have no more excuses for your own success,” she says. “I want people to realize that the Hollywood myth, like the American myth, is just that. You can create your own story.”
…

Amazon.com has bought the global television rights to “The Lord of the Rings,” the company said on Monday, in what may be its biggest and most expensive move yet to draw viewers to its streaming and shopping club Prime.

Amazon said it will produce a multi-season series that explores new storylines preceding author J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring,” the first installment in the famed fantasy trilogy.

Three movies made of the trilogy in the early 2000s, filmed in New Zealand by director Peter Jackson, garnered nearly $3 billion at the box office and 17 Academy Awards.

Amazon acquired the rights from the Tolkien Estate and Trust but did not say how much it paid for them. The estate, HarperCollins and the films’ distributor New Line Cinema will help Amazon produce the television series.

The project underscores a shift in Amazon’s video programming. Its studio started in 2010 with a focus on unique shows beloved by critics, such as “Transparent,” about a father coming out as transgender to his family.

That was a winning formula for attracting Hollywood talent, awards and buzz, though not Prime subscribers around the world.

Now, Amazon is looking for a dramatic show that could be a hit globally, much like HBO’s popular fantasy series “Game of Thrones.” It is going head to head with Netflix, Hulu and others to bid for top content.

This puts Amazon in uncharted territory, with higher production costs expected.

Amazon justifies its spending on programming as a way to draw new sign-ups to Prime, whose members buy more goods more often from the world’s largest online retailer.

“Amazon Prime heads to Middle Earth,” Chief Executive Jeff Bezos said in a Twitter post.

Although “The Lord of the Rings” is the most famous work to emerge from Tolkien’s pen, he wrote much else, including prequel “The Hobbit” – also made into a movie trilogy by Jackson – and the denser “The Silmarillion.” The Amazon series will delve into some of Tolkien’s work that the movies did not explore.

“Amazon is committed to producing super high quality, recognized, branded entertainment,” said Wedbush Securities industry analyst Michael Pachter. “That’s a departure from shows like ‘Transparent’ and ‘Catastrophe.'”

“By definition this will be expensive,” he added.
…

Peace never reigns in the pages of DC Comics. There’s always a world to be saving, a cataclysm to avert. The making of the DC superhero team-up film “Justice League” was hardly any more tranquil.

Made in the wake of the disappointment surrounding its predecessor, “Batman v Superman,” and the critically-panned “Suicide Squad,” “Justice League” was, like a jetliner given new wings in midair, retooled on the fly. Warner Bros. sought to lighten the tone of Zack Snyder’s grandiose and muscle-bound DC universe – a much-publicized pivot that came just as tragedy was striking.

Snyder, the “300” filmmaker, had overseen this latest series of DC movies starting with “Man of Steel,” but he stepped down after “Justice League” had been shot following the death of his daughter. Joss Whedon, the “Avengers” director known for snappy dialogue who had already been helping to punch up the script, was brought in steer the film through post-production and two months of reshoots. (He’s credited as co-writer.)

Writer Geoff Johns and producer Jon Berg had already been brought in to brighten “Justice League” and overhaul the wider DC slate with a more optimistic tone.

But that’s not been all. Ben Affleck, who stars as Batman, withdrew from directing a stand-alone Batman film, while also combating criticism over his behavior with women in the past. Whedon, himself, was called a hypocrite for espousing feminist ideals by his ex-wife, Kai Cole. Jason Momoa had to apologize for a 2011 joke about rape and “Game of Thrones.”

And just weeks before release, Warner Bros. severed ties with one of the film’s chief financiers, Brett Ratner’s RatPac-Dune company, after sexual assault allegations were leveled against Ratner. Gal Gadot, who plays Wonder Woman, has reportedly insisted Ratner have no connection with any future Wonder Woman film.

“Justice League” is the kind of production that, one suspects, its makers will celebrate the release of with a stiff drink.

“I’ve probably had a stiff drink along the way,” producer Charles Roven says, chuckling. “It’s been different in the sense that we’ve had some sadness along the happy-joy of making the movie. But for the most part it’s been an incredibly positive experience.”

Now, Warner Bros. and DC are hoping that the finished “Justice League,” which opens Friday, doesn’t show any Frankenstein-like scars from its tumultuous creation.

“The goal is to make sure when you’re watching the movie, it all feels cohesive,” says Roven, the veteran producer of “The Dark Knight” trilogy. “That imprint that Joss had, some aspect of it is going to come out in the direction, but the actors are already pretty much down the road on their arcs. Let’s just say 80, 85 percent of the movie is what was originally shot. There’s only so much you can do with other 15, 20 percent of the movie.”

In interviews, Roven and cast members pledged their loyalty to Snyder and his vision for the franchise, one they say incorporated a changing tone before Whedon’s involvement. (Neither filmmaker was made available for interview. Each has stayed silent publicly since Snyder’s departure.)

Batman

“Zack from the time that I first met with him said, ‘Look, Batman makes the DC world dark. The DC world has to be created as something dark,”’ says Ezra Miller, who plays Barry Allen aka the Flash). “He said what’s great now is that the League gets to bring Batman out of this darkness. That was always Zack’s vision. That was the intention from the beginning.”

The film, Miller says, has “a wonderful collision of tone” that he considers “a testament to both the strength of Zack’s vision and the generosity of Joss’s commitment.”

It’s also a turning point in the larger DC cinematic world.

“Justice League” finds Affleck’s Bruce Wayne, in the wake of Superman’s apparent death, gathering together the League to fight a new enemy. That means pushing not just Wonder Woman to the fore, but also Miller’s Flash, Momoa’s Aquaman and Ray Fisher’s Cyborg.

“It was very clear that the tone of the movie was different than ‘Batman v Superman,'” says Gadot. “Henry (Cavill), Ben and I had a wonderful addition with Ezra and Jason and Ray (that) just stirred everything up.”

Gadot and “Wonder Woman” are a big reason for optimism in the franchise, following its critically acclaimed, zeitgeist-grabbing $412.6 million box office success domestically. Though the epicenter of DC Comics has always revolved around Batman and Superman, that’s starting to change.

Matt Reeves has taken over the Batman movie, but he’s starting fresh on the screenplay, making a release date several years off. That leaves open the possibility of further changes, even potentially Affleck’s casting. “From everything I know, he’s going to play that Batman,” said Roven. “They’re retooling the script, so I can’t really say anything for certain.”

What’s next?

The Superman sequel “Man of Steel 2” also isn’t coming anytime soon, if at all. Roven says there’s no script but “various story ideas” are being kicked around.

On the front burner, however, is “Aquaman,” scheduled for release in December 2018, a Wonder Woman sequel due in 2019 (with director Patty Jenkins returning) and a Cyborg movie. Whedon is also prepping a Batgirl movie. 

“Justice League,” a team-up movie, will be followed by solo efforts.

“One of the things that’s really important to us with all of these DC movies is making sure that while they make sense, one from the other – because they’re in a certain way linked – we also want to make sure that the audience is hopefully excited by the fact that you don’t know exactly where you’re going to go.”
…

The maker of Barbie says it will sell a doll modeled after Ibtihaj Muhammad, an American fencer who competed in last year’s Olympics while wearing a hijab.

 

Mattel says the doll will be available online next fall. The doll is part of the Barbie “Shero” line that honors women who break boundaries. Past dolls have included gymnast Gabby Douglas and “Selma” director Ava DuVernay.

 

Muhammad said on Twitter that she was “proud” that young people will be able to play with “a Barbie who chooses to wear hijab!”

 

Muhammad, the first American to compete at the Olympics while wearing a hijab, won a bronze medal in fencing at the 2016 Rio Games.
…

Italian state museums are on track for another record-setting year in 2017 in terms of visitors and revenue, with the outdoor Colosseum in Rome and Pompeii near Naples topping the Culture Ministry’s most-visited and most-lucrative list.

The ministry on Monday issued a three-year review of its revolutionary decision to bring in non-Italian directors for some of the gems of its national museum network, and to give the institutions greater autonomy. The results were significant: an 18.5 percent increase in the number of visitors nationwide from 2013-2016, and a 38.4 percent increase in revenue — or about 48.5 million — to 175 million euros last year.

Culture Minister Dario Franceschini said the ministry’s reforms “are starting to bear fruit.” He praised a continued “radical inversion of trends,” with visitor numbers already up 9.4 percent and revenues up 13.5 percent in the first nine months of 2017.

With more UNESCO heritage sites than any other country, Italy’s outdoor cultural patrimony is one of its biggest draws — Rome’s Colosseum and Forum, the lagoon city of Venice and the Roman amphitheater of Siracusa to name a few. Fresco-filled churches and basilicas, many in quaint Medieval hilltop towns, are other favored tourist destination.

Traditional museums often play second fiddle to such extraordinary sites and frequently pale in comparison to their counterparts in world capitals in terms of multilingual labeling, educational activities and lucrative licensing opportunities.

Franceschini sought to change that by overhauling the museum system in 2014 and bringing in a handful of foreign directors: The German Eike Schmidt runs the Uffizi, British James Bradburne heads Milan’s Pinacoteca di Brera and French Sylvain Bellenger runs the Capodimonte in Naples.

The Culture Ministry is responsible for 439 of Italy’s 4,834 museums, so a small fraction of Italy’s artistic, archaeological, historical museums. But it runs some of the most important ones.

Overall, the Colosseum was consistently the greatest draw over the last three years, with some 6.68 million visitors in 2016.

The Pompeii complex last year outpaced Florence’s Uffizi Gallery to take second place, after seeing a 37-percent increase in visitors in the 2013-2016 period.

But the greatest increase was registered by the National Archaeological Museum of Reggio Calabria, which went from 11,500 visitors in 2013 to 210,598 last year — a 1,728-percent spike.

The exponential growth is thanks to a new home for the collection and new display space for the Riace Bronzes, two bronze nude males that are considered the best examples of classic Greek art. The bronzes, believed to date from the 5th century BC, were discovered in 1972 at the bottom of the Ionian sea.
…

When celebrated Indian fashion designer Wendell Rodricks sat down to write his third book, haute couture was not on his mind.

He was thinking about his neighbor Rosa — an elderly woman who had lived her life as a poskem — adopted as a child by a wealthy family in the western Indian state of Goa, given their family name but condemned to a lifetime of domestic servitude.

Rodricks’ new novel, “Poskem: Goans In The Shadows,” is a fictional tale of four people caught up in a Goan tradition that finally appears to be dying out in the 21st century.

Rodricks writes of an unspoken world of the last generation of people who fell victim to the poskem tradition, preserving their story for posterity, the publisher’s note states.

The author, a Goan himself, describes it as “the sunshine state’s dark secret.”

“The worst part of being a poskem… was that the entire village knew of these people and did not treat them with respect,” Rodricks told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Alda, the protagonist of the book inspired by the real-life Rosa, discovers she is different from the other children in the house when she is 10.

While her six “siblings” went to school, she did household chores, and while they ate from porcelain plates, she ate in the kitchen with the servants.

“Poskem has so many emotions — incest, sodomy, rape, seduction, love, hate, murder. But all this happened in reality,” Rodricks said at the book’s launch in India’s southern city of Chennai.

India’s 2011 census recorded more than 4 million laborers aged from five to 14 years old.

In Goa, one of India’s top tourist destinations, poskem were normally from poor families or illegitimate children, Rodricks said.

“They were taken into a family, given the family name, introduced to a religion but, for the most part, not given equal treatment like the other siblings in the house,” he said.

“Very often they had no right to property and were even selfishly denied marriage so that the family could keep them in lifelong servitude.”

Rodricks said his mother’s family had a poskem, but he did not know the meaning of the word when he was young. He first understood what it meant in his twenties and later got to know more when he settled down in Goa and Rosa was his neighbor.

“The book is an apology to all the men and women who lived their lives as poskem in a 200-year-old tradition that has been rarely questioned,” he said.
…

Travel blogger Mikah Meyer takes us on a ferry ride to San Juan National State Park in Washington state.
…

Armed with signs, catchy phrases and a motivation to take #MeToo beyond the internet and into real life, a few hundred women, men and children gathered Sunday among the sex shops and tourist traps of Hollywood Boulevard to protest sexual harassment.

 

The Take Back the Workplace March and the #MeToo Survivors March joined forces in the heart of Hollywood, near the entrance to the Dolby Theater where the Academy Awards take place. They walked side by side past the tourists, costume shops, strip clubs and a man wearing a “Whiskey Made Me Do It” T-shirt to gather for a rally of rousing speeches from the likes of Harvey Weinstein accuser Lauren Sivan and Oscar-winning producer Cathy Schulman.

 

“Not in pots, not in plants, keep your junk inside your pants,” the crowd chanted for a few minutes, before shifting gears to: “Harvey Weinstein is a joke, women workers just got woke.”

 

Other chants included, “Survivors united, we’ll never be divided” and “Whatever we wear, wherever we go, ‘yes’ means ‘yes’ and ‘no’ means ‘no.’ ”

 

Some came with their families, some came with friends and attendees ranged in age from 4 to over 68. Aislinn Russell, a 15-year-old Los Angeles high school student came with two peers and signs railing against terms like “friend zone” and “slut.”

 

“Seeing the #metoo movement growing and seeing all these people telling their stories, I have my own stories too,” Russell said. “I want to join in with that and not be silent with everything going on.”

 

Her sign, drawn in pink and purple block letters read: ” ‘Slut’ is attacking women for their right to say yes.” Her friend’s read: ” ‘Friend Zone’ is attacking women for their right to say no.”

 

Another attendee, Nancy Allen, a 52-year-old woman from Los Angeles, carried a sign that read, “I was 7.”

 

“We’ve been silent too long,” Allen said. “A lot of people have kept this inside us for years and years.”

 

Howard Kim, a 68-year-old Los Angeles resident, came out to support the march.

 

“I’m just a little sorry there aren’t more people out here,” Kim said. “I was hoping there would be.”

Event organizers estimated there were about 200 to 300 attendees. But they also acknowledged that it was “difficult to tell” with the normal Hollywood Boulevard crowds.

 

The crowd walked about a mile to the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Cole, the site of CNN headquarters, where a podium was set up for the Take Back the Workplace rally.

 

Sivan, a TV journalist who alleged sexual harassment from Weinstein and served as the “celebrity chair” of the Take Back the Workplace event, said that the time is ripe for a re-ordering of power.

 

“We want our daughters and sons to be able to go to a workplace and never have to take a meeting with a dude in a bathrobe,” Sivan said. “They will never have to choose to put out or keep their job.”

 

Schulman, who presides over the advocacy group Women in Film, told the crowd that the sexual harassment problem can’t be fixed by just weeding out sex criminals. Women, she said, have to be protected from prejudice and abuse. Schulman called for diversifying workplaces and reforming human resources departments.

 

Although there were not many celebrity attendees on site, some supported the marches from afar.

 

“To all my sisters and brothers out there marching today in L.A Sending you love and support from thousands of miles away!” said Patricia Arquette on Twitter Sunday.

 

Claire Forlani, another Weinstein accuser, also tweeted: “To the women and men marching in Hollywood today #metoomarch I am there in spirit. #Solidarity”

The peaceful demonstration had an air of melancholy too. While there was solidarity, fear of retaliation persisted.

 

One woman, who did not want to give her name for fear of retaliation or lawsuit carried a homemade sign accusing a sitcom producer of grabbing her from behind and making a lewd remark and suggestive comment.

 

“Thank you to my agent at William Morris for telling me ‘Keep your mouth shut or you’ll never work again,’ ” read the other side of the sign. “BTW, you also represented my abuser.”

 

Schulman said she is hopeful, however. Her organization on Thursday announced that it is setting up a sexual harassment hotline where victims can call for pro-bono legal counseling and advice. The hotline is expected to be operational by Dec. 1.

 

“I’ve experienced gender bias, salary imparity. I’ve been yelled at, disrespected. I’ve had credit taken from me, I’ve had money stolen from me. I’ve been bankrupted twice and much worse. And I’ve seen it all. I’ve seen every bit of harassment and every bit of these sex crimes. However, I’ve produced 20 movies, I’ve supervised over 150 movies, I’ve won an Academy Award. I’ve even raised a 17-year-old daughter,” Schulman said. “Do not let them destroy us. We can win this war. It’s a game. It’s a game of power that we can win.”
…

It takes more than a red suit and a white beard to be a good Santa Claus. That’s an important lesson taught at the longest continuously running Santa Claus school in the world.

Charlie W. Howard, who was the featured Santa Claus in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade for 17 years, started the school in 1937. 

Tom Valent, now the school’s dean, says there was a great need for good Santas at that time. 

“Santas did not portray the image that we want,” Valent said. “Santa Claus stands for all good things and some of the gentlemen that were portraying that image were not up to par then.”

​Santa always learning

Today’s Santas really do not have that problem. They attend the three-day workshop at the C.W. Howard Santa Claus School for a variety of other reasons, such as learning Santa sign language, facts about reindeer and how to do proper dress and makeup. They also become familiar with the newest wish list toys, gain interview experience for radio and TV and get tips for managing their business taxes.

Robert Davis, who has played Santa for 30 years, has attended the school several times. 

“No matter how good you are at whatever you choose to do, you can always be better,” he said. “Not only does the school teach you so much, but when you interact with 250 people who love the same thing you do, you learn something new every year.”

Although Howard opened the school in his home town of Albion, New York, today, the Santas’ headquarters is the Santa House, which sits near the center of town in Midland, Michigan.

Valent designed the gingerbread style house, which features a traditional cuckoo clock with animated dancers, in 1986. He also hand-carved the hundreds of displays inside, from animated elves painting toys and playing a piano, to a candy conveyor line, and a giant Santa chair.

Thousands of Santa’s cousins

No one knows exactly how many Santas have graduated from the school, but conservative estimates place the number around 15,000. 

During that time, there have been students from North America, Europe, Africa, and Australia. This year the school has Santas from all 50 states, and also 20 from Canada, three from Denmark, one from New Zealand, and one from Norway.

The Santas never claim to be the one and only real Santa, but rather “the spirit of Christmas.” At the school’s opening night Santa Walk, they tell visiting children they are the “cousins of Santa.”

Robert Davis says they also never promise anything, instead saying they will “try their best.” 

“Anywhere I go, I try to make my contact and exchange with that child the very best that it can be because that could be that child’s best five minutes of the year,” he said.

After all, as founder Charles W. Howard was fond of saying, “He errs who thinks Santa enters through the chimney. Santa enters through the heart.”
…

For more than a century she was known as the woman behind the throne, the empress who through skill and circumstance rose from lowly imperial consort to iron-fisted ruler of China at a time and in a place when women were believed to have no power at all.

But it turns out Empress Dowager Cixi was much more than that. The 19th century ruler, who consolidated authority through political maneuvering that at times included incarceration and assassination, was also a serious arts patron and even an artist herself, with discerning tastes that helped set the style for traditional Asian art for more than a century.

That side of Cixi comes to the Western world for the first time with Sunday’s unveiling of “Empress Dowager, Cixi: Selections From the Summer Palace” at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana. The wide-ranging collection, never before seen outside China, will remain at the Southern California museum through March 11 before returning to Beijing.

Wide-ranging collection

Consisting of more than 100 pieces from the lavish Beijing palace Cixi called home during the final years of her life, “Empress Dowager” includes numerous examples of intricately designed Chinese furniture, porcelain vases and stone carvings, as well as several pieces of Western art, rare in China at the time, that she also collected. Among them are a large oil-on-canvas portrait of herself she commissioned the prominent Dutch artist Hubert Vos to create.

Other Western accoutrements include gifts from visiting dignitaries, among them British silver serving sets, German and Swiss clocks, and a marble-topped table from Italy with inlaid stones in the shape of a chessboard.

This is even an American-built luxury automobile. The 1901 Duryea touring car, is believed to be the first automobile imported into China and as such may have involved the empress in the country’s first automobile accident when her driver is said to have hit a pedestrian.

“We already have a lot of scholarship on who she is and how she ruled China. But this show brings you a different angle,” said exhibition curator Ying-Chen Peng, as she led a recent pre-opening tour of it through the museum that was kicked off by a raucous performance of Chinese lion dancers accompanied by musicians loudly banging gongs cymbals and drums.

Through art, not politics

“This exhibition seeks to introduce you to this woman as an arts patron, as an architect, as a designer,” the American University art historian said.

That’s an approach that may finally have gotten it to the Western world. Anne Shih, who chairs the museum’s board of directors, noted recently that she spent 10 years trying to persuade the Chinese government to lend Cixi’s art.

The Bowers has built an impressive international reputation over the years by hosting exhibitions of priceless, historical, often larger-than-life artworks from Tibet, the Silk Road, the tomb of China’s first emperor and other historic sites.

However, Shih says the Chinese government turned her down repeatedly. Officials told her the empress, who outlived two much younger emperors, including one who died mysteriously of arsenic poisoning, was just too controversial. She’s been portrayed in numerous films and books and not always positively.

Shih finally prevailed, however, when she emphasized this show would focus on art, not politics.

​A passion for art

Although it does, it still becomes apparent to visitors what a formidable presence Cixi must have been as they enter a recreation of her throne room to be greeted by a larger-than-life portrait of her covered in jewels and razor-sharp fingernail protectors as she glares ominously at her audience.

Nearby, however, are objects that quickly make her passion for art clear. Prominent among them is a towering calligraphy work of black ink embossed on a sheet of paper that, stretching to about 6 feet (2 meters), is taller than the dowager was. She is said to have made it by wielding a large heavy brush while standing on a stool as some of the eunuchs who served her stretched out the paper.

Not far away are ink-and-paper drawings of flowers the empress also created, although Peng notes that when it came to painting, Cixi was a much better calligrapher.

Placed into the emperor’s harem as a low-level teenage consort, she quickly elevated her status by giving birth to his only son in 1856. When the emperor died six years later she installed the boy as his successor and, as the woman behind the throne, ousted opponents, brought in loyalists and ran the country herself for the next 43 years. She died in 1908 at age 72.

Although she led her country through numerous wars launched by foreign invaders during those years, she also found time to visit with dignitaries from other countries and to pursue her own passion for art.

Her real artistic skill, however, lay not in making art but in envisioning works that would stand the critical test of time and then finding skilled artisans to create them.

“Her personal preference actually led to the further development of these very ornate designs,” Peng said, observing some of the intricately carved, gold-inlaid furniture and hand-painted porcelain objects. “Nowadays when you go to antique shops, you can see quite a few pieces in this style. You can say she was a trendsetter.”
…

What is the only Da Vinci painting on the open market worth? A Russian billionaire believes he was swindled when he bought it for $127.5 million. This week he’ll find out if he was right.

“Salvator Mundi,” a painting of Jesus Christ by the Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci circa 1500, is the star lot in New York’s November art auctions that will see Christie’s and Sotheby’s chase combined art sales of more than $1 billion.

It goes under the hammer at Christie’s on Wednesday evening, something of an incongruous lot in the postwar and contemporary sale, which attracts the biggest spenders in the high-octane world of international billionaire art collectors.

The auction house, which declines to comment on the controversy and identifies the seller only as a European collector, has valued the painting at $100 million.

“Look at the painting, it is an extraordinary work of art,” said Francois de Poortere, head of the old masters department at Christie’s. “That’s what we should focus on.”

But the price will be closely watched — not just as one of fewer than 20 paintings by Da Vinci’s hand accepted to exist, but by its owner Dmitry Rybolovlev, the boss of soccer club AS Monaco who is suing Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier in that city-state.

Rybolovlev, who spent an eye-watering $2.1 billion on 37 masterpieces purchased through Bouvier over a decade, accuses Bouvier of conning him by hundreds of million dollars by overcharging him on a string of deals, and pocketing the difference.

At the heart of the court battle is “Salvator Mundi,” which has been exhibited at The National Gallery in London.

Bouvier bought the Da Vinci at Sotheby’s for $80 million in 2013. He resold it within days to the Russian tycoon, for $127.5 million, netting a $47.5 million profit. Bouvier denies any wrongdoing.

The painting’s rarity is difficult to overstate. For years it was presumed to have been destroyed.

Long believed to have been a copy, before eventually being certified as authentic, it fetched a mere 45 pounds ($60 in today’s money) in 1958 before disappearing again for decades. It emerged only in 2005 when it was purchased from a US estate.

All other known paintings by Da Vinci are held in museum or institutional collections.

“For auction specialists, this is pretty much the Holy Grail,” Loic Gouzer, co-chairman of Christie’s Americas postwar and contemporary art department, has said. “It doesn’t really get better than that.”

 A Ferrari on the block

Christie’s has sought to emphasize Da Vinci’s inestimable contribution to art history by hanging “Salvator Mundi” next to Andy Warhol’s “Sixty Last Suppers” — which depicts Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” 60 times over, also on sale with a $50 million estimate.

Pablo Picasso holds the world record for the most expensive piece of art ever sold at auction. His “The Women of Algiers (Version O)” fetched $179.4 million at Christie’s in New York in 2015.

Other highlights being offered by the auction house are “Contraste de formes,” a 1913 Fernand Leger valued at $65 million and “Laboureur dans un champ” by Van Gogh, painted from the window of a French asylum in 1889 and valued at $50 million.

Sotheby’s, whose May sales languished behind Christie’s, says it has more than 60 works making their auction debuts this week.

Chief among them is Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies of George Dyer,” valued at $35-45 million, and which it says is appearing in public for the first time in 50 years. Bacon painted the work in 1966 during his passionate relationship with Dyer.

Two other such triptychs are in museums, while an additional two have been offered at auction in recent years.

Sotheby’s other star lot is a 1972 Warhol “Mao,” exhibited in Berlin, Turin and Paris, and now back in public view for the first time since 1974. It has been given an estimate of $30-40 million.

Each of the other 10 “Mao” paintings of the same size are in prestigious public and private collections, including the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Sotheby’s calls it one of the most iconic images of the 20th century.

And for the first time, the house has added a rare automobile to an art auction, offering Michael Schumacher’s Grand Prix-Winning Ferrari for upwards of $4 million on Thursday. But is it a work of art?

“No, it’s not,” said Gregoire Billault, senior Sotheby’s vice president, of the sleek, low-slung, fire-engine red vehicle. “But it’s… the very best racing car ever sold at an auction.”

 

 
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For the first time, a museum in Australia is telling the stories of the massacres by colonists of indigenous people from an Aboriginal perspective. Thousands of First Nation people are believe to have been killed by white settlers until the 1940s, but much of that history is yet to be uncovered.

Near the city of Portland is the site of the oldest known massacre of indigenous people in the Australian state of Victoria. 

There was tension in the early 1830s between European settlers, who had set up a whaling station, and a local Aboriginal tribe over a whale carcass. The precise details of the confrontation have been hard to establish, but 60 to 200 First Nation people were killed in what is known as the Convincing Ground massacre.

The killings are part of a series of stories being told in a new exhibition at the Melbourne Museum. Called “Black Day, Sun Rises, Blood Runs,” the multimedia show is included in the museum’s Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Center.

Indigenous stories

The stories are told by indigenous people who have been filmed at the sites of several massacres.

Officials say the testimony tries to fill gaps in the documentation of the killings contained in court proceedings, newspaper reports and Aboriginal records.

Curator Genevieve Grieves says the exhibition contains valuable historical information.

“We are going quite deeply into six narratives that include massacre, they include resistance, they include the native police, who were used against Aboriginal people in Victoria and other parts of the country,” she said, “And we are really doing that through first-person voice. So we are just talking to people connected to those spaces and so we have got what is on the historical record, but also what is contained in memory as well, in indigenous memory and, indeed, in non-indigenous memory as well.”

Grieves says this is the first time a new permanent exhibition at an Australian museum has detailed the stories of the massacres from an indigenous perspective.

Thousands massacred

According to the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, about 1,200 indigenous people in Victoria state died in 40 massacres from the 1830s to the 1850s. Academics say that armed white settlers or farmers would ambush Aboriginal camps in the night or early morning.

In July, an online map marking the massacres of Aboriginal clans across Australia’s colonial frontier was launched. It detailed more than 150 sites where violent attacks against indigenous groups took place in eastern Australia following the arrival of European settlers in the late 1700s.
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Despite 70 years of tense relations between India and Pakistan, the two countries share a passion for each other’s movies, food and fashion trends. Take the example of palazzos, a popular Pakistani type of pants that are all the rage in India. VOA Urdu’s Ritul Joshi reports from Delhi that the trend started after a new Indian TV channel started broadcasting Pakistani dramas.
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