Ben's weekly round-up of what's happening in the arts world
The director of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts is a front-runner, I hear, to take over from Charles Saumarez Smith as steward of the National Gallery's £1bn collection. But Malcolm Rogers is probably best known for sending back 13 masterpieces of looted ancient art to Italy - and for renting out 21 Monets to the Bellagio hotel and casino in Las Vegas for about $1m in 2004. So what should his rivals (such as Sandy Nairne at the National Portrait Gallery and Nicholas Penny of the National Gallery of Art in Washington) do to defeat him? Reminding the NG board of such Vegas trinkets as Philippe the frog bobbing around in a water-lily garden might help . . .
Word is that the Barbican's artistic director, Graham Sheffield, who was publicly beaten to the top job by Nicholas Kenyon, and has been a recent critic of the government's Olympics spend, may be contemplating foreign fields - probably France.
Was (the winning) conductor Vladimir Jurowski damning with faint praise at the Royal Philharmonic Awards when he described the revamped South Bank as "good"? Is that it?! Well, he has practised there, so he should know. We mere mortals will find out how good in three weeks when the venue reopens.
Ricky Gervais (below) loves saying how his career has gone the wrong way - from TV into stand-up - but I remember seeing him perform at the Café Royal in Edinburgh seven years ago. He'll be returning to Auld Reekie this year with a show called Fame.
A sign that the "cultural" side to the 2012 Olympics may be something more than a vain promise made in the bid stage: another (2006) RPS Award winner, the composer Jonathan Dove, is writing a "community cantata" for the games.
bendowell@ btinternet.com
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