Today's arts news and gossip.

THE JOHN D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation, one of the largest private philanthropic organisations in America, has chosen the 2007 MacArthur Fellows, who will receive grants of $500,000 over the next five years. Fellows include a blues musician, a spider-silk biologist and a medieval historian. The grants, often known as "genius grants", are given without requirements.

A week after winning the legal right to exhibit an immense, unfinished installation by Christoph Büchel, a Swiss artist, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art has decided to dismantle the piece. Mr Büchel refused to finish the installation after a dispute over funding for the project, which involved an oil tanker, a smashed police car and a re-assembled old movie theatre. Dismantling the work will cost the museum $40,000, bringing the amount spent on the project up to $400,000.

Conrad Shawcross, a British sculptor, has completed two works to be displayed in Selfridges, a London department store, in October. "Palindrome" and "Lattice" are made with steel, aluminium, light bulbs and wood. This exhibit will coincide with the Frieze Art Fair, which showcases the works of new and established artists from around the world over three days in October.

Contract negotiations between Broadway's League of American Theatres and Producers, and Local One, the stagehands' union, are approaching a deadline. If the dispute, mainly over the League's flexibility in hiring stagehands, is not resolved, the League may lock stagehands out of theatres and bring Broadway to a halt, just as the autumn season is beginning.